Table Of ContentPOSTHUMANISM AND THE
MAN QUESTION
This book brings together the emerging insights of what posthumanism, new
materialism and afect theory mean for ‘the man question’. The contributors to
this book interrogate the question of how ‘Man’ as a gendered being is entangled
with nature, culture, materiality and corporeality, and they explore ways to unsettle
men’s sense of sovereignty to decentre anthropocentric masculinity.
Men have to move from the centre of privilege which grants them supremacy
before they can open themselves to the decentred, embodied, afective, vulnerable
and relational self that is necessary to embrace the posthuman. This book explores
the extent to which this is possible.
The book will be of interest to academics, students and scholars across a range
of disciplines who are engaging with the intersections of feminist studies with
posthumanism and new materialism, especially as they relate to critical studies
of men and masculinities. Chapters on fathering, pornography, ageing, afect,
embodiment, entanglements with technology and nature and the implications
of these issues for changing men and masculinities and the politics of critical
masculinity studies’ engagement with posthuman feminisms will interest students
and academics across these diverse disciplines.
Ulf Mellström is an anthropologist and Professor of Gender Studies at Karlstad
University, Sweden. He has published extensively within the areas of masculinity
studies, transport and mobility studies, gender and technology, gender, risk and
crisis management, engineering studies, globalisation and higher education and
South East Asian Studies with a particular focus on Malaysia. He is the founder
and editor-in-chief of one of the leading journals dedicated to studies of Men
and Masculinities – NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. His
recent book publications include (Forstorp and Mellström, 2018) Higher Education,
Globalisation and Eduscapes: Towards a Critical Anthropology of a Global Knowledge
Society and (Gottzén, Mellström and Shefer, 2020) Routledge International Handbook
of Masculinity Studies.
Bob Pease is Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences
at Deakin University and Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the
University of Tasmania. He has published extensively on masculinity politics and
critical social work practice, including fve books as single author and 15 books
as co-editor. His most recent books include Doing Critical Social Work (co-editor,
2016), Men, Masculinities and Disaster (co-editor, 2016), Radicals in Australian Social
Work (co-editor, 2017), Critical Ethics of Care in Social Work: Transforming the Politics
and Practices of Caring (co-editor, 2018), Facing Patriarchy: From a Violent Gender Order
to a Culture of Peace (2019) and Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman
and New Materialist Perspectives (co-editor, 2021).
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and
Intersectionality
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is commit-
ted to the development of new feminist and pro-feminist perspectives on changing
gender relations, with special attention to:
• Intersections between gender and power diferentials based on age, class, dis/
abilities, ethnicity, nationality, racialisation, sexuality, violence, and other social
divisions.
• Intersections of societal dimensions and processes of continuity and change:
culture, economy, generativity, polity, sexuality, science and technology;
• Embodiment: Intersections of discourse and materiality, and of sex and gender.
• Transdisciplinarity: intersections of humanities, social sciences, medical, tech-
nical and natural sciences.
• Intersections of diferent branches of feminist theorizing, including: his-
torical materialist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, radical
feminisms, sexual diference feminisms, queer feminisms, cyber feminisms,
post-human feminisms, critical studies on men and masculinities.
• A critical analysis of the travelling of ideas, theories and concepts.
• A politics of location, refexivity and transnational contextualising that refects
the basis of the Series framed within European diversity and transnational
power relations.
Core editorial group
Professor Jef Hearn (managing editor; Örebro University, Sweden; Hanken
School of Economics, Finland; University of Huddersfeld, UK)
Dr Kathy Davis (Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Professor Anna G. Jónasdóttir (Örebro University, Sweden)
Professor Nina Lykke (managing editor; Linköping University, Sweden)
Professor Elżbieta H. Oleksy (University of Łódź, Poland)
Dr Andrea Petö (Central European University, Hungary)
Professor Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London, UK)
Professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Syracuse University, USA)
Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands
Queering the Margins
Edited by Suzanne Clisby
Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality
Traveling Truths in Feminist Scholarship
Katrine Smiet
Subaltern Women’s Narratives
Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies
Edited by Samraghni Bonnerjee
Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues
Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice
Edited by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert
Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19
Displacements and Disruptions
Edited by Melanie Heath, Akosua K. Darkwah, Josephine Beoku-Betts and Bandana
Purkayastha
Narrating Intersectional Perspectives Across Social Scales
Voicing Valerie
Viola Thimm
Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities
A Transnational Feminist Engagement
Tamara Shefer and Jef Hearn
Posthumanism and the Man Question
Beyond Anthropocentric Masculinities
Edited by Ulf Mellström and Bob Pease
For more information about the series, please visit www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Advances-in-Feminist-Studies-and-Intersectionality/book-series/
RAIFSAI
POSTHUMANISM AND
THE MAN QUESTION
Beyond Anthropocentric
Masculinities
Edited by Ulf Mellström and Bob Pease
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Ulf Mellström and Bob Pease;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Ulf Mellström and Bob Pease to be identifed as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mellström, Ulf, editor. | Pease, Bob, editor.
Title: Posthumanism and the man question: beyond anthropocentric
masculinities/edited by Ulf Mellström and Bob Pease.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Routledge advances in feminist studies and intersectionality |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2022033698 (print) | LCCN 2022033699 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032113784 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032113760 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003219613 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Masculinity. | Posthumanism. | Men’s studies. |
Privilege (Social psychology)
Classifcation: LCC BF692.5. P67 2023 (print) | LCC BF692.5 (ebook) |
DDC 305.31—dc23/eng/20220728
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033698
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033699
ISBN: 978-1-032-11378-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-11376-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21961-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003219613
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of Figures x
Notes on the Contributors xi
1 Introduction: Posthumanism and the Man question 1
Bob Pease and Ulf Mellström
PART I
Masculinities and Afect: Transgressing the Gendered
Emotion Regime 19
2 The Afective Appeal of Nature for Masculinist Movements 21
Sam de Boise
3 Masculinities Taking Shape: Afect, Posthumanism, Forms 33
Terrance H. McDonald
4 Around and Around: Afective Masculinity in Circulation 44
Todd W. Reeser
5 Unsettling Masculinities Through Afect: Philip Roth’s
Everyman and the Nemesis of Old Age 56
Esther Zaplana
viii Contents
PART II
Anthropocentric Masculinities and Entanglements
With Bodies, Nature and Technology 71
6 Boys’ Brains on Porn: Afect, Addiction and Cerebral Subjectivity 73
Lucas Gottzén
7 “Confront[ing] the Suspicion” and “Embodied
Embedded”: New Materialism, Relational Ontologies, and
Fathering Bodies 85
Andrea Doucet
8 Challenging Patriarchal, Colonial Patronage in
Anthropocentric Engagements With ‘Nature
Conservation’: Narratives of White Male Game Rangers
in Southern Africa 99
Tamara Shefer, Ida Sabelis and Harry Wels
9 Emancipation, Connections and Vulnerabilities Among
Bodaboda Men in Kampala: New Materialist Perspectives
on the Efects of Infrastructural Limits 113
Caroline Wamala-Larsson and Jennie Olofsson
10 Destabilising Male Privilege: Explorations of the
Posthuman in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and
Jeannette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) 125
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí and Gemma López-Sanchez
PART III
Conversations Between Critical Studies of Men
and Masculinities and Feminist Engagements With
Posthumanism 137
11 Embrace or Engagement? Critical Studies of Men and
Masculinities and Feminist Posthumanism/New Materialism 139
Chris Beasley
12 Materialism, New Materialisms and Critical Studies
of Men and Masculinities: Looking Back and Looking
Forward, Relationally 154
Jef Hearn
Contents ix
13 Are Posthumanism and Relational Ontologies Necessarily
Emancipatory for Masculinity Studies? 169
Ulf Mellström
PART IV
Posthuman and New Materialist Ontologies of
Becoming for Men 181
14 Towards Non-Sovereign Masculinities: Complexity,
Nature, and New Materialisms 183
Steve Garlick
15 Under Construction: Masculinities as a Continuous
Process of Assembly and Renovation 195
Ryan Coulling
16 Postgender Ecological Futures: From Ecological Feminisms
and Ecological Masculinities to Queered Posthuman
Subjectivities 207
Paul M. Pulé and Asmae Ourkiya
17 Men Becoming Otherwise: Lines of Flight From ‘Man’
and Majoritarian Masculinity 222
Bob Pease
Afterword 236
Greta Gaard
Index 240
