Deleuze’s work offers exiting new methodologies. Indeed, writing on Infinite Eros, Sholtz and Carr go so far as to claim “Deleuze and Guattari offer us a new conception of life - life as the singular relations that we are. Life is constituted, sustained and amplified through connections and encounters, thus it is always constituted through difference” (2018, p. 459). Such fresh conceptions of the empirical here, configured as thinking about life itself as difference itself, are perhaps most valuable when applied to ‘real world’ problems as transformers; as ways of looking anew at established problems. Scholars of cultural pedagogies show us how the world at large teaches gender. Advertising, schooling systems, work, toilets, casting in films, clothes: the list is exhaustive, and each site of culture that is structured around (and reproduces) ideas of gender, is itself shaped by the gendered assemblages from which it is constituted. Gender pedagogies are iterative, they are affective and are assembled together across an infinite number of contexts. From carbon futures trading markets, the materials from which bicycles are made, to Hollywood films, geographies of the schoolyard and books about the human psychological condition, masculinity is shaped and named in ways over which we often have little control. Yet seeing this process of shaping and naming, being able to articulate gender machines, gendered affects and the assemblages that produce them, is a methodological affordance that Deleuze’s work gives us. This book has offered a consolidation of some ways Deleuze’s thought is shaping and changing masculinity studies, and most importantly shows us how Deleuze’s ideas of assemblage, affect, the child, smooth and striated space, the surface, and capitalism are methods of thought that give us a way of seeing how gender is taught not only by people but also by objects, and through systems, materials, economies, and geographies. Chapter 2 of this book offers a further provocation to continue and extend such engagements. I have noted that this is one of many possible beginnings to thinking about Deleuze and masculinity studies as a field of thought. My perspective is necessarily partial, and indeed, biased. It is important, though, because it illustrates advancements in thinking about masculinity that have been developed as Deleuze’s work is increasingly being taken up in the field.
Chapter 2 shows us how Deleuze’s ideas of affect and assemblage are methods that allow us to see all performances of masculinity as expressions of social, material and discursive assemblages. Changing the performative nature of masculinity will also mean changing the social, material and language structures that frame men’s lives. Chapter 2 advances this argument in relation to the take up of Deleuze’s work in masculinity studies, particularly through the concepts of assemblage and affect, which have been applied to extend theoretical work undertaken through Butler’s concept of gender performativity. Through assemblage and affect we can see the contextual, atmospheric and material dimensions of performativity in new ways. These methods for thinking gender highlight materiality, context, and the relationship between language and material context in meaning making. They also allow us to see that affects of masculinity are produced by complex social assemblages and often these impact the bodies of men who are sex marked male in quite diverse ways. Affects of masculinity can make a man feel he is not man enough, can reduce his capacity to act, through drawing his attention to the gap between his body and experience and dominant ideals of masculinity. The a/effect of masculinity might be hours spent lifting weights in gyms, in attempts to become more like a popular form of man. As Jonathan Allan so astutely observes: “Masculinity … resides in a cruel optimism that highlights not only the shame of masculinity, but also the dread that is felt in having been shamed, being shamed, and the possibility, if not promise, of being shamed once more again” (Allan, 2018, p. 187).
Through separating popular affects of masculinity from bodies that are sex marked male, we can see the cultural pedagogies of gender as they impact on those bodies for whom they supposedly speak. We can ask what are the effects of affects of gender? We can look to undertake and support gender activism by changing affective assemblages of masculinity on small scales. Thinking about masculinity in terms of affect and assemblage is, then, a method that brings with it possibilities for critical perspectives and critical interventions.
In Chapter 3 this book establishes the fact that, as methodologies for thinking about boyhood, Deleuze’s thought and psychoanalysis are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Indeed, psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytic reading of boys’ and men’s lives can sit productively alongside empirically focused Deleuzian engagements that examine the material and social production of gender. Chapter 3 advances this argument through examining the gendered production of identity undertaken by boys in South East London. The boy’s re-inscription of their identity through phallic symbols of racing cars absolutely aligns to a Freudian reading of Oedipal castration anxiety. At the same time, the boys are profoundly embedded in place and explore their own geography of the playground in ways that align with a Deleuzian understanding of affect, intensity and micro-political acts of smoothing striated space. Here, Deleuze’s thought offers methods for understanding the ways in which gender identity can be embedded in place and can be relationally produced. These are understandings not provided in Freud’s work and can actually be seen as sitting productively alongside Freud’s ideas on boyhood. Extending this empirical observation into a recommendation for scholarship, I encourage researchers to understand the theoretical proposition that we have multiple subjectivities as an invitation to theorize various aspects of subjectivity uniquely, or through diverse theoretical and methodological tools. As humans we are understandable psychoanalytically and yet we also operate affectively, we are intensive and extensive, we are socially knowable and also embedded in place and time. As such, we need to have a range of methods for understanding the different aspects of subjectivity. Deleuze’s material and political thought does not preclude or exclude also working psychoanalytically when we are undertaking empirical research.
Chapter 4 illustrates the fact that lived experiences and media representations of disability are often co-constitutive. Screens are a surface that we fold into how we see ourselves, and in relation to which we continue to become who we are. Images and films of men inform how boys and men understand themselves, and representations of disability of course complexify the becomings of men with disabilities. Deleuze’s work has been especially useful in better understanding the political impact of media representations of disability and of the nature of embodiment for men living with a disability. The field of disability studies has conceptually embraced Deleuze’s capacity to consider the micro-politics of identity and embodiment and can bring these theoretical foci together with a critical and reflexive understanding of the gendered nature of disability. While the gendered nature of disability is consistently re-produced through media representations, it can also be shifted through different forms of media representation. Examples of men with disabilities as active and desirable sexual subjects are one of many possible ways in which media texts might problematize the re-inscription of disability as feminised. The case studies of Michael Stokes’ work and the film text Me Before You bring the question of viewing publics into my discussion. As texts designed to appeal to mainstream viewing audiences, the photographs and the film speak to publics who may not have engaged with disability issues or thought about disability and sexuality. Creating space for these conversations to happen is critical political and affective labour that moves some way towards recognizing the sexual rights of man with disabilities and opening up to reconfigurations of sex, sexuality and the sexual body that are disability lead. Further work in this area might draw on Deleuze’s thinking with Guattari on what the body can do, and how bodily libidinal arrangements make a ‘Body without Organs’: a map of desire, to how changing what counts as sex and how sex is experienced and undertaken can re-map desire and emotional investments.
Chapter 5 of the book shifts tone, from canvassing areas in which Deleuze’s work has already been taken up in masculinity studies to arguing that when taken together with feminist theory, Deleuze’s work provides a path for problematizing and changing carbon economies and the broader gender politics that sustain the neutralization of these economies. The gendered nature of carbon economies urgently needs to be rethought. Ergas and York have shown us “that CO2 emissions per capita are lower in nations where women have higher political status, controlling for GDP per capita, urbanization, industrialization, militarization, world-system position, foreign direct investment, the age dependency ratio, and level of democracy (2012, p. 965). They go on to note that “This finding suggests that efforts to improve gender equality around the world may work synergistically with efforts to curtail global climate change and environmental degradation more generally” (2012, p. 965).
Building on Ergas and York (2012), Julio Godoy (2011), Fernström-Nåtby and Rönnerfalk (2018) and many others, we can take as proven the fact that the way masculinity is popularly configured and associated gender imbalances in social systems are primary drivers in climate change. The process of effecting change needs to begin with changing masculinity and the role that masculinity plays in systems of environmental degradation and pollution. Chapter 5 advances this argument, partly in relation to Deleuze’s concept of sad affect and Deleuze and Guattari’s work on capitalist machine. The sad affect of many forms of contemporary masculinity is a reduction of the earth’s capacity to act and creates an attrition of natural resources. After discussing some ways in which this occurs through oil mining and carbon generation, Chapter 5 then opens out to consider how toxic masculinities articulate in myriad ways, across surfaces and knowledges of carbon and the economies of cultural and financial relation that surround it. From popular, ill-informed critiques of scholarly disciplines and theoretical projects, to capitalist economies that construct and trade publicly owed resources for private gain, frontiers for (and registers of) toxic masculinity shift constantly as the machine of capitalism consumes its own outsides in attempts to re-brand, re-sell and commodify that which might not otherwise support capitalist gain. The man in the suit, the stock market boss, the racing car driver, the disabled athlete wearing prosthetic limbs, becomes politically aligned to the mining corporation who buys, mines and sells earth for ecological ruin and financial gain. These capitalist workers can also be aligned to the bigot (Richard Dawkins) who critiques the feminist project, who argues only specific kinds of scholarly projects are legitimate. Bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism together with contemporary feminism offers theoretical resources through which we can show up masculinist economies of re-production and create space for change. Masculinity studies shows us that Deleuze’s work is useful for rethinking gender performances, the effects of these performances and possibilities for becoming gendered in social and material worlds. We need to continue this project by further exploring what Deleuze’s work allows for masculinity as a practice and economy. We must explore how we can do masculinity differently, think masculinity in new ways and invent new, sustainable, gendered futures.
In closing, then, I would say that Deleuze’s work offers a methodology for thinking about how gender comes to matter, but more than this, I am arguing that Deleuze’s thought needs to be read with other disciplines of scholarship. If we are to shift understandings and performances of gender and value systems associated with such performances, scholars need to pay close attention to the empirical while taking a lateral approach to how we consider masculinity in everyday life. Scholarly habits, disciplinary pairings, and ontological or epistemological differences need to be let go of in order to develop new methodological assemblages for working with and understanding masculinity. We can be more than we currently are and make the world a place that has a more sustainable and equitable future through working with Deleuze to see and do masculinity differently.