Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities

The cover image for this issue depicts an initiation of sorts. Two figures, entirely slicked in a second skin of rubber, place a rubber mask over a third figure's head. The mask, tight and restrictive, must be stretched to properly enclose the figure's face and contour against the nose and lips.

Do “new types” of masculinities offer possibilities for more equitable change in heterosexual relations? This article utilizes the televisual depiction of heterosexual masculinity offered by Otis Milburn in Netflix's Sex Education to think through this question. Otis demonstrates significant potential for doing heterosexual masculinity differently via his pro-feminist stance, prioritization of women's sexual pleasure, queer positivity, and comfort in wearing women's clothes. However, despite a genuine desire to be a different kind of man, he also engages in conventional practices of heteromasculinity that objectify women and subordinate their interests. This article grapples with the question of how best to conceptualize these contradictions and complexities for individual men, in ways that might engender changes to the existing gender order. It argues a more detailed and nuanced understanding and theorization of how male hegemony works in lived heterosexual relationships beyond the idea that men adopting “new types” of masculinity is required.

Chastity cages have recently exploded in popularity, with more men rendering themselves in sustained inerection. By utilizing material culture analysis of form, color, and symbol, this article analyzes chastity cages and chastity culture broadly to argue that chastity cages construct identity imaginaries that are not gendered, but sexed. The phallic form of this cage, in a reversal of heteronormative penetration, penetrates the phallus with a vulva, creating a speculative femaleness. Under oppressive patriarchy, the experience of the queer and the straight wearer of the chastity cage both center normativity; for the heterosexual, subverting it, the cage presents the freedom of not having to adhere to expectations of maleness. For the queer wearer, an oppositional experience with the same core; sampling the pleasure of normativity. The chastity cage allows men to perform and experience pleasure in experimental ways that the societal structures they exist within would not allow.

James Bond, the much celebrated and despised composite figure for manhood, provides an excellent point of entry for examining basic truths and methods of men's studies. By focusing on the first James Bond novel, 1953’s Casino Royale, we propose that the gender roles performed by the characters emerge only in mutual interaction, that gender is a system of emergent properties. We analyze some of the most-cited masculine traits of the 1953 protagonist in relation to his would-be wife Vesper Lynd, the antagonist Le Chiffre, and the author Ian Fleming. The original James Bond is as vulnerable and feminine as he is deadly and masculine, and the 1953 ensemble of characters and their reception make visible otherwise imperceptible attribution errors and logical fallacies and men and gender.

In this article, I analyze the practices men working a feminized profession (librarianship) adopt to engage in more inclusive, diverse, and functional organizational gender politics. I start by outlining my approach to theorizing masculinities in waged labor settings, and I use this outline to reflect on my experiences interviewing men working in UK academic libraries. As I reflect on my experiences interviewing men, I analyze and critique scholarship about waged labor to promote more holistic critiques of gendered relations and masculinities. My aim is to discuss and present alternative strategies to conceptualize the ways men formulate understandings of masculinities and, while doing so, develop practices that support and contribute to more inclusive forms of waged labor.

Richard Vytniorgu's Effeminate Belonging: Gender Nonconforming Experience and Gay Bottom Identities (Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2024)