Identités en jeu, séduction en scène - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

Mélanie Gourarier, anthropologist; Guillaume Vallet, economist; conversation with sociologist Benjamin Tainturier

Mélanie Gourarier and Guillaume Vallet

The phantasmatic return of masculinity

Masculinity as a safe haven. Capitalizing on the argument of fragility `

Contemporary discourses on the “crisis of masculinity” are generally interpreted as the consequence of transformations in gender relations or the weakening of male privileges. I propose reversing this perspective. Rather than considering the crisis as the historical context in which masculinity would be redefined, I hypothesize that it constitutes one of the very conditions of its reproduction. Masculinity thus appears as a safe haven: a category whose political force lies in its ability to present itself as perpetually threatened in order to justify its restoration.

On the one hand, learning masculine seduction creates a space of recognition in which the conquest of women serves as a means of mutual valorization among men. On the other hand, contemporary discourses on the revival of masculinities, even when critical or emancipatory, continue to reinstate masculinity as the privileged and preferred horizon.

The notion of a “safe haven” thus invites us to stop questioning the reality of a crisis involving a loss of power for men, and instead to examine the political uses of its recurring staging, which contribute to the reproduction of that power. Masculinity then appears less as an identity in difficulty than as a technology for stabilizing social relations between the sexes, capable of transforming a feeling of vulnerability into a political resource for perpetuating domination.

Mélanie Gourarier

Masculinities tested by the “hard body” of vulnerability capitalism

In the “capitalism of vulnerabilities,” the economic system in which we have lived since the 1980s, the body has become the ultimate individual resource: many individuals seek to transform this resource into capital through a process of social valorization taking place in several settings (the labor market, the romantic dating market, social interactions). It is in this context that we are witnessing the sportification of existence, the staging of the body according to a logic of seduction, but also the creation of a body “ready for combat.” This elevated status given to the body shows the extent to which it constructs powerful imaginaries that enable us to conceive of the making of the dreamed-of body.

Thus, far from weakening in an era dominated by a digitalized service economy, the body remains at the heart of economic and social exchanges, and therefore of individuals’ identity construction. In particular, body-capital remains associated with the reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity and male domination: vulnerability capitalism creates new spaces for the valorization of men’s bodies.

This process is not without risk, however, especially when the body becomes central to the definition of identity: the “all” body then becomes the “too much” body, paradoxically calling its very essence and existence into question while weakening the “social body.”

Guillaume Vallet