“Be Soft”: Irony, Postfeminism, and Masculine Positions in Swedish Sport Betting Commercials

Gambling advertising usually draws heavily on gendered stereotypes, including portrayals of male gamblers as tough and successful. Meanwhile, representations of men in advertising have grown increasingly diverse, with emotional and sexualized men accompanying heroic, muscular portrayals. In this article, both these bodies of research are drawn upon to discuss a series of Swedish sports betting commercials which encourage the viewer to “bet hard” while also “being soft.” The celebration of “softness” is ambiguous but can be seen as referencing gendered, political discussions about men and masculinity. Engaging with hybrid masculinities theory, postfeminism, and discourses about gambling and betting, the article demonstrates that meanings around “softness” are ambiguous, ironic, and serve to normalize gambling by distancing it from discourses about addiction. The commercials represent a shift in gambling advertising, but the linking of men’s politics to gambling also represents a new complexity in narratives about “new,” or “soft,” men.

The Failing Family : Changing Constellations of Gender, Intimacy, and Genre

This chapter examines a boundary-crossing archive of popular and countercinematic West, East, and post-unification German films that all focus on precarious intimacies: Dörrie’s Men (1985); Wortmann’s Maybe…Maybe Not (1994); Carow’s Coming Out (1989); and Grisebach’s Longing (2006). Shifting focus onto a consideration of men and masculinity in the postfeminist era, I analyze how these films subject the heteropatriarchal family to scrutiny, often exploring homosocial bonds and queer relations. In addition to investigating the precaritization of gender, sexuality, and intimacy pictured by these four films, this chapter sheds new light on the much vaunted “return to genre” in the German cinema of neoliberalism.

Ashamed of One’s Sexism, Mourning One’s Friends

One of the most important questions for feminist research on men and masculinity concerns how men can change and become more affected by feminism and less engaged in sexism. Here, men who identify as feminist, pro-feminist or anti-sexist have been considered to be of particular interest. This article contributes to the emerging research on men’s engagement with feminism by analysing contemporary writing about gender relations, inequality and masculinity, more specifically books about men published in Sweden, 2004-2015. Focusing on lived-experience descriptions, the analysis shows how a range of emotions are central to the processes where men encounter and are becoming affected by feminism. The emotions identified include happy ones such as relief, but a more prominent place is given to negative emotions such as alienation, shame, frustration, as well as loss and mourning. Drawing on Ahmed’s model of emotions as bound up with encounters with others, the article highlights how of men’s engagement with feminism is embedded within interpersonal relations with others, particularly women partners, men friends, and children.

Gender, Populism, and the QAnon Conspiracy Movement

According to one recent review of the burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarly literature on populism, populism’s “relationship with gender issues remains largely understudied” (Abi-Hassan, 2017, 426–427). Of those scholarly treatments that do exist, the lion’s share focus on the role of men and masculinity in populist movements. In this essay, I argue scholarly reflection on the relationship of gender and populism should not be limited to this narrow frame. Through a close examination of the complex gender politics of QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy movement that burst into the mainstream of U.S. politics and culture with the onset of the global Coronavirus pandemic, I demonstrate that populist deployments of femininity are as rich, complex, and potent as their deployments of masculinity. QAnon, I argue, is a case study in how femininity, particularly feminine identities centered on motherhood and maternal duty, can be mobilized to engage women in populist political projects. Until scholars of populism start asking Cynthia Enloe’s famous question, “Where are the women?,” in a sustained and rigorous way, phenomena that are integral to populism’s functioning will elude us and our understanding of the relationship between gender and populism will remain partial and incomplete (Enloe, 2014).

Raewyn Connell and the Making of Masculinity Studies in South Africa

The study of masculinity in South Africa scarcely existed in 1990. A minor interest in gender was focused on women and inequality. South Africa was emerging from four decades of apartheid. It was into this environment that Raewyn Connell’s ideas were introduced, adopted and adapted. Raewyn herself made a number of trips to South Africa in the 1990s and 2000s and found a ready reception for her theories about masculinity. South Africa was in transition feeling its way from white minority rule and authoritarianism toward democracy and a commitment to ending poverty, inequality, racism, and the oppression of women. In this article, I describe how Raewyn’s idea energized scholarship, created a new research interest in men and masculinity, and contributed to gender activism.