State Hypermasculinity in World Politics

The relationship between escalating global crises and the contemporary rise of populist and authoritarian leaders has been the subject of growing scholarship within International Relations. Feminist International Relations research has been vital in emphasizing the need to interrogate masculinities as a critical link in explaining this conjuncture. However, much of this work—including feminist analyses—has primarily focused on the constitutive effects of hypermasculine identities and the gendered political performances of individual “strongman” rulers in shaping state crisis responses. This Theory Note seeks to reframe this focus. It advances the concept of state hypermasculinity to unpack the operation of hypermasculine logics across multiple domains where state power is exercised and contested—diplomatic, structural, spatial, and virtual. In doing so, it underscores the significance of masculinities as more than an individual attribute, drawing attention to the interrelated, enduring, and contradictory transformations shaping the gendered reproduction of the state. State hypermasculinity thus provides a conceptual tool for comparative and regional analyses of variation across contemporary authoritarian and populist rule, offering a more systemic account of the gendered dynamics underpinning global political transformations.