Masculinities, Bodies, and Emotional Life

This paper explores relationships between men, bodies, and emotional life and the ways emotions are shaped within postmodern masculinities. Exploring examples of ways men narrate their lives, the author questions prevailing notions of hegemonic masculinities that have tended to sustain rationalist traditions of modernity. Tending to treat the emotional and personal as “therapeutic”—in Connell's work framed in opposition to the “political”—makes it difficult to give adequate space to the exploration of cultures, bodies, emotions, and sexualities.