Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities

With a world that appears to be on an uncertain precipice, with wars and conflict occurring across the globe, increasing threats of environmental damage, and unparalleled political transformations, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that discussions of bodies, masculinities and sexualities are merely a distraction to what is “really going on” in the world. This appeal to a “real” world, in opposition to a world of academia sets up a series of juxtapositions, where in the real world, you need practical knowledge and skills that can address immediate needs, solve problems, and have tangible results. The academic world, in this pole, in contrast, is a world of disconnected abstract theorizing that has little relevance to everyday challenges. Placed in the context of growing right-wing sentiment in Europe and the United States, it is possible to see how an attachment to the “real”, the “everyday”, and the “ordinary”, feel so persuasive. It is through the seemingly emptied meaning of the “ordinary” where such terms gain their power to produce interpretation. Ernesto Laclau (2000) uses the notion of the “empty signifier” to capture the ways that “the people” in political discourse are empty, being filled with strategic meanings that warrant a political perspective or action. As such, “various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack’ (idem: 412). Perhaps it is the emptiness, or the ways that emptiness is “discoursed”, that helps us to grasp the nature of the shifts that are taking place and what that means for bodies, masculinities, and sexualities. This “perhaps” is imbricated with the clause of recognition of causal results or actions; or, differently, is the place where the supposed “unreal” world of academia meets and offers more than simply greetings to the supposed “real” world that, somehow, finds academia excised from it.

Onni Suomi, one of the most promising young wrestlers in Finland, is pictured training for 2022 Finnish Championships in a private gym in Paimio, Finland.

The increasing incidence of platonic hugging and kissing among men has sparked considerable debate in scholarly literature, particularly surrounding Eric Anderson's articulation of inclusive masculinity theory (IMT). Aiming to move productively beyond Anderson's critics, we propose a feminist poststructuralist reframing of IMT that emphasizes the discursive dynamics underpinning men's uptake of “feminized” practices. Drawing on data from interviews with 14 pairs of fathers and sons living in Australia, we conceptualize their increasing engagement in platonic physical intimacy with other men as an assertion of queer-inclusion discourse and contestation of masculinist discourse that is neither linear nor necessarily consistent. Ultimately, we argue this approach allows scholars to retain some of Anderson's key theoretical contentions, while better accounting for change, continuity, and contradiction in men's gender practice.

In this article, we explore how ten men who took part in naked photoshoots for charitable purposes make sense of their embodiment as men. Through semi-structured interviews, we look at how participation in such a novel experience of nudity with other men underpins transformations of masculine conventions as well as some of the tensions present in these men's accounts of the events. We highlight three significant discourses that exemplify these patterns: Nudity as Enabler of Intimacy; Surveillance and Insecurities; Producing the Natural Body. Our findings showcase the important ways that men can and do engage critically with masculinity while at the same time exploring some of the ambivalent ways that these challenges can manifest.

This article explores the early queer history of the Mexico City Metro (from its planning stages in the late 1960s—and especially the subway's embeddedness in the political and sexual repression emblematized by the student massacres of 1968 and 1971—through its first decade of operation). Drawing evidence from a variety of sources—literary works, essays and chronicles, newspaper accounts, and popular music, as well as from biographies of the planners of the Metro—the article argues that, from its inception, the Metro was understood by the state and by sexual-political dissidents as a mechanism for political and sexual control. But as the Metro more efficiently connected upper-class neighborhoods with of barrios populares, the Metro gradually became a zone of queer rebellion.

Despite growing criticism from human rights scholars and international medical experts, non-therapeutic penile circumcision of newborns in the United States continues to be widely accepted among American healthcare practitioners. While a wealth of literature exists on the topic, it can leave out cultural depictions of the foreskin as aesthetically displeasing, unhygienic, or as extra skin, presumptions that normalize its physical and psychological erasure. Highlighting how a cultural attitude treats a healthy body part as worthy only of excision, I show how this vilification rationalizes the wide-scale performance of a practice that in any other context is seen as grossly unethical: the painful and unnecessary modification of the sexual anatomy of a non-consenting person. I also discuss how this rationalization enables profit-driven trafficking in infant sexual tissue.

Krishnan Nair, popularly known by his screen name Jayan, is often hailed as the first-ever “superstar” actor in Malayalam cinema. The metamorphosis of Jayan's cinematic stardom signifies the masculine prototype with which Indian film stars attain cultural dominance by aestheticizing their corporeal self. This article approaches the earlier superstardom in Malayalam cinema by deciphering the centrality of Jayan as a Superman-superstar figure. It argues that the heroic screen image, dialogue delivery, stylized stunts, and trendsetting costumes introduced by Jayan in the 1970s–1980s established a new reception of the masculine body that glorified the semiotics of the “Superman.” Using the spectator–spectacle discourse on superstardom, this article examines how different shades of superstardom, especially its posthumous restructuring and reproduction, affect the fate of superheroes in regional cinemas.

Tobi Evans, Reimagining Masculinity and Violence: Game of Thrones and a Song of Ice and Fire (Liverpool University Press, 2023), 240 pp. ISBN: 9781800855366. Hardback, $130.