This article theorises masculinities as affective performances, which are shaped through the emotional labour of male academics. We explore how seemingly homogeneous masculinities fracture within Turkish academia, a numerically feminising yet male-dominated field shaped by neoliberal structuring and political polarisation. Drawing on 53 interviews with male academics and nine focus groups with 54 university students across four major Turkish cities, we show how male academics manage emotions in professional interactions, often performing emotional labour they neither name nor recognise. While many rely on norms of autonomy, control and emotional detachment, expressions of empathy, reflexivity and openness emerge, particularly among precarious or non-traditional men. We investigate diverse forms of emotional labour that either reproduce power relations (orthodox) or subvert them (heterodox) along three axes: emotional detachment versus connection; gender neutrality versus gender awareness; and vertical versus horizontal social relations. Academia is an affective field where control, vulnerability, reflexivity and detachment are mobilised as situated strategies in response to boundary violations, institutional precarity and the expectations of care work associated with feminised professions. Our contribution lies in identifying the concrete mechanisms through which emotional labour reproduces masculine authority under conditions of neoliberal metrics, authoritarian political pressure and patriarchal tradition and in developing orthodox and heterodox emotional orientations along three axes as an analytical framework grounded in these data.
This article analyzes the gendered politics of emotions of young Israeli women and men regarding urination and defecation in public toilets and other lavatories outside the home. Highlighting the impact of gender, we interviewed 20 middle-class, heterosexual Jewish Israelis of European ancestry about their toilet habits. Our analysis focuses on three recurring emotions—disgust, embarrassment, and shame—that emerged prominently from participants’ accounts and had clear gendered implications. Primarily, all respondents emphasized the importance of toilet cleanliness, describing excretion as a source of disgust. Second, they stressed the importance of privacy and anonymity, describing varying levels of embarrassment when fearing that they might be identified or when they were identified by others. Third, they discussed the painful social and personal consequences of violating accepted norms of toilet use, which evoke feelings of shame. Although female and male interviewees shared similar concerns, clear gender disparities emerged. Men and women diverged in what they considered socially and politically tolerable and legitimate levels of filth, social exposure, and defiance of social rules regarding urination and defecation. Moreover, while participants largely reproduced established emotional and behavioral norms, several (especially women) voiced moments of self-reflection that exposed the internalized nature of these expectations. Their accounts suggest that toilet habits operate as subtle forms of social regulation, occasionally prompting individuals to reassess or negotiate their own compliance.
This article is a retrospective examination and contemporary interrogation of emotions in a UK-based, long-term, profeminist collective memory work (CMW) older men’s group, of which the authors were members. The group met all day twice a year during 2002–15 and subsequently produced the book Men’s Stories for a Change of written memories and analytical commentaries. The article asks the following: what do these experiences and analyses of older profeminist men’s CMW reveal about men, masculinities and emotions? This question is addressed in terms of both the immediate case study and older men and emotions more broadly. The methodology employed derives from the CMW group, with its own interrogative methods, complemented by subsequent qualitative, quantitative and textual analysis, as well as co-autoethnography. In this process, the prime aim became the multifaceted analysis of and reflection on men’s (relations to) emotions in CMW, recognising interconnections and overlaps between personal, empirical, political and theoretical facets. In the written memories, the most prevalent clusters of emotions were the following: anger, fear and humiliation; loss, sadness and shame; love and pleasure; and acceptance. In the process of the group and in doing profeminist collective emotion politics, several emotional ambivalences and tensions were noted between collective emotion work and work on collective emotions, supporting feminism and critically nurturing each other, emotional expressiveness and emotional restraint, and profeminist activism and bodily ageing. Emotions were aged, though not in a given deterministic way, and were gendered, referencing feminist and gender awareness, though not only that. The importance of situating older men’s emotions in time and place is emphasised.
