This article draws selectively on three cases of young heterosexual fathers to highlight nuances, complexities, and tensions that could complicate understandings of “caring masculinities” and contribute to the debate concerning caring masculinities, hegemony and domination. It suggests that there is a need to consider forms of domination beyond gender and notes that masculinities are dynamic and may therefore be enacted in different ways as men move across contexts. Considering these issues, as well as the discrepancies that may characterize men’s caring practices and discursive formations, can reveal inconsistencies that may challenge current understandings of caring masculinities as antithetical to hegemonic masculinity. To theoretically frame these tensions, the article brings caring masculinities and “hybrid masculinities” into critical dialogue.
Research shows how sexualized violence is moving online and becoming digitalized; however, little is known about the relationship between the manosphere and sexualized violence. This paper aims to explore how content with and about sexualized violence manifests in the Danish manosphere and advance our understanding of conditions conducive to this. Based on a (n)etnographic study in the Danish manosphere, the paper shows that content with and about sexualized violence is present in two ways: Firstly, in leak communities, where sharing sexual imagery of women without consent seems governed by a feeling rule of misogyny. Secondly, in men’s rights communities where critique of #MeToo and the consent-based rape law seems governed by a feeling rule of himpathy. With the concept cathartic shaming the paper suggests how distinct communities may share the use of ridicule and condemnation of women to reduce feelings of humiliation, shame, injustice and unfairness rooted in social expectations about hegemonic, heterosexual masculinity.
Community dads’ groups offer a novel environment to observe fathering interactions and practices. Our analysis of observations at these settings alongside semi-structured interviews focuses on the symbolic and social interactions between fathers, the caregiving practices they engaged in with their children and how these interactions influenced their identities. At six dads’ groups we observed several deliberate strategies of social avoidance with other fathers, as well as moments of ‘banter’. Interviews reveal the symbolic meanings of these encounters, indicating that dads’ group spaces, while mostly devoid of ‘chattiness’, nonetheless offer opportunities for fathers to observe the caring practices of others, to learn and modify behaviours in response, and to offer fleeting, gestural support. Our findings contribute insights into the social dynamics within male homosocial settings, demonstrating subtle forms of interaction between men which are important aspects of constructing a fathering identity. Community dads’ groups may help men feel confident in attending structured parenting classes.
This review essay reads Xiaodong Lin’s (2013) and Sarah Gosper’s (2025) studies of rural-origin men in urban China to explain why mobility often raises income without securing masculine recognition. Lin shows how migrant men pursue recognition through modernity-framed practices of work and filial provision, while Gosper demonstrates that marriageability has emerged as a tighter and more exclusionary site of masculine certification amid labour precarity. Together, the books reveal a shift from modernity-based judgments of manhood to intimate and marital criteria that increasingly mediate recognition. Conceptualising recognition as a socially negotiated verdict, the essay proposes cross-field capital convertibility as a lens for understanding why mobility-generated resources carry uneven value across family, work, and intimate arenas.
In recent years, male-oriented financial advice podcasts have gained significant popularity in the wider manosphere ecosystem, an online community promoting male supremacist and anti-feminist views. Along with other influencer-led advice on fitness and mental health, this content purports to guarantee men ‘high status’, while endorsing harmful masculinist norms. This study applies critical narrative analysis to a total of nine podcast videos (3 per channel) from three popular, male-oriented ‘finfluencer’ podcast channels on YouTube: CeoCast, the Ahmed Mahmood Show, and First Things THRST. We ask how these podcasts, which are hosted by and regularly feature manosphere-friendly digital entrepreneurs, contribute to the narrative construction of new (hyper) masculinities defined by wealth. In addition to mapping significant changes within the neo-manosphere, this paper concludes that finfluencers - alongside tech oligarchs and strongman politicians - are engaging in a struggle for hegemony by positioning ostensibly anti-establishment, reactionary masculinities as an alternative to the more ‘respectable’ masculinities of transnational corporate capitalism.
This article shows how we can use the sociology of emotions approach in combination with theories of masculinity and opportunity structures to explain the development of Czech fathers’ rights organizations and why they originally tended to be aggressive and engage in sometimes violent protest actions rather than act like professionalized NGOs. While much has been written about post-communist women’s movements, much less has been written about post-communist men’s groups. Having inherited a conservative legal system, joint custody arrangements were rarely granted until recently, making the opportunity structures rather closed to the conservative men. In addition, their pre-modern extremely conservative and anti-feminist views made it impossible to cooperate with women’s groups and also made it difficult to get public or EU funding. These activists were mostly middle-class professionals, who supported “traditional” family values. Following theories of the sociology of emotions, we argue that when getting divorced, the conservative fathers lost their role as the head of the household along with their homes and custody rights, which led to a loss of status and an increasingly marginalized masculinity. This, in turn, filled them with anger and resentiment, thus inducing them to engage in confrontational activities. When the system began opening up and shared custody became more common, the activists became more professionalized, less confrontational and focusing on opposing general liberal gender values.
This article examines how men negotiate the moral meanings of gender (in)equality in high-tech organizations that publicly promote gender equality while reproducing persistent inequality regimes. Based on 35 in-depth interviews, the analysis conceptualizes their accounts as contested hybrid moral repertoires: morally charged and contested ways of making sense of gender (in)equality in ostensibly egalitarian organizations. Three intertwined dynamics emerged. First, men challenge gender hierarchy by supporting gender equality and recognition of women’s exclusion. Second, they reinforce hierarchy through tensions between political correctness and authenticity, framing restraint as a burden and spontaneity as sincerity. Third, they preserve privilege through discourses of unfairness, reverse discrimination, and lost power. Drawing on the cultural sociology of morality, the article extends scholarship on hybrid masculinities by foregrounding moral sense-making and contributes to the sociology of gender and organizations by showing how moral evaluations and claims to legitimacy become mechanisms through which gender inequality is reproduced.
There has been a growing body of research on feminine men in China, particularly in relation to the state’s critical stance, but few studies have examined discourses on male makeup. Drawing on the theoretical framework of hybrid masculinity, this paper analyzes articles on male makeup from two Chinese men’s lifestyle magazines published from the late 2000s to 2023. These articles construct male makeup discourse in three ways circumventing the state’s negative views on and potential stigmatization of feminine men: (1) avoiding femininity by separating male makeup from female makeup or by emphasizing heterosexuality; (2) positioning male makeup as a gender-neutral practice; and (3) seeking justification from pre-modern Chinese male makeup practices to show that male makeup is an acceptable practice even today. Through this analysis, this paper argues that Chinese male makeup discourses construct the concept of femininity, which has been closely associated with women’s beautification practices, as seemingly fluid while still supporting gender hierarchy, thereby reaffirming the limitations of hybrid masculinity.
This research examines how white, cisgender, and straight men negotiate masculinity in inclusive nightlife. Drawing on fourteen semi-structured interviews with inclusive nightlife visitors in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), we identified two distinct strategies of how the participants performed a hybrid masculinity while navigating an inclusive environment: 1. Translational masculinity (translating subordinate masculine practices), and 2. Inconspicuous masculinity (toning down hegemonic masculine practices). These strategies emerge in a paradoxical inclusive space: a space that allows for different and inclusive forms of masculinity but simultaneously feels exclusionary for white, cisgender, straight men because of their hegemonic position. The participants negotiated their power position and legitimate unequal gender relations by co-opting feminist discourse while positioning themselves opposite of LGBTQ+ people and women and as belonging less in inclusive nightlife. The distinction between the two strategies allows future studies to better identify different, and possibly previously missed, practices of hybrid masculinity.
Informed by extensive fieldwork within Hawzas in Lebanon - traditional Shia institution training scholars and Imams - this paper thinks alongside three feminine queer Muslim cis men within this Islamic space. Focusing on the body, emotionality, and sexuality, the analysis explores how they experience the Hawza legitimizing and enabling key aspects of their feminine queer dwelling. Crucially, they do not articulate this queer enablement and the entwined negotiation of hegemonic masculinities through Eurocentric modernity and liberal progressivism but through specific constructions of 'Islamic tradition'. By exploring these queer lives within Muslim-majority and 'traditional' Islamic spaces, the paper accordingly complicates homocolonialist discourses of a flat incommensurability between (any) Islam and queerness and positions queer Muslim lives as possible beyond Western-centric paradigms inviting the development of a project for a 'decolonial Muslim queer' to be (re)made.
In post-2020 Chinese film and TV dramas, a non-hegemonic masculinity has emerged and gained popularity, which this article theorizes as the Beta-male imaginary. Originating from the ABO fanfiction trope and transcreated within contemporary Chinese screen culture, Beta-male protagonists are characterized by lingering emotions, average social positioning, and a retreat from hyper-competition. Alongside the viral meme wonangfei (hapless loser)—a pejorative resignified after 2023—they crystallize into a shared cultural shorthand for urban precarity and tacit resistance to Alpha hegemony and social Darwinism. Combining content analysis with platform-based reception studies, this article frames the rise of wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries as affective, ambivalent reconfigurations of male “softness” and “impotence” that unfold amid China’s post-2020 socioeconomic downturns. Through case studies of two actors, Guo Jingfei and Bai Ke—both frequently cast as wonangfei characters and rescripted by audiences as “Betas Going Mad” and “Betas with Husband Vibes” respectively—the article demonstrates how female-oriented consumer culture and the platformized circulation of affect sustain these non-hegemonic masculinities. Such portrayals offer audiences both emotional catharsis and social critique, channeling collective precarity, querying hegemonic norms, and renegotiating gender dynamics across public and domestic spheres. Yet these imaginaries remain ambivalent—unsettling patriarchal emotion-regimes while at times over-romanticizing precarity and softly reproducing inequality.
Life coaches claim to offer men pathways to "authentic" masculinity through self-development. Despite their growing popularity, scholars have paid little attention to how these coaches negotiate and perform masculinity. In addressing this gap, we examine how male-oriented life coaches understand, construct, and perform masculinity-both online and offline. Drawing on a hybrid ethnographic approach-analyzing Instagram content from 15 life coaches and field observations from three men's circles-we unveil how life coaches promote a dominant vision of masculinity that appears to challenge restrictive norms-for instance by encouraging emotional expression-yet consistently reframes such practices within defensive narratives that reinforce hegemonic ideals of masculinity. The findings show how life coaching functions as a site of negotiation, where gendered anxieties are addressed through commercially mediated forms of masculine belonging, reproducing normative gender hierarchies under the guise of self-improvement.
Despite the burgeoning research on the manosphere, there is little linguistic work on 'manfluencers'. To fill this gap, this study examines how Andrew Tate uses his X account to disseminate harmful ideologies that discursively frame masculinity in toxic terms. Our analysis identifies three main discourses of Tate: male supremacist discourse, homophobic discourse, and sexist, misogynistic discourse. Our analysis also illustrates that Tate reifies these discourses by employing linguistic processes such as categorisation, polarisation, lexicalisation, fallacies, positive self-presentation, and negative other-presentation. This study not only exposes and resists Tate's harmful ideologies, but also contends that academics must adopt an activist-scholar posture to promote gender equality, champion social justice (for women), and advocate for positive social change. It furthermore submits that 'manfluencers' like Andrew Tate must be condemned, and social media owners like Elon Musk must take responsibility by banning him on X. Such action is necessary as part of efforts to dismantle harmful gender norms, counter the mainstreaming of extremist ideologies, and safeguard children/young people against radicalisation online in the age of social media.
Much theoretical development within critical masculinities studies is spurred by a disagreement over whether to take the individual or the structural as starting point of scholarly analysis. Rather than settling the debate, this article dives into an unusual terrain, namely legal theory, and more specifically, property theory, to offer a conceptual framework or metaphor that allows us to think, name and visualize how individual men can profit from, perpetuate and resist the structural subordination of women, which benefits them as a group. Bringing together earlier scholarship on property, identity and inequality, I argue that masculinity, understood as a reified social relationship of power, could be viewed to function as a resource or asset which its "owners" can use or mobilize to relate with others and benefit from belonging to the group of men. Conceptualizing masculinity as property not only sheds new light on a theoretical debate within critical masculinities studies but offers scholars and activists a helpful new way to talk about, visualize and understand instances in which structural male privilege works to the benefit of individuals.
Fat sex is a prohibitive topic; media and scholarship render a paradoxical image of fat sexuality as either extreme impotence or insatiable sexual appetite. Previous literature on fat sex highlights women’s experiences with violence and fetishization yet little research on fat men’s lived sexual experiences is available. Conducting 19 phenomenological interviews, narratives illustrate hybridization techniques participants use to distance themselves from feminine readings of their bodies. To work around their seeming undesirability, respondents adopted hyper-masculine idealized traits, evidenced by themes of compensatory manhood acts, strategic dress, downplayed eroticism, seeking sex online, abstinence, and critiques of the Bear community. Findings suggest that participants rely on hybridized, fluid masculinities and symbolic separation from effeminate gendered performances to experience sexual agency and engage with phallocentric discourse as fat men.
