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In *The New Arab Man,* Marcia Inhorn, a prominent scholar of Muslim masculinities, challenges common stereotypes about contemporary Middle Eastern Muslim men. Her work is significant, for it highlights the emergence of egalitarian Muslim masculinities in the Middle East. However, this paper draws attention to a starkly different form of Muslim masculinity emerging among the young Muslim men of the West. This "Red pill Muslim masculinity" combines the teachings of popular youtubers such as Rollo Tomassi with a simplistic understanding of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. It emphasizes that men and women are situated in a confrontational dynamic due to inherent and immutable evolutionary differences. Red-pill Muslim influencers view women as inferior, hypergamous, irrational, and solipsistic beings who must be controlled by an aggressive, judgemental, and manipulative Muslim masculinity. Crucially, prominent Muslim youtube influencers have begun to frame red pill ideology as “traditional” Muslim masculinity, thereby encouraging young religious men to embrace this trend.
The digital manosphere has been an object of scholarly analysis for several years. Crucial, but often missing, in the assessment of the manosphere is the role of religious belief and moral framings about the body. This paper intervenes by analyzing how online manosphere elements interact with both religious traditions and forms of political authority in order to produce discourses, technologies, and self-improvement regiments related to Orthodox masculinity. Drawing on three years of research, this paper offers a case study from the online Eastern Orthodox manosphere, showing that this mode of masculinist discourse unites reactionary religiosity with affective energy borrowed from, and recognizable to, participants within the manosphere. In doing so, we argue that manosphere culture, focused on social debate as a normative form of corrective instruction, helps Orthodox men craft vernacular theologies of the body that are inspired by Orthodox theology and manosphere culture but arguably at odds with both.
This paper emplots the work of Rajiv Surendra, an emerging domestic advisor with a dedicated following, in the longer tradition of domestic advice. By locating his teaching in conversation with domestic advisors like Lizzie Kander of the Settlement Cook Book, the author seeks to reframe the intimate work of teaching homemaking as less stably feminine than presumed and more invested in masculinist structures of prescription and authority. In short, this paper asks, what different conceptions of masculinity, domesticity, and kinship become possible when we imagine domestic advice writing as not simply maternal and feminine but invested in systems of knowledge production that we might differently gender in their underlying paradigms? This paper argues that the Canadian actor-turned-influencer’s recognizability as a domestic advisor—and as a queer, unchaste, wealthy, Tamil man—both modulate and reinforce conclusions we have drawn about Americanization, racial formation, kinship, and gendered discipline through domestic advice writing.
Employing the analysis of professional wresting developed by Roland Barthes in his influential essay, “The World of Wrestling” (1972), this paper contends that American voters, like a professional wrestling audience, are not interested in facts, but desire a public spectacle in which good triumphs over evil. Given the vagaries of the Electoral College, the influence of dark money in elections, and the increasing role of the Supreme Court plays in validating or determining election outcomes, many Americans believe the electoral process, like a professional wrestling match, is rigged. An analysis of the symbols and rituals of professional wresting provides a lens through which we can analyze the American electoral process as a rigged public spectacle intended to reinforce cultural and national narratives of American triumphalism embodied in images of masculinity, violence, and power.
Masculinized social media spaces are often associated with forms of oppression like misogyny, queer- and transphobia, and racism. Without dispelling that reality, my net ethnography of the subreddit r/Hunting uncovers the ethical and religious heavy lifting men do in social media spaces devoted to masculinized practices. For hunters on r/Hunting, the moment of violence, the kill, is at once the point and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized. Even more, it triangulates them into relationships with their imagined and known male ancestors, their kin, and the totality of living things. Indeed, this moment of violence anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies. Hunting, then, is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.