Social geography II: Geographies of care,men and masculinities

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in caring masculinities. The concept is said to potentially change gender relations. The report showcases the value of feminist social geographies of care. I focus upon three areas where caring masculinities proliferate: transnational policies on care; the circulation of migrant masculinities and expanded modalities of caregiving; and resituating domestic masculinities through caring responsibilities in the home. I argue caring masculinities cannot be reduced to individual men, but if the concept is to be socially transformative it needs to be located through an intersectional feminist care ethic, material structures and progressive care policies.

I Introduction

Following my first report on decolonising geography, this review focuses on masculinities and care. Care and gender inequalities are of longstanding interest to social geographers. This report outlines some of the path-breaking work undertaken by feminist social geographers, before tracing early foundational accounts of men, masculinities and care. I then explore the concept of ‘caring masculinities’ in three ways: (i) critical evaluation of transnational policies and practices of care; (ii) connecting the ‘flows’ and inequalities surrounding migrant masculinities, mobility and caregiving labour; (iii) analysing domestic masculinities that converge around childcare, fathers and families.

II Feminist geographies of care

Geographies of care recognise care as dispersed across time and space, coming to materialise in particular places. This might include care homes, hospices, hospitals as well as the administer of care through digital apps and robotic technologies (Johnston and Pratt, 2024). Care geographies not only reshape the home, through material objects such as shower chairs, strollers, chairlifts or recliners, but the home itself may become a ‘liquid asset’ to offset future costs of residential care (Horton, 2021). Furthermore, geographies of care extend beyond healthcare, to consider the wider ‘spaces, practices and experiences of care’ (Conradson, 2003: 451), a critical focus for research on ‘caring masculinities'.

When it comes to care, feminist scholars have long regarded it as a central axis upon which the sexual division of labour is forged. Here, ‘caring … is the constitutive activity through which women achieve their femininity and against which masculinity takes shape’ (Graham, 1983: 17). Care is essential to humans throughout the life-course and may take place in the household, state, voluntary or private sector, being frequently intertwined in market relations and uneven processes of financial globalisation. Building on these ideas, geographers have drawn upon the concept of ‘global care chains’, ‘global networks’ or ‘therapeutic mobilities’ to examine the international division of labour that frequently creates inequalities between migrant healthcare service providers from the global south and their northern counterparts (Raghuram et al., 2009; Walton-Roberts, 2019; Yeates, 2004). Sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2000: 131) defines global care chains as, ‘a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’. These ‘stretched out’ geographies of care might further include human and non-human matter through the circulation of knowledge, pharmaceuticals, tissue samples, organs and vaccines around the world. Ultimately care is a global issue, reliant on the transnational migration of bodies, objects and things (Kaspar et al., 2019).

Feminist perspectives enable a series of critical interventions into understandings of care through which caring masculinities can benefit. First, applying a feminist ethic of care critiques the division between paid work in the formal labour market and the relegation of care as low-paid, unpaid and unseen labour. This labour is indispensable, where care is ‘a species activity’ interwoven into our lives as ‘a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Tronto and Fisher, 1990: 40). Nancy Fraser (1997) has argued for a ‘Universal Caregiver’ model where gendered households have equal rights and responsibilities for wage-earning and care. Consequently, McDowell (2004: 151) argues for an ethic of care that recognises, ‘the labour market and households are part of an interconnected system’. For Joan Tronto (1993), the aim is to change the overall public value of care. This might include critiquing the way financial surplus is extracted from care homes through low-paid labour, largely undertaken by working-class women and a racialised workforce (Horton, 2022).

Second, by mapping global care chains and utilising theories of transnational migration, feminist geographers offer a ‘scaled-up’ consideration of care, locating it within a shifting and contingent nexus of local-global relations, for example, where migrant care workers are used to supplement the national labour force and impact upon local communities (Batnitzky et al., 2009; Datta et al., 2009; Kaspar et al., 2019; Walton-Roberts, 2019). Third, feminists expand upon the narrow medical aspects of care work to consider the broader role performed by au pairs, cleaners, cooks, maids and other domestic workers when it comes to children, the elderly and household relations (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Parreñas, 2001; Yeates, 2004). This serves to place women as central to migration studies, global care chains and the economic ‘flows’ of knowledge, skills and labour. Fourth, rather than viewing care in purely statistical or economic terms, familiar to migration studies, feminist approaches elicit first-hand ‘care accounts’ (Raw and McKie, 2019) that recognise care as suffused with power and inequalities (Bartos, 2019; Bowlby et al., 2025; England and Dyck, 2014). Shaped by these broader insights, social geographers discuss ‘caringscapes’, ‘carescapes’, ‘ecologies of care’ (Bowlby, 2012; Bowlby and McKie, 2019; McDowell, 2004; Tarrant, 2013) and more lately, ‘feminist political economies of care’ (Nayak, 2024).

Finally, a feminist ethic of care understands care as relational, embodied and affective work, where the ‘emotional labour’ of care is underscored by the bodily intimacies of caregiving (Hochschild, 2003; Tronto, 1998; McDowell, 2004; Held, 2005; Hanlon, 2022). Here, feminist care ethics distinguish between caring about and caring for. Caring about recognises a need for care, while caring for refers to the active practice of meeting that need (Tronto and Fisher, 1990). At points the two may intertwine forming ‘circles of care’ between different actors, networks, objects and agencies (Tronto and Fisher, 1990; Bobinac et al., 2010). Engaging in the emotional ‘body work’ of care highlights the relational dimensions between caregivers and receivers, the intersectional aspects of care work and its inequalities, as well as the shifting, complex and unpredictable relations of power that emerge (England and Dyck, 2014; Giesbrecht et al., 2016; Bartos, 2019; Raghuram, 2019; Bonner-Thompson and Nayak, 2022).

Where feminist research has led the way on care, limited geographical attention has been paid towards men and masculinities This led Kilkey (2010: 126) to identify men as ‘a missing link in the global care chain’ when it comes to service, domestic and other care duties. This lacuna is particularly striking where men represent a growing proportion of unpaid family care members across Europe (Finn and Boland, 2021), and though care work is traditionally female-dominated, the number of male nurses in the US has increased fourfold in the past five decades to 22% (Bottino, 2024), while a record number of men in England, 21%, are currently paid care workers, drawn from an array of international countries (Skills for Care, 2024). If feminist geographies of care have sidelined men and masculinities, recent years are witnessing a burgeoning interest in ‘caring masculinities’, emanating predominantly from Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM), Gender Studies and Gerontology.

III Men, masculinities and care

Research on masculinities and care emerged from the subfields of health and social policy, family studies and sociologies of care and ageing. Surprisingly, much of this work is overlooked in recent accounts on caring masculinities, which Wojnicka and De Boise (2025) date to the early 2000s. However, preceding this are some foundational accounts of male caregiving. A formative finding in these studies was the ‘discovery’ of daily spousal care, supporting the absence or intermittence of state care amongst older couples. As Fisher succinctly surmises, ‘Spouse care thus led, indirectly, to the discovery of male carers’ (1994: 662). Bytheway’s (1987) research on redundant steelworkers in South Wales is emblematic. Men who became primary caregivers viewed it as a reciprocal relation, payback for the care they received from their wives throughout their working life. Obligation, love and attachment were primary reasons for elderly male spousal care. Many men acquired newly found respect for the homecare formally undertaken by spouses. Fisher goes onto question the tendency of state services to gender care around societal expectations of women as ‘natural’ caregivers and men as lacking in capacities and competencies of care. Instead, where men are forced into caring roles Fisher (1994: 659) found, ‘there are circumstances where men accept the obligation to care, undertake intimate personal care, and derive identity and reward from their caring work’.

If increasing longevity has led to a recalibration of care in households, another marker of social change is the break-up of the nuclear family, and the rise of single fathers sharing, or having sole custody of children. Risman’s (1986) survey of 141 single fathers in the US who were divorced, separated or widowed offers valuable insights. She discovered most men were competent at housekeeping, conducting grocery shopping, food preparation, cleaning and yard work without recourse to paid help. Fathers also felt emotionally close to their children who they believed would open-up to them. Risman adopts an anti-essentialist approach to care claiming, ‘men can “Mother”’ (ibid: 95) and that ‘mothering is not an exclusively feminine skill’ (ibid: 101). Her findings are salient for social work, custody cases in the Court of Law and for others involved in child welfare.

Focussing upon male nurses and caregivers in Ireland, Hanlon’s (2012) later research on masculinities, care and equality found caring masculinities to be an ambivalent locus of power. He identifies how most men occupy ‘care-free’ masculinities, unencumbered with thoughts or duties of care. Some participants regarded care as feminised activity, leading to gender subordination and loss of power. Nevertheless, others found caregiving not only rewarding but also transformative, boosting their self-esteem, skills and commitment to care. However, as he later notes, the capitalist commodification of caregiving may curtail possibilities for deep affective care (Hanlon, 2022). In a rare geographical account Giesbrecht et al. (2016) interview 19 male family carers in Canada, adopting an intersectional scalar approach. They identify how, ‘The daily geographies of participants’ lives were found largely to be restricted to the body, home and local community’ (ibid: 1595). Despite the scaled confinement, Giesbrecht et al. indicate how in certain circumstances men’s caregiving role enabled them to contest, and even actively disrupt hegemonic masculinity, especially where men showed public pride in care within the community.

Together, this formative corpus of research on men, masculinities and care indicates firstly, how in familial contexts and later life men may be forced to take on caring duties, where private care is unaffordable and public resources limited. Much of this labour may go ‘unseen’ by the state and society, particularly where retired and elderly men are socially isolated (Milligan and Morbey, 2016; Tarrant, 2013; Leontowitsch, 2022), or regard care as feminised, ‘shameful work’. Secondly, increasing separation rates in post-war Western nation-states meant single dads maybe implicated in the physical and emotional aspects of homecare and childcare. Recently, this may extend to include men undertaking home schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, childcare in prolonged austerity or reshaping domestic relations due to geopolitical events (Boyer et al., 2017; McLean, 2021; Warren, 2022). Thirdly, many men carrying out unpaid care work may not have the resources to outsource caregiving and are likely to be from working-class and racially minoritised ethnic backgrounds (Elliott and Roberts, 2024; Giesbrecht et al., 2016; Gill, 2020). These structural inequalities indicate that rather than middle-class men being the vanguards of change, the marginalised masculinities inhabited by retired men, single dads, the elderly, unemployed and working-class men of differing ethnicities have the potential to transform masculinities and gender relations.

Karla Elliott’s (2016) conceptual paper on ‘caring masculinities’ has become a touchstone for Gender Studies and CSMM, reinvigorating debate and engendering a profusion of research (Wojnicka and De Boise, 2025). For Elliott (2020: 1735), ‘Caring masculinities can be defined as masculinities that reject domination and associated patriarchal traits and incorporate instead ideals of care’. Along with the rejection of domination, she advocates for the integration of positive emotions, interdependence and relationality to transform men and challenge the gender order. Elliott (2016) aims to develop a ‘practice-based model’ of caring that focuses upon the actual care practices men engage in that reshape gender relations, such as child-care, self-care or elderly-care. For her, caring masculinities involve men engaging in non-domination, emotional literacy and deep caregiving practices.

Importantly, being a male care worker or single dad need not necessarily equate with ‘caring masculinities’. Most paid care work is extensively conducted by women, who also remain more likely to be unpaid carers (ONS, 2021). Furthermore, we must distinguish between caring masculinities as a social construct and caring as a social activity. We further need to consider the different types of care men are implicated in, along with the impacts this has upon themselves and others. Although men may practically administer care, it is the emotional, intensive labour – the thinking, being, doing of care – that can potentially change the gender hierarchy. As Hanlon suggests, ‘it is impossible to deconstruct male power without reconstructing men’s emotional life’ (2012: 66).

To instigate new social geographies of care that engage with men and masculinities – holding the potential to rework gender – I will critically evaluate three areas where change may occur: transnational gender policies and care practice; migrant masculinities, mobility and care work; and domestic masculinities, fatherhood and families. Finally, drawing on these insights, I turn to potential gaps on caring masculinities where social geographers are best placed to contribute.

IV Caring masculinities: Transnational policy and practice

Policy initiatives on gender equality and care include analysis of EU nation-state programmes (Hearn, 2018; Scambor et al., 2014), exposition of the home care workers and the Fair Labour Standards Act in the US (England and Alcorn, 2018), critiques of austerity-driven public–private partnerships between state health providers and technology companies in the UK (Johnston and Pratt, 2024), the role of migrant live-in elderly care in Austria, Canada, Switzerland and the UK (Schwiter et al., 2018), the crisis of low-paid care work in Canada, Finland, South Africa and the UK (Bowlby et al., 2025), as well as care policies in parts of the global south (Raghuram, 2016; Esquivel, 2021).

In a systematic review of the role of men in gender equality programmes across 6 EU member states, Scambor et al. (2014) found countries with an emphasis on gender equality and good welfare systems invariably had the most gender-balanced division of care/work. Drawing on statistical reports, they found an increasing involvement of men in caring practices, particularly childcare and various fields of domestic work. Scambor et al. identify how ‘caring masculinity has emerged as a new pattern of masculinity’ (ibid: 570), especially amongst young men in European urban areas. For Hearn (2018: 29), gender affirmative policies ‘are very much to do with care and caring’. In their recent collection, Bowlby et al. (2025) use qualitative methods to examine the experiences of transnational paid healthcare workers in Canada, Finland, South Africa and the UK. Despite an international ‘care crisis’ following the COVID-19 pandemic, caregivers continue to remain vulnerable to low-pay, precarity and poor working conditions, leading the authors to iterate the need for systemic reforms that challenge the persistent disparities faced by an essential workforce (see also Horton, 2022).

Analysing childcare, the role of nation-state policy is evident in Brandth and Kvande’s (2018) research in Norway with 20 men who fathered alone during parental leave. Nordic countries have introduced extended parental leave policies with exclusive rights for fathers and the maintenance of full salaries. Extended paternity leave means many women may return to work as men become temporary sole carers of infants. As a result of welfare transformations, Brandth and Kvande discovered, ‘policy has influenced the norms of fatherhood; fathers are expected to use their leave quota and be more than simply family providers’ (ibid: 73). Men went from having low confidence in their caregiving abilities to increased self-esteem, care competence and deeper connections with their children. This has shifted norms of masculinity wherein, ‘men assess the values and practices of care and integrate them into masculine identities and practices’ (ibid: 86), in ways that are no longer disparaged. Such accounts signal a potential for the ‘Universal Caregiver’ (Fraser, 1997).

Policies on care and gender equality should be inclusive of emerging generations. In England and Wales, government guidance for the teaching of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) (2020) is creating possibilities for more diverse forms of gender practice, that may give rise to the production of caring masculinities and more inclusive sexualities (Bonner-Thompson and Nayak, 2025; Nayak and Bonner-Thompson, 2022). The landmark legislation, premised on the 2010 Equality Act, demonstrates an explicit focus on the role of care in young lives. Updated guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) recommends, ‘pupils should be taught how to treat each other with kindness, consideration and respect’ (DfE 2021: 19). This tapestry of care threaded through policy, recognises students, ‘positive emotional and mental wellbeing’ (ibid: 20), the role of ‘caring friendships’ and ‘families and people who care for me’, as well as the value of ‘respectful relationships’, and peer confidentiality (ibid: 21). The revised rubric mirrors Elliott’s (2016, 2020) definition of caring masculinities, offering potential transformations for gender identity through education, where care and emotions are no longer estranged from masculinity.

Care is central to the United Nations Global Sustainability Goals (2021). However, health and medical anatomy are historically premised on white bodies (Hunter, 2021; Raghuram, 2019; Seiler, 2020). In the US care remains configured across white lines, where career employment often comes with private health insurance invoking racialised and classed notions of ‘white care’ (Seiler, 2020). The Affordable Care Act (2010) in the US, often known as ‘Obamacare’, attempts to offer inclusive care yet is under threat from neoliberal revanchism (Lopez, 2019). Esquivel (2014) has examined the potential of care policies in the global south where, similarly to relations in the north, care largely falls to women with a greater preponderance of women working in the care sector. In parts of Latin America Esquival (2021) found recent care policies to be ‘transformative’, where rights, autonomy, wellbeing and agency were achieved for caregivers and recipients. In South Africa Morrell and Jewkes argue that caring splices open pathways to gender equality, concluding, ‘men’s engagement in care work deserves to be an explicit goal of interventions aimed at “changing men”’ (2011: 9). These global examples demonstrate the significance of care for gender equality and the role policy plays in ‘the struggle for a careful world’ (Ruby and Scholz, 2018: 73).

V Migrant masculinities, mobility and care work

In a scoping review of men, masculinities and transnational migration in Canada over the past 24 years, Sowad and Lafrance (2025) remark on a general paucity of research, but recent interest in intersectionality. Cataloguing English published peer-reviewed papers, they conclude further studies are needed on how transnational migrant ‘masculinities are produced by and productive of changing social locations, cultural positionalities, patterns of inequality, and hierarchies of power and privilege’ (ibid: 128). Arguably it is here that geographers are making flourishing contributions, exploring if migration processes and changing economic status challenge or reaffirm gender identities in the labour market. For example, transnational migration may lead to ‘re-traditionalising’ masculinities, as Walsh (2011) discovered with British expatriates in Dubai. With British men often working long hours and a 6-day week, expectations that female spouses were responsible for cooking and cleaning could result in traditional gender realignment. In these instances, Walsh argues, ‘whiteness, Britishness, occupational status and associated wealth enable and exaggerate performances of hegemonic masculinity in transnational migration that are different from those enacted “at home”’ (ibid: 529). This suggests hegemonic masculinity may materialise across different times and spaces, within and beyond the workplace (Hopkins and Giatzitzoglu, 2025).

Undertaking 67 interviews with migrant men in London’s low-paid economy, Datta et al. (2009) adopt an intersectional approach to examine the competing and contradictory ways masculinity intersects with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and nationality through the global restructuring of the economy. Around half of migrant men worked in the lower echelons of construction and emphasised the arduous aspects of labour, reinforcing the gritty ideal of ‘men’s work’. The other half worked as cleaners, including some care workers and those in the ‘feminized’ service sector. They deployed ‘compensatory narratives’ to justify their labour, noting the lack of choice open to them, the physical exertion required or how care work may be seen differently in their home countries. This indicates that low-paid migrant masculinities are likely to amplify discourses of dominant masculinity to enhance their status, regardless of whether their jobs are ‘masculinised’ or ‘feminised’. An intersectional approach is further apparent in Batnitzky et al.’s (2009) case study interviews with 120 male migrants working in either London hotels or hospitals. The authors found upper- and middle-class migrant men without families were ‘flexible’ when it came to taking lower-class jobs, viewing it as life experience and challenging gender identities in positive ways. However, lower-class migrant men with families back home were more ‘strategic’ when it came to undertaking ‘women’s work’, emphasising financial needs as a priority. To this extent, geographers were already making inroads into Kilkey’s (2010) subsequent declaration of men as a ‘missing link’ in global care chains.

In the North American health context, Walton-Roberts (2019) examines the South Asian diaspora of male nurses from Kerala to Ontario, who choose to occupy full-time employment in technically advanced areas, where male nursing is low-paid and stigmatised in India. Nursing stigma is managed where migrant men alleviate themselves from ‘less well paid, “caring”, deep emotion and body work’ (ibid: 33), where care can be ‘masculinised’ through medical professionalisation (Hanlon, 2012), the removal of emotional labour and a separation from bodily dirt and disease. Similarly, in a study of Sri Lankan migrant men working as cleaners and carers in Italy, it was found they tended to disavow aspects of their labour, in preference for ‘masculine’ chores including driving, gardening or repairing household items (Näre, 2010). Further research in Italy observes how upper-middle-class men with family care needs outsourced ‘dirty work’ to migrant care workers across lines of class, gender and ethnicity, thereby perpetuating capitalist hegemonic masculinity and reproducing the colonial division of labour (Gallo and Scrinzi, 2016). Nevertheless, a minority of working- and middle-class men learned embodied skills from caregivers where ‘cash-for-care’ benefits failed to adequately fulfil needs, indicating gender transformations may happen at the margins rather than the centre.

Much of the transnational work on migrant masculinities and care adopts an explicitly geographical focus by considering the migration, mobility and motility of workers at multiple intersecting scales. Where the mobilities paradigm is widely utilised in geographic research on migrant masculinities (Datta et al., 2009; Kaspar et al., 2019; Walton-Roberts, 2019), through innovative ethnographies in Western Africa, Kopf and Phelan (2024) focus on its antithesis – immobility, ‘waiting’ and ‘being stuck’. The impacts of economic precarity and political insecurity on men reveal a Malian train station where engines cease to operate but workers continue to turn up to claim lost pay, and in a Burkina Faso marketplace where customers have ebbed away, but vendors continue to gather. Kopf and Phelan seek to ‘trouble understandings of care, work, masculinity and being stuck’ (ibid: 484). They divulge how men ‘staying put’ is an act of care, mutual support, hope and solidarity. These ‘webs of care’ (ibid: 486) were strewn together through material, temporal and affective acts, involving caring about and caring with one another, often through the circular rhythms of chatting, praying or eating together in the maintenance of felt attachments.

VI Domestic masculinities: Childcare, fathers and families

When it comes to debates on caring masculinities in gender studies and CSMM, an area that derives much attention is fatherhood. Contrastingly, it has been suggested that social geographers have largely ignored the social construction of fatherhood (Aitken, 2009; Meah and Jackson, 2016). For Gorman-Murray (2008: 368), the domestic home space ‘generates opportunities to contest hegemonic masculinity’. Reflecting on ‘the awkward spaces of fathering’ Aitken (2009) attested, ‘the emotional act of fathering in itself is a heroic act’. More recent accounts see fathers claim, ‘caring is masculine’ (Lee and Lee, 2018), or caring dads are ‘real heroes’ (Scheibling, 2018). There are echoes here of Brandth and Kvande’s (2018: 87) study of Norwegian fathers, where the most exalted form of masculinity was less about ‘status and resources’, but ‘care competence’.

To better understand these narratives, we need to examine men’s actual caregiving practices. Beglaubter’s (2021) study with 33 Canadian fathers taking paternal leave offers nuanced findings that traverse beyond ‘heroic’, ‘caring’ or ‘careless’ men. Beglaubter found men adopted different dispositions to early caregiving. There were those who took little initiative, were largely in the background unless called upon and viewed themselves as the ‘help and support’ for spouses. ‘Doers’ were more active and did not require instructions when it came to changing nappies or tending to a crying baby. However, despite being skilled parents they deferred to mothers for most decisions such as meal planning or developmental needs. It was the ‘tag-teamers’ who came closest to the ideals of caring masculinities through experience of solo leave-taking, often due to spousal shiftwork or other activities that led to lone caregiving. Even so, Beglaubter discovered ‘‘tag-team fathers’ authority was only temporary’ (ibid: 11), with couples seamlessly stepping back into gendered roles at the end of paternity leave. It was only those ‘deeply immersed’ in routine infant caregiving who utilised caring masculinities to unsettle gender relations. This suggests that caring masculinities need to be located within material configurations and national work-based policies. Furthermore, men’s caring practices are plural and diverse in their enactment, they may be temporary or enduring, according to situation and context.

Arguably the most extensive research undertaken is by Andrea Doucet (2004, 2006, 2016), including a longitudinal study interviewing 134 Stay-At-Home-Dads (SAHD), couples with an SAHD and solo working mothers in Canada and the US. Doucet seeks to reimagine care/work policies for a fairer society and questions if the SAHD – an archetype of caring masculinities – is a feminist concept. She suggests otherwise, as the concept establishes binaries of work and care, while instigating individualised conceptions of choice that have long been subject to feminist critique. Doucet further maintains that in places like Sweden the SAHD does not exist due to better combinations of work, longer paid leave, parental rights, high-quality day care and national support for gender equality. In contrast, the SAHD in North America is a response to neoliberalism, the downloading of care responsibilities to individual households and a move away from public services to domestic solutions for childcare. Through narrative accounts with 70 SAHDs in Canada, Doucet (2004) further found most men prioritised paid work above care, viewing their caring roles outside of work as marginal. In this rendering, rather than reworking the gender order, the practice of caring masculinities embodied by the SAHD is more likely a response to job precarity, childcare costs and the institutional ‘thinness’ of quality welfare services, giving rise to ‘growing care gaps’ in a ‘shrinking state’ (England and Alcorn, 2018: 443).

This may partly explain why caring masculinities in their ‘practice-based’ form are as likely to occur at the ‘periphery’ rather than the ‘centre’ (Elliott, 2020), amongst unemployed, working-class, racially minoritised and lower-middle-class men. It is then important that white middle-class fathering does not come to epitomise caring masculinities and progressive transformations. Where Elliott has argued that caring masculinities are ‘antithetical to hegemonic masculinity’ (2016: 254), others are more sceptical. In Hunter et al.’s (2017) critical review of masculinities and fatherhood, they reflect how the ‘new’ involved father may in time become hegemonic being associated, ‘primarily with white middle-to-upper class fathers’ (ibid: 6). They speculate that caring masculinities do not exist outside of hegemony, rather, they may reflect a ‘broadening’ of hegemonic masculinity as men may seek to reassert dominance in other spaces, including leisure, paid, unpaid and community work (Tarrant, 2013; Hopkins and Giazitzoglu, 2025). These entanglements are seen where Father’s Rights campaigners have incorporated aspects of ‘caring masculinities’ to assert men’s rights in ways that consolidate and maintain white male dominance (Eisen and Yamashita, 2017), ultimately ‘masculinising care’ (Jordan, 2018). In patriarchal societies, white fatherhood can come to represent the apex of masculinity, where men can be upheld as ‘saviours’ or ‘superdads’ (Kaufman, 2013), affirming ‘heroic narratives’ (Doucet, 2016) of caring fathers as virtuous, compared with Black, Indigenous and ethnically minoritised fathers, who are often vilified as absent, deviant and dysfunctional.

Poesze’s (2019) research on Ghanaian migrant fathers in the Netherlands challenges these racialised perceptions. Fathers who had acquired citizenship, working rights and stable employment maintained strong ties with their children in Ghana, being able to visit, send remittances and maintain social media contact. Contrastingly, undocumented and low-income Ghanaian fathers with limited resources often saw familial relations deteriorate and disintegrate due to dwindling finances. In post-conflict Sierra Leone masculinity, once premised on being the provider, is being reworked with young men redefining masculinity through care. Following Ebola, McLean (2021: 795) found, ‘Many young men now see it as their role to perform childcare activities such as feeding, bathing, and dressing children’, signalling the emergence of caring masculinities shaped by geopolitical events.

Interviewing 26 young Khmer fathers and 26 young mothers in Cambodia, My (2022) outlines a continuum of caring masculinities from those with ‘less-caring’ and ‘more-caring’ practices. The study offers an important contribution by making caring masculinities elastic. Furthermore, care in the global south may include breadwinning, where in the north it is associated more closely with hegemonic forms of masculinity (Connell, 1995). The role of women’s paid employment outside the home was often a reason for ‘more caring’ masculinities. ‘Less-caring’ Khmer men could engage in care work that involved physical strength such as collecting and chopping wood for the fire, rather than washing clothes or dishes, while ‘more-caring’ men could undertake both breadwinning and caregiving practices, or swap some breadwinning duties for more care. In a similar vein, Morell and Jewkes (2011) found that in South Africa, men often envisioned care through ‘provision’ and ‘protection’ – aspects generally deemed patriarchal. However, caring masculinities maybe enacted differently according to time and place, while care and conflict may be braided together, with differing effects and unpredictable relations of power (Bartos, 2019; Bonner-Thompson and Nayak, 2022; Raghuram, 2019).

Studies on caring masculinities largely focus on men, with scant attention afforded to children and young people (Ruby and Scholz, 2018; Swain, 2025). Recent debates on ‘toxic masculinity’, misogyny and the ‘manosphere’ indicate pressing needs for engaging new generations in practices of care (Bonner-Thompson and Nayak, 2022). Geographers are beginning to carve some pathways here, looking at emerging ‘post-crisis’ masculinities (McLean, 2021), care in children’s lives and possibilities for feminist transformations (Bonner-Thompson and Nayak, 2025), youth homelessness (Klodawsky et al., 2006) and care precarity (Bonner-Thompson and McDowell, 2020), as well as care inequalities in former industrial regions, where ‘care is regarded as menial, residual, effeminate labour’ (Nayak, 2024: 1647). Such studies are significant, as despite a feminist ethics indicating care as relational, accounts of those that need care or are cared for remain sparse. Moreover, young adult care workers ‘are lightly explored in the literature’ (Fisher, 2025: 3), and even less is known about children and young people who are unpaid family carers.

VII Conclusion

Emerging work on caring masculinities attempts to change men’s relationship to care. In doing so, it reveals opportunities for rethinking gender. Gender relations are thereby constituted through care. Different masculinities are produced if men are ‘caring’, ‘careless’ or ‘carefree’. Where theories of masculinity barely reflect on care and care work (Ruby and Scholz, 2018), caring masculinities are hopeful, signalling a potential to change the gender order (Elliott, 2016, 2020; Hearn, 2018; Scambor et al., 2014). To achieve this, I have argued that the concept must travel beyond individual men and be nested within progressive care policies and material structures enabling of equality.

By adopting a multi-scalar approach to the transnational circulation of migrant workers, geographers are furthering debates on masculinities, mobility and care. Here, attention needs to be paid to the uneven ‘flow’ of migrant bodies from the global south, to service the care needs of those in the north. The low-paid aspects of care work should be a critical focus, where caregiving inequalities occur across intersecting lines of class, ethnicity, gender, citizenship status and nationality. Restrictive governmental border controls on migrant workers, mean accounts of ‘waiting’ or being ‘stuck’ are also (Kopf and Phelan, 2024).

It is important not to reify ‘caring masculinities’ as an ontological category, fixed typology or ‘pure’ identity; they are social constructs. If caring outcomes are unknown and unpredictable, it follows that those of caring masculinities are too. Instead, we need to recognise all masculinities as situated in relations of power, multiple, fragmented and shifting in their configuration (Connell, 1995; Hearn, 2018). For Ruby and Scholz, compared with feminist care theory, caring masculinities are ‘insufficiently theorised’ (2018: 81), an issue this report responds to through a multi-scalar intersectional feminist care ethics (Giesbrecht et al., 2016; Hanlon, 2022; Raghuram, 2019; Tronto, 1993). This may mean adapting, elaborating or even ‘rethinking the concept’ (Wojnicka and De Boise, 2025). There are several possibilities for social geographers to further ‘stretch the boundaries of care’ (Bartos, 2019) and caring masculinities. This might include feminist geographies of care that engage with the gendered experience of men and masculinities; relational research that considers caregivers as well as recipients; or embodied intersectional accounts that focus upon marginalised experiences and social inequalities. Doing so may pave the way for a less combustible more ‘Careful World’ (Ruby and Scholz, 2018), where masculinities and care are no longer antithetical.