Border Masculinities : Spatial and Affective Borders across the Planet

Thakkar, Amit and Baker, Brian and Harris, Christopher (2024) Border Masculinities : Spatial and Affective Borders across the Planet. In: Border Masculinities : Literary and Visual Representations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 1-20. ISBN 9783031680496 (In Press)

Abstract

This essay is an introduction to the edited volume Border Masculinities: Literary and Visual Representations (Amit Thakkar, Brian Baker and Chris Harris, 2024), which brings together studies of film, television and literatures covering the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and Australasia. It frames border masculinities as those masculine subjectivities which are affected not just by the global erosion of spatial borders in the late twentieth and twenty-first century but also by conceptual borders related to that erosion, for example Self-Other, able-disabled, hegemonic-subordinate, son-father, and so on. The conceptual category of borderlands includes affective and psychological hinterlands which are usually the result of mobilities of either a physical or abstract nature, and very often both. Due attention is given to the analyses of various masculinities in the chapters that contribute to the volume, including sub-hegemonic, complicit, female and post-feminist masculinities. The discussion concludes with a call to work well beyond the concept of globalisation, ‘fixated as that term is on global (human) economics, the defence of national identities against globalising forces and trade barriers’ and instead to envision border masculinities as planetary rather than nation-specific. The essay is influenced by Raewyn Connell (1995), Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2012) and, in terms of the concept of ‘planetarity’, especially Gayatri Spivak (2015).