Criticism of masculinity: Dangerous men (feelings) | nd-aktuell.de

Yes, we want heroes! When exactly did men actually start to become cowards?” commented the Catholic-arch-conservative journalist Birgit Kelle in the weekly magazine at the beginning of 2016 “Focus” the violent attacks on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Allegedly effeminate white men did not protect their companions from intrusive migrants, complained Kelle, a CDU member and author of anti-feminist books such as “Then close your blouse” and “Gender Gaga”. Björn Höcke also thinks very similarly: For years, the Thuringian AfD right wing has been diagnosing the “identity-disturbed man” and is therefore calling for a new “defensiveness”.

With this heroic topos, Birgit Sauer and Otto Penz introduce their study on “Affective Structures of the New Right”. Sauer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vienna, and Penz taught sociology there. In their joint research work, they are looking for explanations for the success of authoritarian parties and movements in Germany and Austria. Much has been written about this topic recently, but Sauer and Penz’s scientific starting point is rather unusual. Because they want to bring together economic and psychological analysis and analyze the “neoliberal transformation” against the background of “changing gender and sexuality relations”. This mental connection makes the book worth reading – and instructive, especially for those parts of the left who like to dismiss emotional, but often only apparently “private” issues as a negligible secondary contradiction in the much more important struggle of the classes.

What is rather confusing, however, is the unintuitive title “The Boom in Masculinity”. The word economic cycle is primarily used in German-speaking countries to describe economic cycles. However, the authors use the term, with reference to the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, as a cultural studies category. This serves “to attempt to capture the complexity of social change processes”. Although economic conditions played a fundamental role, conclusive conclusions can only be reached in combination with social and cultural factors.

According to Sauer and Prenz, the rise of right-wing populism is explained not only by capitalist production and exploitation relations such as the increasing precarity of paid work and “not only by the growing autonomy of women and trans people”. Rather, the two scientists represent an analytical approach that considers the economic and affective structures of the “new authoritarian economy” together. They are concerned with the interaction at the end of which “a new social formation becomes recognizable”.

Fight for physicality

According to the Viennese research duo, right-wing movements strive for a racist and nationally oriented social model of “inequality and exclusion”. To mobilize these ideas, a “specific affect structure of threat, fear, anger and hope” is addressed. Declassed men who feel devalued by the gradual decline of industrial work and are also unsettled by the expanded roles of women in private life are particularly susceptible to such strategies. Sauer and Penz consider gender and sexuality to be central factors that have contributed significantly to the electoral success of parties such as the German AfD and the Austrian FPÖ.

Not only Islam, but also a perceived “individualism of Western modernity” that endangers one’s own identity has become a consistent enemy image. The “battle for physicality” appears particularly threatening because queer emancipation movements “reject fixed attributions and seek to dissolve them.” The populist campaigns, Sauer and Penz summarize, were aimed at the “feeling rules,” as the American social researcher Arlie Hochschild called them in 1979. Anti-democratic attitudes are anchored “in people’s bodies” with the result that they support right-wing positions on their own, so to speak. A “new affective form of controlling access” has been established.

“Are emotions per se a threat to democracy?” the authors ask themselves, before giving their own answer: “We would deny this and rather think that the fact that the authoritarian right succeeds in playing with affects and feelings “This is not least due to the emotional rigidity of traditional parties.” They therefore advocate, in an appeal to established politics as well as civil society initiatives and organizations, for the “democratic-emancipative appropriation of passions”.

Masculinist identity politics

The welfare state consensus after the Second World War, Sauer and Penz look back, was based on gender inequality in (West) Germany and Austria well into the 1970s, especially on the separation of paid wage work and unpaid care work. Women were “only precariously integrated into the hegemonic democratic compromise” and remained significantly underrepresented in parties and parliaments. The “signature of the neoliberal economy” then became significant transformations not only in economic conditions, but also in gender relations – and this endangered the role models of traditionally oriented men in particular. The growing financial autonomy of women through their own employment made it easier to divorce marriages, early on in the former GDR and later also in the old Federal Republic. And the slowly establishing equality policy has also changed the balance of power and the emotional structures within private relationships since the 1980s.

Soon afterwards, countermovements began to emerge; male anti-feminists in particular have since then been mobilizing against the supposed “gender madness”. According to the authors, this is characterized by a “double moral antagonism”. Vertically, this constructs a contradiction between below and above, between the “little man” and an aloof elite. As a typical example, they cite the right-wing polemic against the EU strategy of gender mainstreaming. Horizontally, groups should be excluded that “question the homogeneity and identity, the ‘own’ of the people” – this is aimed at queer lifestyles, but also at migrants and Muslims.

An “affective space” opens up; the threat scenarios presented arouse fear and anger, sometimes even a “gender and sexuality panic”. In this way, a “masculinist identity politics” developed in the right-wing milieu. Their goal, in the spirit of Björn Höcke quoted at the beginning, is to restore a traditional and, above all, “defensive” white masculinity. Unfortunately, in the context of the “turning point” rhetoric, this narrative is now also being taken up by politicians from other parties, such as the “war-ready” SPD arms minister Boris Pistorius – and thus made socially acceptable.

Many of the details in the scientifically written book by Sauer and Penz will probably be familiar to those who have been working against right-wing extremist and anti-feminist movements for many years. The basic concept of not treating the economic and emotional structures of a new authoritarian conjuncture of masculinity separately does, however, provide interesting connecting lines and new insights.

Birgit Sauer, Otto Penz: The boom in masculinity. Affective strategies of the authoritarian right. Campus-Verlag, 198 pages, br., 30 €.