Posthumanism and the Man Question: Beyond Anthropocentric Masculinities

This book brings together the emerging insights of what posthumanism, new materialism and affect theory mean for ‘the man question’. The contributors to this book interrogate the question of how ‘Man’ as a gendered being is entangled with nature, culture, materiality and corporeality, and they explore ways to unsettle men’s sense of sovereignty to decentre anthropocentric masculinity. Men have to move from the centre of privilege which grants them supremacy before they can open themselves to the decentred, embodied, affective, vulnerable and relational self that is necessary to embrace the posthuman. This book explores the extent to which this is possible. The book will be of interest to academics, students and scholars across a range of disciplines who are engaging with the intersections of feminist studies with posthumanism and new materialism, especially as they relate to critical studies of men and masculinities. Chapters on fathering, pornography, ageing, affect, embodiment, entanglements with technology and nature and the implications of these issues for changing men and masculinities and the politics of critical masculinity studies’ engagement with posthuman feminisms will interest students and academics across these diverse disciplines.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Posthumanism and the Man Question Part One Masculinities and Affect: Transgressing the Gendered Emotion Regime 2. The Affective Appeal of Nature for Masculinist Discourse 3. Masculinities Taking Shape: Affect, Posthumanism, Forms 4. Around and Around: Affective Masculinity in Circulation 5. Unsettling Masculinities Through Affect: Philip Roth’s Everyman and The Nemesis of Old Age Part Two Anthropocentric Masculinities and Entanglements with Bodies, Nature and Technology 6. Boys’ Brains on Porn: Affect, Addiction and Cerebral Subjectivity 7. "Confront[ing] the Suspicion" and "Embodied Embedded": New Materialism, Relational Ontologies and Fathering Bodies 8. Challenging Patriarchal, Colonial Patronage in Anthropocentric Engagement with ‘Nature Conservation’: Narratives of White Male Game Rangers in Southern Africa 9. Emancipation, Connection and Vulnerabilities Among Bodaboda Men in Kampala: New Materialist Perspectives on the Effects of Infrastructural Limits 10. Destabilising Male Privilege: Explorations of the Posthuman in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Jeannette Winterson’s Frankisstein (2019) Part Three Conversations Between Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities and Feminist Engagements with Posthumanism 11. Embrace or Engagement:? Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) and Feminist Posthumanism/New Materialism 12. Materialism, New Materialism and Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) Looking Back and Looking Forward, Relationally 13. Are Posthumanism and Relational Ontologies Necessarily Emancipatory for Masculinity Studies? Part Four Posthuman and New Materialist Ontologies of Becoming for Men 14. Toward Non-Sovereign Masculinities: Complexity, Nature, and New Materialisms 15. Under Construction: Masculinities as a Continuous Process of Assembly and Renovation 16. Postgender Ecological Futures: From Ecological Feminisms and Ecological Masculinities to Queered Posthuman Subjectivities 17. Men Becoming Otherwise: Lines of Flight from ‘Man’ and Majoritarian Masculinity Afterword