Abstract
Although there is much feminist work that has examined the intersection of gender and neoliberalism, critical work on men and masculinities remains underdeveloped in this area. This article suggests that complexity theory is a crucial resource for a critical analysis of the ways in which masculinities contribute to the ongoing maintenance of neoliberal socio-economic systems. Critical work on neoliberalism and capitalist economics has recently been drawn to complex systems theory, as evidenced by the work of scholars such as Sylvia Walby, William Connolly and Brian Massumi. Their work produces important insights into neoliberalism, but does not develop a sustained reflection on the place of men and masculinities in this domain. In order to develop a critical account of the relation of masculinity to complexity, the article draws on the work of Judith Butler and Bonnie Mann. It suggests that Butler’s theorising on precariousness contains important resources for understanding how hegemonic masculinities are positioned in relation to the complexity of neoliberal systems, as illustrated in Mann’s concept of ‘sovereign masculinity’. Finally, drawing on two different examples of the enactment of masculinities in neoliberal contexts, the article argues that hegemonic forms of masculinity can be understood as technologies for the amelioration of the complexities and insecurities generated by neoliberal markets.
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organised kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. (Hayek, 1989: 7)
Friedrich von Hayek is arguably the key theorist of neoliberalism. As one of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society – whose biennial gatherings have brought together leading neoliberal thinkers since 1947 – the influence of his work extends from the early neoliberal philosophies developed in his native Austria to British and American variants of neoliberalism. One of the distinctive contributions of Hayek's work is his attempt to ground neoliberal theory in an epistemology derived from complexity theory. In a lecture given on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 (from which the epigraph above is taken), Hayek argues that the social sciences must recognise that they deal with systems of ‘essential complexity’, which are comprised of ‘a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain’ (1989: 4). Consequently, governments must limit themselves to setting up a legal framework that allows competitive markets to handle the allocation of resources.
Although neoliberalism takes different forms, this principle of self-limitation in the face of complexity is a key theme. In general terms, neoliberalism may be understood both as a globally dominant set of capitalist economic policies, typically focusing on deregulation, austerity, privatisation and competitive markets, as well as a set of political and social practices for governing people's lives through encouraging them to view themselves as bearers of human capital and individual responsibility. From both angles, market-based forms of self-organisation are relied upon to generate economic and social orders out of complex series of interactions. Moreover, while ideas associated with complexity have long maintained a presence within economic theory (Colander, 2000), responses to the global financial crisis of the late 2000s by influential economists and financial regulators have installed complexity theory as the contested terrain of neoliberal economics (Cooper, 2011). Thus, as the complexity of economic systems and their embedding within social, political and natural systems becomes ever more apparent, it is important that critical engagements with neoliberalism engage with complexity theory. In order to adequately grapple with neoliberal theory, it must be confronted at its point of greatest strength.
Christiaens (2019) has argued that Hayek’s position is, in effect, a form of secularised providential theology, with ‘the market’ occupying the place of an absent God. Hayek's Nobel lecture does little to contradict this claim, as he comments approvingly on ‘the Spanish schoolmen of the sixteenth century, who emphasized that what they called pretium mathematicum, the mathematical price, depended on so many particular circumstances that it could never be known to man but was known only to God’ (1989: 5). Given neoliberalism's continual generation of states of insecurity (Lorey, 2015), the secularised, putatively infallible knowledge of the free market provides the apparently secure ground that prevents the system as a whole from spiralling into chaos.
The long shadow of God, however, may not be sufficient to establish faith in the market. This article pursues a different thesis. I suggest that gender plays an important role in sustaining neoliberal regimes. Read through a gendered lens, Hayek’s claim in the epigraph above is provocative: ‘man’ must recognise that he cannot acquire the knowledge that ‘would make mastery of the events possible’. He is, presumably, intending to refer to man qua universal human being, but who is actually in a position to forfeit mastery? The term ‘master’ (denoting one who possesses power, authority and control) bears a gendered character. Throughout Western history, it has been men who have aspired to mastery, and who have been recognised as such. In this light, Hayek's admonishment bears a veiled threat to men; it unsettles, and calls their gender into question. Beginning from this provocation, my intent in this article is to contribute to feminist analyses of neoliberalism by turning the focus onto the relationship between masculinity, neoliberalism and complexity.
Much recent attention has been given to the convergence of neoliberalism with various contemporary feminisms (Repo, 2016; Banet-Weiser et al., 2020). Notably, Rottenberg (2018) has argued that the last decade has seen the emergence of a neoliberal form of feminism, propagated by elite Western women, and which serves the needs of capitalism. Other feminist critics have analysed the ways in which women have been constructed as ideal neoliberal subjects (Gill and Scharf, 2011), serve as vehicles for extending neoliberalism through global development (Wilson, 2015) and are positioned as agents of neoliberal rationality within an expanded economisation of the social (Adkins, 2018). Taken together with numerous studies documenting how existing gender inequalities are exacerbated by neoliberal state policies (Walby, 2009), one might get the impression that neoliberalism's gender effects almost exclusively concern women. This may perhaps reflect the extent to which men or the masculine remain the unexamined norm. But where do masculinities fit into this picture? This article suggests that feminist theorising on neoliberalism misses an important component of the way in which the latter articulates with gendered orders and systems if the dimension of masculinity escapes critical attention. On the one hand, because neoliberalism has often relied on ideologies of ‘traditional’ family relations (Cooper, 2017), it not only reinforces women's responsibilities for reproductive work, but also causes problems for working-class, poor or racialised men who lack opportunities to be ‘breadwinners’ (Radhakrishnan and Solari, 2015; Walker and Roberts, 2018). On the other hand, other critical work has begun to emerge that identifies significant links between masculinities and neoliberal economic rationalities (Brown, 2015; O’Neill, 2018; Salzinger, 2019). Indeed, Hearn’s (2015) Men of the World points out that the transnational capitalist class is highly gendered, and that it operates within a world of financial economics that is largely one of men. It is this aspect of the gender–neoliberalism nexus that I am particularly interested in here.
In what follows, I seek to develop a theoretical framework that can account for how masculinities articulate with neoliberalism and, in particular, how they mediate between the control and freedom promised to neoliberal subjects and the states of insecurity generated by the self-organising processes that characterise complex socio-economic systems. I refer to hegemonic masculinities 1 throughout the article, which may be understood as material-semiotic constructions that serve to legitimate existing gendered orders. They are always aspirational and cannot be fully embodied or realised by any individual. Particular individual enactments of masculinity take place within socio-natural systems that are always marked by hegemonic masculinities and are, to some degree, responses to them. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, hegemonic masculinities are positions within webs of symbolic meanings, around which material patterns of gendered behaviour are organised. They are imagined positions of ontological security from which the world may be viewed as under control. Hegemonic masculinities should not be understood as representing coherent ideologies; rather, in the language of complexity theory, they serve as ‘attractors’ that draw actors towards them and thus provide some degree of stability and order to complex socio-natural systems (Garlick, 2016).
I first examine some prominent recent approaches to neoliberalism and capitalist economics that draw upon complex systems analysis. In the work of William Connolly, Brian Massumi and Sylvia Walby, we find aspects of complexity theory deployed to generate important insights into the operations of neoliberalism. Although in quite different ways, each also provides elements of a theoretical perspective on the relation of masculinities to complex socio-economic systems. The next section of the article then builds on this analysis by turning to the work of Judith Butler and Bonnie Mann. Butler's work does not explicitly develop a theory of masculinity or complexity, but I suggest that her theorising on the precariousness of life contains important resources for understanding how masculinities are positioned in relation to the complexity of life under neoliberal conditions. I further suggest that this line of thinking is illustrated by Mann’s (2014) concept of ‘sovereign masculinity’. Finally, the article briefly considers two sites in which we can observe masculinities in action within neoliberal contexts. I argue that, in such settings, hegemonic masculinities promise to ameliorate the ongoing tensions, complexities and insecurities generated by neoliberalism. In this way, masculinity plays an important part in sustaining the neoliberal market-based framework that shapes contemporary capitalist socio-economic systems and their corresponding gender orders.
Neoliberalism and complexity
This section is primarily focused on the work of three theorists who each draw upon complexity theory to develop accounts of neoliberal economics that recognise that the latter is not restricted to a narrow sense of the economy. First, however, in order to envision how economic systems may be understood as complex systems, I briefly turn to Cilliers’ (1998) Complexity and Postmodernism, which was a key text in promoting complexity theory beyond the physical sciences. As Cilliers explains, all social systems are complex systems, and economic systems provide an important example of complexity in action. Although he does not develop an economic analysis in great detail, Cilliers (1998: 5–6) provides an outline for conceptualising the economy as a complex system. From this perspective, a population contains a multitude of individual agents, who interact both with one another and with other elements such as shops and financial institutions by buying, selling, lending, borrowing and investing. Economic agents primarily interact with other components of the system that are easily accessible to them, and on the basis of the information available to them, without having an understanding of the system as a whole. These interactions can often be nonlinear (e.g. stock market returns do not necessarily correspond to inputs in a proportional manner), produce feedback effects and generate higher-level emergent forms through processes of self-organisation. Moreover, because they are informed by the ever-changing dynamics of demand and supply, they tend to exist in a far-from-equilibrium state. Thus, we have the key characteristics of a complex system – nonlinear interactions, self-organisation and emergence – and more complex economic phenomena can be built up on this basis. Crucially, however, economic systems are both influenced by their history and are open to the influence of other systems that form their environments.
Building on these ideas, William Connolly mobilises insights from complexity theory to develop a sophisticated analysis of neoliberalism in his The Fragility of Things. He argues that economic markets are ‘merely one type of imperfect, self-regulating system in a cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities for self-organization set on different scales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed’ (Connolly, 2013: 25). The point is not that neoliberal theorists like Hayek are incorrect in attributing self-organising qualities to markets, but that they overestimate the uniqueness of that characteristic in a complex world of becoming. For Connolly, when capitalism is theorised as an open system enmeshed within an environment composed of other, interacting human and nonhuman systems, then we gain an appreciation of the ‘fragility of things’ today. It is the complex relations that hold between interacting systems that need to be taken into account, and which constitute a volatile ecology that continually threatens to undo economic orders. Neoliberal ideology, however, obscures such insight, and instead is ‘drawn to the simplicity of a two-slot system: self-organizing markets with beautiful powers of rational self-adjustment and states as clumsy agents of collective decision’ (Connolly, 2013: 31). Rather than fully grappling with the complexity of the world in which economic markets are embedded, neoliberalism enacts a retreat to the deceptive security of simplicity. As such, it forms an inadequate response to the challenges of our time such as climate change, global pandemics or the severe inequalities generated by capitalist systems.
A more adequate response, as Connolly (2013: 42) characterises it, would be to acknowledge a general ontology of complexity and to enact political strategies that are designed to experiment with its affordances. One of the political tasks that follows is to identify forces that block engagement with the complexity of life. Here, Connolly offers some brief but insightful observations. In particular, he suggests that many working- and middle-class white men seek models of masculinity that promise security within a world of uncertainty, while simultaneously rejecting state interventions into economic markets as they evoke awareness of the fragile, vulnerable and uncertain condition of individual lives. No doubt this does not hold universally, yet for Connolly, ‘this double logic of masculinization of market icons and feminization of state supports and regulatory activities’ (2013: 24) serves to bolster neoliberal ideology. Although this analysis is not developed in great detail, it is suggestive of an important linkage between masculinities, complexity and neoliberalism.
Connolly's nascent theorisation of this linkage builds on comments he first made in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. In that work (Connolly, 2008: 32–34), he argued that the ‘Christian-capital political formula’ operates through the resentments and vulnerability of working- and middle-class men, channelling them towards aspirational identifications with elite men of privilege who symbolise the individual freedom, creativity and power that neoliberalism ties to capitalist markets. Developing this theory further, Connolly writes that ‘neoliberal economic theory … is most at home with itself when it presupposes a rather fixed conception of nature that capitalism can master with little blowback from the force-fields composing it’ (2011: 137). I suggest that it is precisely here that hegemonic masculinities come into play, as they evoke subject positions from which one may attempt to dominate nature and to tame the complexity of the world. If this is correct, then masculinity may serve as a resource for neoliberalism. Next, I suggest that this is further illustrated in the work of Brian Massumi – despite his own lack of engagement with issues of gender.
Massumi’s (2014) The Power at the End of the Economy examines the relationship between neoliberalism and the self-organising properties of economic systems. Although not generally known as a complexity theorist, Massumi’s usage of concepts drawn from the complexity lexicon plays a key role in his critique of neoliberal theory. As he characterises it, neoliberalism discursively presents itself as being grounded in the rationality of individual interests and choices, but actually operates via the ungrounded circulation of affect. Rereading Foucault’s (2008) genealogy of neoliberalism, Massumi notes that the ‘rationalization’ of the economy that neoliberals attribute to individual decisions is actually ‘an emergent property of a complex, self-organizing system’ (2014: 3) that extends far beyond a restricted sense of the economy. This is because ‘the individual subject of interest forming the fundamental unit of capitalist society is internally differentiated’ with ‘an infra-individual complexity quasi-chaotically agitating within the smallest unit’ (Massumi, 2014: 8). At this infra-economic level, rationality and affect exist in a state of indistinction, for the results of an individual's choices are measured in the affective currency of satisfaction and anticipated in a constant state of anxiety about the future. Moreover, the sub-individual (or ‘dividual’) non-conscious level of affective commotion may be directly linked to the collective, macro-economic level without conscious articulation by the individual subject. As Massumi notes, ‘it is a defining characteristic of complex environment[s] that the extremes of scale are sensitive to each other, attuned to each other's modulations’ (2014: 9). Self-organising processes produce economic ‘moods’ at the collective level, which are, in turn, the object of neoliberal governance. The latter operates through what Massumi (2014: 29–30) refers to as ‘priming’ – i.e. the use of situational cues to orient, activate and modulate thoughts and behaviours. As a mechanism of power, priming informs the complex ecology in which neoliberal subjects make ‘rational’ choices.
Massumi does not discuss gender in his analysis of neoliberal economic theory, yet when he turns to consider the ‘politics of dividualism’ we may glimpse the way in which masculinities can function as technologies for the management of the feral life of primes. The trouble with neoliberalism, for Massumi, is that the prescription of rational choice ‘amounts to an attempt to defuse the infra-individual level of bare-active tendency and any emergent autonomy of decision’ (2014: 33). Reason operates here as a mechanism for taming the complexity of life and as a denial of the ways in which the latter informs the nonconscious infra-activity that flows through the individual. In this sense, rational choice is homologous to the function that Connolly identifies certain masculinities as performing in relation to the uncertainty of life. It is notable that, as Connolly does, Massumi highlights the ways in which neoliberalism attempts to enact a restriction and simplification of the complexity of life, especially by positing a simple opposition between reason and affect. For Massumi, the very plausibility of the concept of ‘rational choice […] assumes, and demands, the reduction of vitality, a limiting of life's amplitude’; in this sense, ‘rationality is a limitative mode of power’ (2014: 34). Here, we can posit that masculinities, insofar as they operate as mechanisms for generating ontological security in the face of the fragility and constant becoming of life, bear an affinity with rational choice. This is not to say that they are the same thing; but it is to suggest that masculinity may sometimes serve to enact or legitimate the doctrine of rational choice through which neoliberalism perpetuates itself in relation to forms of insecurity that are not merely existential, but are simultaneously generated by practices of neoliberal governance.
Massumi's response to the inadequacies of neoliberal theory is a politics of dividualism that ‘would affirm complexity, and the oscillatory autonomies of decision that come with it’, and ‘effect modulations of becoming that produce self-justifying surplus values of life’ (2014: 35). What stands in the way of such a project? To affirm complexity, to affirm an impersonal freedom that comes with participation in the flow of life, is to give up the illusion of control. Massumi suggests that the role of the dividual subject is ‘to recognize the rationality of affectivity, and to contribute to its own modulation by forces moving through its microlevel from the infra to the trans’ (2014: 36). The subject of choice can move in this direction by experiencing itself ‘more as collaborator than master of these forces’, and by practising ‘strategic self-surrender to them’ (Massumi, 2014: 36). The gendered dimensions of this discussion lie beneath the surface of Massumi's text, but the master/surrender couplet undoubtedly resonates with the masculine/feminine binary that structures so much of modern Western thought. Hegemonic masculinities are usually defined in opposition to the type of receptivity to life that Massumi advocates. In particular, as has been argued by many ecological feminists (Plumwood, 1993), they are often premised on the domination of nature – both human and nonhuman. Masculinity, through its association with rationality, thus appears as a restrictive or limitative technology for generating order and security out of the inherent complexity of feral life.
Centring gender to a much greater degree, Walby’s (2015) Crisis draws on complexity theory to provide a critical analysis of the ways in which the financial crisis that unfolded in Europe and North America in the late 2000s has been understood, and takes further important steps towards developing an analysis of the intersections between masculinities, gendered inequalities and neoliberalism. Bringing a feminist perspective to bear upon conventional analyses of economy and society, she highlights the ways in which the capitalist economy, and the financial crisis in particular, is inextricably entwined with gender relations. For Walby, ‘the gender regime and capitalism are mutually adaptive complex systems which shape each other’ (2015: 151).
Building upon her earlier Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (2009), Walby argues that complexity theorising transforms the notion of a system, ‘so that while retaining a focus on relationships and connections it is able to grasp sudden change as well as the more gradual coevolution of systems’ (2009: 50). This enables analyses of the complex relations that precipitate economic crises, as well as allowing for the conceptualisation of how multiple intersecting systems or ‘regimes’ of inequality such as gender, class and ethnicity interact with institutional domains such as economy. For Walby (2015: 46), recognising the complexity engendered by processes of ‘financialization’, which involve ‘intrinsically risky speculative investment in assets’, is crucial to explaining why neoliberal economic systems are subject to crises tendencies. She points to the failure of both neoliberal economic theory and conventional social scientific studies to adequately theorise finance as a social system.
Walby claims that in order to more adequately theorise both economic crises and the neoliberal market-based models of organisation behind them, we require the incorporation of a critical gendered lens. Notably, she argues that ‘finance is gendered in at least two aspects’: ‘the gendered consequences of finance, financialization and financial crisis’; and ‘the gendering of financial decision-making institutions in terms of their composition, projects and interests’ (Walby, 2015: 57). Her work provides ample evidence of the gendered consequences of the financial crisis, especially with regard to the harms disproportionately suffered by women associated with austerity policies and the shrinking of the welfare state in accordance with neoliberal doctrine. With regard to the gendering of financial institutions, however, Walby's analysis is less developed. She notes that ‘the decision-makers in finance are disproportionately male’, that this is ‘linked to poor and excessively risky decision-making as a consequence of both masculine culture and lack of diversity in group dynamics’ (2015: 58) and that such considerations also apply to many important state institutions – but she doesn't pursue a more detailed examination of this masculine culture or of its relationship to neoliberal economic regimes. Her work takes important steps towards utilising complexity theory to develop a gendered analysis of neoliberalism, but it mainly treats gender in terms of distributional outcomes for men and women, rather than in terms of how masculinities may serve to sustain neoliberal socio-economic systems. I suggest, then, that her perspective needs to be extended to incorporate a more explicit focus on the intersection of hegemonic masculinities and neoliberalism.
The work discussed in this section illustrates that complexity is increasingly the terrain upon which neoliberalism both operates and is contested today. Several themes have emerged that are important in developing an account of how masculinities are involved in the ongoing reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. In particular, it has been argued that neoliberalism often relies upon processes of simplification, reduction and restriction to produce security and order out of the complexity of life. I have suggested that hegemonic masculinities perform a similar function, thus positioning them as available resources for neoliberalism within complex socio-economic systems. The next section extends this analysis by linking it more directly to feminist theory via discussion of the work of Judith Butler and Bonnie Mann. Both offer further resources for theorising the relationship of masculinities to the self-organising complexity of the world.
Feminism, masculinity and vulnerability
Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004a) work on gender and sexuality has had a large influence on feminist and queer studies. As far as masculinity studies is concerned, however, her writings have not been as widely taken up. This is perhaps, in part, due to a reluctance by many influential scholars in the field to engage with poststructuralist theories (Beasley, 2015), although this trend should not be overemphasised (Gottzén, 2018). It is also the case that Butler herself does not devote much attention to theorising the situation of men or to developing a theory of masculinity. Here, however, I want to propose that it is by turning to Butler's writings that do not focus explicitly on gender that we may extract an implicit theory of hegemonic masculinities in relation to the complexity of life. While this appears paradoxical at first, it makes sense when we consider that masculinities are most often invisible because they are embedded within Western norms of the human.
In Undoing Gender (2004a), Butler refines her theorising on gender to focus more upon the materiality of bodies and how their vulnerability and precariousness implicates everyone in a primary sociality. She argues that gender and sexuality, rather than being individual possessions, are in fact ‘modes of being dispossessed’ (Butler, 2004a: 19, emphasis in the original) insofar as desire – for identity, or for an other – is always dependent on the recognition of others. We do not merely have relations with others, but also only emerge as actors out of those very relations. Gender and sexuality involve our corporeal life, but always simultaneously take us beyond ourselves. As Butler puts it, ‘To say that the desire to persist in one's own being depends on norms of recognition is to say that the basis of one's autonomy, one's persistence as an “I” through time, depends fundamentally on a social norm that exceeds that “I”, that positions that “I” ec-statically, outside of itself in a world of complex and historically changing norms’ (2004a: 32).
I want to extend these thoughts in two ways. First, I wish to suggest that the desire for autonomy itself – and, especially, to be in control of oneself, of one's body – bears gendered dimensions, at least in Western cultures. Second, I want to build on Butler's reference to the complexity of the world in order to theorise this aspect of her thought more explicitly.
Upon close examination of the account of ethical and political life that Butler develops in her work during the 2000s, we find that the complexity of the entanglements of life emerges as an underlying theme to her thought. In the essay ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, for example, she analyses the linkage between life itself and an ineluctable condition of vulnerability that evokes complexity through experiences of loss. Meditating on grief, Butler suggests that ‘it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility’ (2004b: 22). Similar to the way that many complexity theorists (and neoliberals like Hayek) emphasise that there is a structural limit to our knowledge of the world, Butler argues that the loss of a loved other exposes, in grief, how the very constitution of our selves is dependent on others in a way that undoes us. It is not simply that we lose part of ourselves, but that we realise that part of our selves was always already lost in the complexity of the ties that bind us to others prior to our emergence into the world.
Butler’s (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself presents a similar analysis of ethics that locates the subject's opacity to itself as the decisive factor in its relations to others. The ‘I’ is constitutively unable to narrate an account of its own emergence, and thus finds itself addressed and called into being by processes, norms and forces that it cannot fully know. The crucial question, however, is whether this condition of non-knowing is epistemological or ontological. Is it merely a limitation of the subject's ability to know? Or is it due to the complexity of the world itself, out of which the subject has emerged? Butler directs her attention primarily to the epistemological argument, drawing especially on psychoanalytic accounts of the production of the unconscious alongside the subject, but there are moments in her text that suggest a more ontological reading. Writing of the link between the limits of knowing and an ethical posture, Butler claims that ‘if the identity we say we are cannot possibly capture us and marks immediately an excess and opacity that falls outside the categories of identity, then any effort “to give an account of oneself” will have to fail in order to approach being true’ (2005: 42). Here, where ‘opacity’ points to the epistemological limits of the subject, ‘excess’ gestures towards an ontological over-fullness of the world – a complex web of relations that cannot ever be fully grasped.
Butler herself approaches ontological issues more explicitly in Frames of War (2009). In particular, she takes up questions related to affect and the ways in which life itself always exceeds its normative framings. Butler theorises a generalised condition of precariousness as implying an irreducible sociality and dependence on others ‘that calls into question the ontology of individualism’ (2009: 33). Prior to the individual subject, this condition is first apprehended affectively in the body, as it reacts to the world in which it finds itself. Thus, ‘who “I” am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others’ (Butler, 2009: 44). For Butler, affective responses, although never unmediated themselves, can form the basis of the critique of dominant frames of representation. The question is – what prevents them from serving this purpose? What channels affects away from generating recognition of the complexity of our entanglements with others? In the context of war, Butler claims that ‘the US subject seeks to produce itself as impermeable, to define itself as protected permanently against incursion and as radically invulnerable to attack’ (2009: 47). Although she does not state it explicitly, this ‘invulnerable’ subject is normatively a masculine one.
The gender of this subject explicitly appears in some of Butler's more recent work, where she has begun to frame her ethical and political enquiries in relation to neoliberalism. She sets out to ‘reverse and renew’ the meaning of individual ‘responsibility’, noting that neoliberals paradoxically define the concept in terms of becoming ‘economically self-sufficient under conditions that undermine all prospects of self-sufficiency’ (Butler, 2015: 14). Precarity is a constant threat, although it may not affect everyone equally. Here, Butler, in one of her rare statements about masculinity, cites psychoanalytic feminist insights in noting that ‘the masculine position … is effectively built through a denial of its constitutive vulnerability’ (2015: 145). She adds, however, that vulnerability is ultimately undeniable, and thus the posture of invulnerability is always haunted by its potential exposure and discrediting. Following this line of argument, masculinity appears both as a barrier to overcoming the destructive consequences of neoliberal responsibilisation and as an illusory guarantor of individual security.
The processes via which imagined, invulnerable masculine subjects are produced are made clearer in Mann’s (2014) Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror. Mann's analysis draws inspiration from Butler's conception of the ‘sovereign subject’ and advances the claim that ‘“national manhood” and “national sovereignty” point to the same phenomenon’ (2014: 3–4). Mann's account of sovereign masculinity owes much to Butler's thought, although she draws most extensively on Simone de Beauvoir. In particular, Mann follows Beauvoir in conceptualising ‘the operational structure of sovereign masculinity as justification’ (2014: 22). As both an imaginary formation and a justificatory operation, sovereign masculinity divides the world according to sexual difference and works to reproduce the concomitant relations of subordination and exploitation as though they were a necessary feature of the world. Although she does not engage with literature in critical masculinity studies in any depth, Mann's concept of sovereign masculinity can be understood as a type of hegemonic masculinity that attracts and informs the performances of other masculinities. Like Connell’s (1995) formulation of hegemonic masculinity, the effect of sovereign masculinity is to sustain men's dominance over women. Beyond relations of power, however, Mann highlights the extent to which sovereign masculinity provides self-justification, recognition and security to subjects that seek shelter within its imaginary domain.
Where Butler emphasises a general condition of vulnerability and precariousness, Mann argues that sovereign masculinity is generated by ‘a conversion from vulnerability to sovereignty’ (2014: 44, emphasis in the original). Its purpose is to dispel uncertainty and doubt about the world, and to displace shame at one's vulnerability to others. For Mann, ‘shame always accompanies sovereign masculinity because it plays a central part in its production’ (2014: 109). Shame derives from a fundamental condition of intersubjective dependency that is constructed as being incompatible with masculinity; hence, ‘shame converts to rage, hostility, contempt, aggression’ (Mann, 2014: 116). It is precisely this mechanism that makes sovereign masculinity a potent force for the propagation of nationalism, militarism and war. I would add that a similar conversion can be theorised in relation to neoliberalism. As Lorey (2015) has argued (also drawing on Butler), neoliberal governing is premised upon the generation of perpetual insecurities that it simultaneously promises to ameliorate. Hegemonic forms of masculinity promise a subject position where the ‘shame’ that is associated with insecurity and uncertainty is converted into modes of domination and control. Thus, masculinities that are drawn towards these hegemonic models may serve as vehicles through which neoliberalism is both enabled and suffered by masculine subjects.
Like Butler, Mann (2014: 70–71) points to the importance of affective responses, and to the way that gender is lived in the body, in accounting for the conversion of shame to power. Sovereign masculinity has a crucial aesthetic dimension – a gendered mode of embodied perception and interpretation of the world that is prior to the employment of deliberative reason. In experiences of shame, the body's very nature can be non-consciously activated in the service of dominant social systems. In highlighting this affective dimension of bodily perception, Mann seeks to move beyond merely discursive and social constructionist accounts of bodies. Her work evokes a complex socio-natural ecosystem in which human subjects find themselves, and with which they must contend, although she doesn't fully develop the implications of this insight. Nevertheless, Mann's theory of sovereign masculinity provides a model for understanding how hegemonic masculinities align with dominant systems of power in a world characterised by pervasive uncertainty. As such, it has much to offer a feminist critique of neoliberalism.
Securing neoliberalism
In the work of both Butler and Mann, we see how hegemonic (invulnerable, sovereign) masculinities inform and shape the generation of gendered orders under conditions marked by precarity, vulnerability and complexity. We can observe this same dynamic at work in the lives of men who struggle in the lower rungs of neoliberal societies. In The Tumbleweed Society, Pugh (2015) highlights some of the experiences of such men living in what she refers to as the ‘insecurity culture’ that neoliberalism has produced. Although her book is mainly focused on the effects of job insecurity on women, Pugh devotes a chapter to examining how working-class men cope with the loss of employment. Her analysis pivots on the concept of duty, which plays out in two main ways – the duty that men feel their intimate partners owe to them, and the sense of duty that they affirm for themselves, not just at work, but also in their family lives, especially with regard to their responsibilities to their children. As she sums up this dynamic, each of these men ‘clings to the notion of duty in the home as if it will fend off the insecurity that prevails in the workplace’ (Pugh, 2015: 9).
The workplace is often a key site in which men stake a claim to masculinity. Aside from financial compensation and the ability to provide for one's family, work potentially offers status, the capacity to exercise power, and the ability to establish control over a domain of activity. However, for working-class men in insecure and poorly paid occupations, the neoliberal economy offers few opportunities to realise this desired state of masculinity. Accordingly, as the men in Pugh's study demonstrate, the home becomes a more important site for the assertion of masculinity. The submerged anger that they feel at being unable to achieve in their work lives is displaced onto their intimate partners, whom they hold to high standards of commitment and duty as per longstanding gendered divisions of labour. As Pugh describes it, ‘at work … notions of his own duty and how he has fallen short exact a powerful penance in the form of shame and grief. With intimate partners, however, he attends closely to the duty of others, specifically women’ (2015: 91). And when women fail to live up to these high standards, ‘traditional masculine notions of duty can lead to the disillusion, anger, and outrage that make intimate connections fraught’ (Pugh, 2015: 93). Here, we can observe the same pattern that Mann details when describing the conversion of shame into rage, hostility and contempt. Denied recognition as men and justification of superiority in the workplace, these men seek to combat the insecurity of neoliberal existence through the assertion of masculinity in their personal lives.
The other side of this process of displacement from work to family life concerns men's relationships with their children. Pugh demonstrates that some men respond to economic insecurity by redefining duty in terms of supporting and being there for their children. However, in doing so, they must frequently ‘battle against prevailing notions of optional fatherhood’ (Pugh, 2015: 98). These men reject the idea that their commitment is a choice. For Pugh, this shift represents a distancing from a conception of masculinity rooted in ‘fixed notions of duty that govern men's sense of an honourable self’ (2015: 105). She argues that such men can be understood as ‘gender innovators’ who are engaged in a process of ‘undoing gender’ (Pugh, 2015: 107). Yet, in terms of the theoretical framework I have proposed above, this is not all that is occurring here. By maintaining an emphasis on duty, these men respond to the complexity of life in a way that evokes a hegemonic form of masculinity, even as they are unable to realise it. Duty becomes a technology of masculinity insofar as it is directed to the reduction or denial of complexity. This can be sensed in the way that Pugh defines duty as ‘a kind of high-beam spotlight, bleaching out the gray areas, intensifying the darks and lights’; duty ‘suggests a set of known tasks – and people’ (2015: 89). As a conceptual mechanism for the simplification of life, duty for these men seems to be a way to reassert a claim to a masculine subject position that is grounded in certainty, despite the insecurity of the world around him. Moreover, as Pugh notes at the end of her discussion, ‘notions of duty, with their keen sense of accountability devolving to the individual, fit right into the calls for the neoliberal privatization of risk and responsibility’ (2015: 108). As a technology of masculinity, duty reduces complexity and thereby facilitates the unquestioned reproduction of neoliberalism.
This relation of masculinity to complexity can also be seen in a different kind of example. Salzinger’s (2016, 2019) studies of transnational capitalist finance in Mexico and the United States are helpful in demonstrating how masculinities serve to sustain neoliberal globalisation. In a case study of transnational currency traders, she highlights how concepts of ‘risk’ are entwined with the gendered dynamics through which neoliberal economic markets are managed. For Salzinger, ‘masculinity acts as both finance's legitimating terrain and as a discourse that interpellates its working subjects’ (2016: 15). In contrast to the neutral, disembodied discourses of homo economicus to be found in neoliberal theory, she observes that, ‘in an actual financial market, no one thinks economic man is gender neutral’ (Salzinger, 2019: 204). In particular, masculinities are linked to the practices of ‘risk-taking’ that are central to the functioning of financial markets. Salzinger notes that almost all of the traders that work in these markets are men and that discourses of masculinity – ‘Do it! Be a man!’ – are commonly invoked to fuel risky trading positions and serve as ‘an incitement to the fundamental speed, decisiveness, and ruthlessness necessary to trade and to handle the consequences’ (2015: 16–17). Risk is the concept that most directly links the working-class men discussed above, who suffer from precarious employment, to these currency traders, who are in a comparatively privileged position. Both confront the fundamental uncertainty that is generated by neoliberalism's reliance on the competitive workings of markets as the privileged way of managing the complexity of socio-economic systems. Although currency traders are more comfortable materially, they still face insecurity, as both their reputations as ‘men’ and their livelihoods are dependent to a large degree on the workings of deregulated financial markets that are ultimately out of their control.
Salzinger examines the conflicts that Mexican traders experience in currency markets, noting that ‘speculating against one's homeland in turbulent moments … is a psychologically complex task’ (2019: 201). Here, masculine prohibitions against the acknowledgement of emotions assist in the management of such complexity. By inhabiting the masculine position of the disembodied and disembedded rational decision-maker, these men allow financial markets to operate in a way that appears to conform to neoliberal theory (even if, in practice, the reality is never quite as smooth). As such, masculinity functions both as a factor in the ongoing reproduction of neoliberal subjects and economic systems, and as a means of managing the uncertainties of dealing with global financial markets. It does so by effectively blocking full awareness of the complexity of the entanglements of global finance in people's lives. By minimising social responsibility and connectedness, it allows these men to take actions that perpetuate the inequalities built into the socio-economic systems in which they operate.
Ultimately, I suggest that it is the market mechanism itself that becomes the bearer of an idealised hegemonic masculinity, which serves to reduce the ethical and political consequences of global capitalism to a narrow set of economic considerations. Salzinger claims that ‘the market itself reads as the realm of the ultimate, unmarked masculine, as the autonomous miracle of abstract rationality, emerging intact but separate from the hurly-burly of the marketplace itself’ (2016: 21). The traders, as Salzinger emphasises, cannot fully inhabit this idealised position, for they are subject to very human emotions that are not always kept under control. Nevertheless, they employ technologies of masculinity that seek to assert their power and control over other actors in the market. They are drawn towards a position in which the forces of the market have been brought under their control. Importantly, the market is more than simply the human actors that compose it. As Salzinger notes, the market is ‘understood as beyond human access’ (2016: 19). In other words, there is an emergent dimension to self-organising markets that is crucial to their complexity, and which defines their ‘nature’. More specifically, competition defines the nature of neoliberal markets, and masculinities function as technologies that work towards reducing the complexity of socio-economic systems so that competitive economic forces may maintain a privileged place in neoliberal societies.
In the wake of the financial crisis of the late 2000s, many commentators argued that neoliberal theory had been fatally exposed as an inadequate vehicle to guarantee the survival of capitalism. Yet, the obituary for neoliberalism may prove premature – in part because other interacting systems such as gender continue to stabilise it. This article has argued that coming to terms with the articulation of market-based neoliberal modes of governance and hegemonic forms of masculinity requires theorising the complex relations at play across the natural, social and cultural dimensions of life. Above, we have seen how Connolly, Massumi and Walby all link neoliberal hegemony to practices that confine and attempt to limit economic relations with the complexity of the world. Butler and Mann, on the other hand, both attribute importance to the ways in which the complexity of life is embodied in the affective responses of the denizens of neoliberal worlds. We can perhaps discern a certain convergence here that calls for further thought. Whether it is a desire for experimentation with complexity, or receptivity to complexity, whether it is a wish to move beyond restricted complexity and to utilise the self-organising powers of ecosystems or whether it is an ethical project premised on recognising the complexity of our affective sociality with others, a common problem – whether stated explicitly or left implicit – is masculinity and the way that its hegemonic forms extend beyond human social relations and produce a set of technologies that attempt to exert control over life itself. In the context of social and economic insecurities, hegemonic masculinities are generated through the negation of the full complexity of life, thus allowing neoliberalism to exploit a restricted sense of complexity via market-based modes of organisation. Neoliberal theory promises to endow freedom upon sovereign subjects, but as an economic system it simultaneously generates insecurity. Hence, masculinities appear as a resource for neoliberalism insofar as they serve to ameliorate the ongoing tensions, complexities and insecurities generated by market-based economic modes of organising life.
This is not to suggest that all men inhabit the same psychic and social spaces, as intersectional theory makes clear; yet, insofar as they are drawn towards hegemonic masculine attractors within Western socio-economic systems, their reactions to vulnerability, precariousness and insecurity tend to contribute to the maintenance of neoliberal modes of organisation that enact a specific relation to complexity. For such men, masculinity serves as a technology that functions to order and secure their relations to others, and to the natural or nonhuman elements of the ecosystems in which they find themselves. Nowotny (2005) has noted that technologies are often deployed in attempts to reduce complexity; the modern Western, binary system of gender can be understood as one such technology. Just as the market mechanism is feted as guarantor of neoliberal order, masculinities are esteemed insofar as they hold out the promise of control in a complex world. Of course, not all men benefit from neoliberal capitalist regimes. Indeed, there is significant evidence that the articulation of neoliberalism and masculinities works out badly for many men around the world (Cornwall et al., 2016). The neoliberal emphasis on the entrepreneurial self in concert with the unevenness of global economic change and opportunity means that men (especially poor, working-class men and men of colour) face economic realities that leave them struggling to realise hegemonic masculine ideals that run counter to their actual material conditions of existence. Yet, this is only one aspect of the gender relations at play here.
Finally, in advancing a critique of the relationship between masculinities, complexity and neoliberalism, I do not mean to imply that complexity is necessarily always a good thing in itself. Nor do I intend to suggest that recognition of the complexity of the systems in which we find ourselves should be a reason to absolve actors of responsibility for outcomes or to embrace mere passivity or inaction in the face of the limits of knowledge. Rather, my intention is to extend the critique of neoliberalism by examining how it articulates with other systems of power relations such as gender, to develop a critique of how masculinity may be a factor in the perpetuation of the inequalities characteristic of neoliberal economic systems, and to consider whether there are sites or moments in which the trajectory of the coevolution of these complex systems might be altered. Important recent work in feminist theory has highlighted the ways in which neoliberalism relies upon gender (Repo, 2016), family values (Cooper, 2017) and even feminism itself (Rottenberg, 2018). It may also depend on hegemonic masculinities to sustain itself.
