When, in 2019, I started planning a conference that would take place in September 2020 at the University of Exeter, my aim was to bring together a wide variety of scholars to reflect on the viral modes of contemporary masculinities. The conference was being planned in the context of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellows grant I had been awarded, thanks to which I had been researching contemporary gay “pig” sex subcultures. That is, a kind of contemporary gay male subculture anchored in the eroticization of bodily fluid exchanges and of the corruption of the whole, self-contained, and impermeable male body hegemonically idealized in modern European thought. In a biopolitical context in which HIV infection had become something one can self-manage through highly active antiretroviral therapies, or otherwise avoid with pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drug regimens, I contended that the twenty-first-century erotic investment in bodily fluids and transgression of the boundaries of the idealized bourgeois body makes gay “pig” subcultures a rich field of practice that can help us think about new and hopefully more capacious ways of relating to the other that no longer require identification and recognition as preconditions. Emerging at the intersection of twenty-first-century sex media, pharmacotechnologies, and sex practices, gay “pigs” are porous creatures that can simultaneously point toward new kinds of relating, of sociability, of ethics, while at the same time still often manifesting and reinforcing some of the traits that have historically defined modern European masculinities (Florêncio 2020). In short, the literal opening up of their masculinity, which I saw—and continue to see—as ethically and politically promising, still often remained dependent on a strengthening of other traits coded as masculine: endurance, athleticism, resilience, heroism, and so on; as if masculinities weren't a static monolith but indeed a fleshy psychosexual reality that manages to survive precisely because it is plastic, adaptable, receptive to change. Diversity ensures the survival of any species, I guess.

At the core of that research project, there was an attempt to make sense of the ways in which masculinity has always been predicated on a particular kind of modern European body ideal: wholesome, self-reliant, impenetrable, white, male, a standard against which all other bodies—regardless of their gender—were to be measured and ranked (Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Rassmussen 2011), against which all other bodies, including all other masculine bodies, would be seen to be lacking or failing. From that point of view, to talk about masculinities is always to talk about particular body configurations, particular arrangements of flesh and meaning, and the lengths to which we go in order to protect those configurations or arrangements from being corrupted, broken into, undone. In the specific case of that project of mine, the focus was to understand the manner in which contemporary gay male sex cultures have resignified penetrability not as a kind of emasculation—of becoming-woman—but as a kind of becoming-hypermasculine where the threat of emasculation through penetration is overcompensated by means of centering attention on the athletic and heroic aspects of being fucked relentlessly, of taking more and more dicks, of collecting cum loads. In short, how contemporary gay male sex cultures turned bottoming into a pathway to Herculean masculinity.

Considering that this process of hypermasculinization through relentless bottoming also emerged in the context of AIDS memory and framed by ongoing health concerns around sexual risks—risks associated with older and newer infections, with older and newer cultures of sexualized drug use, with older and newer patterns of porn consumption—a framework started developing in my mind regarding the production and destabilization of older and newer kinds of masculinity by viral means. By this I meant not exclusively actual viruses associated with sexually transmitted infections but also viruses as units of information that replicate themselves and spread from anywhere to anywhere, without a traceable single origin point. In this way, we could speak of new forms of masculinity being produced thanks to the viral dissemination of data regardless of their being coded in either silicone or flesh; and we could also speak of older forms of masculinity being corrupted by the same means. Importantly, this idea of viral masculinities would also draw attention to the ways in which relations of inside and outside, of normal and pathological, of norm and exception, of borders and their transgression, are being questioned and reshaped today and at different scales thanks to viral forms of communication that differ in structure and style from older more centralized forms of information exchange that had clearly assigned roles for senders and receivers of information—for example, broadcast news, clinical encounters, expert messages to lay publics, linear television, university lectures, and more (Galloway and Thacker 2007; Parikka 2016; Sampson 2012).

Recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, various scholarly articles and op-ed pieces have been published that illustrate the viral tensions at the heart of conflicting ideals of the body—more precisely, of the masculine body—and of the threats different kinds of viruses may pose to it (Elan 2020; Hesse 2020a; Mahdawi 2020). For instance, in “Toxic White Masculinity, Post-Truth Politics and the COVID-19 Infodemic,” Jayson Harsin (2020) offers a conjunctural study of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic by showing how the “coronavirus’ cultural agency […] worked in synergy with its biological form” (1060). That is, Harsin critically engages with the broader reality of the pandemic by bringing the “cultural materiality” of the virus to bear on its infectivity and virulence. In so doing, he notes the synergetic manner in which “a form of toxic, especially white, masculinity is a key to understanding [the coronavirus pandemic's] entwinement with contemporary post-truth” (ibid.: 1060–1061).

Indeed, when Donald Trump, then 45th President of the United States, was admitted to hospital having himself tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection—and having previously publicly overlooked the seriousness of the pandemic—only to be eventually discharged just three days later, numerous op-ed pieces appeared in the media which connected Trump's reluctance to wear a mask with hegemonic ideals of masculinity as risk-taking, heroism, and endurance (Hesse 2020b; Thomson 2020; Valenti 2020). Not only that but Trump's refusal to respond adequately to the new coronavirus was also linked in Harsin's article to the wider “infodemic”—that is, the information epidemic—of “post-truth” that had sustained and continues to sustain the turn of a significant and growing section of the population toward far-right ideologies, facilitated by social media's increasing infrastructural role in twenty-first-century power-knowledge formations. Indeed while, for liberals and many to their left alike, concerns over the implications to freedom and human rights of some of the measures implemented to tackle the pandemic could coexist with the public health imperative to contain it, others appeared more concerned with questioning the validity of epidemiological data, reframing the threat posed by the virus as a foreign threat that ought to be contained—the “China virus,” as Trump infamously called it (Vazquez and Klein 2020)—and behaving as if wearing a mask or maintaining physical distance were the true viruses; that is, a series of emasculating behaviors threatening the strength, heroism, and invincibility of the masculinist political personae of both themselves and their nations (Harsin 2020; Schillmeier 2020).

Yet, conceiving viruses as threats to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity is not restricted to the men trying to defend themselves from supposed emasculation. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Donna Haraway (1991) uses the figure of the virus as an example of the ontological continuum between biology and technology, reflecting on its value for feminist technoscience, epistemology and politics. Just like the cyborg, the virus posed a threat to modern patriarchy, leading patriarchal institutions to develop a gamut of security measures tasked with containing the spread of viral code, whether by means of pharmacotechnologies protecting fleshy bodies or antivirus software products protecting information systems hardwired into silicone substrates. More recently, the feminist art and philosophy collective Laboria Cuboniks (2018) has also deployed viral imaginaries in their speculative envisioning of feminist futures. Similarly, in her Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell (2020) calls for a feminism that takes on a politics of the glitch, a politics that, just like a virus, infects and corrupts data infrastructures, from computer software to the wetware that is our own flesh.

In a similar vein, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger have also recently conceptualized not only feminism but also women's studies programs as viruses. “One future pedagogical goal of women's studies is the creation of students as symbolic ‘viruses’ capable of infecting and unsettling the academic spaces around them” (Fahs and Karger 2016: 935). If “both capitalism and academia already function with the virus as one of their guiding metaphors” (ibid.: 936)—capital subsuming all facets of life in order to replicate itself academic discourse infecting society via teaching to ensure the social reproduction of class distinction, for instance (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990)—women's studies should, as a feminist project, appropriate that very same viral logics in order to replicate itself and corrupt its host. “Women's studies should prioritize the development of students who can move through, within, and between disciplines, who can, in essence, change form” (Fahs and Karger 2016: 937), “unsettling previously held assumptions, challenging previously held worldviews” (ibid.: 947).

Due to the ways in which both the body of modernity and the modern body politic have been predominantly idealized as always-already male, autonomous, impermeable and impenetrable; and due to how the figure of the virus has been used to frame political threats to the masculinist heteropatriarchal order, rethinking masculinities in the context of our contemporary viral cultures is an important and timely scholarly and political task. Yet, in doing so, we must not overlook the plasticity and diversity of masculinity itself—the ways in which masculinity can be framed either as a body to be defended or as a corruptive infectious agent against which one must defend one's body. The way in which we will choose to approach masculinity will depend on the specific sets of relations under analysis at any given time, as well as on their degrees of porosity, permeability, and mutability. It is for that reason that one must attend to “masculinities” rather than “masculinity” understood as a coherent, unchanging, self-contained and autonomous whole.

As Raewyn Connell (2005) has argued, the histories of what she termed “hegemonic masculinity” are inseparable from parallel histories of subordination, marginalization and policing of the masculinities seen to fall short of a particular historically-contingent masculinist ideal. Subordinated and marginalized masculinities are—on account of intersections of class, race, gender, sex, sexuality, and ability—“expelled from hegemonic masculinity” because they are seen to pose a dangerous emasculatory threat to that very ideal (79). Because they exist both within masculinity and outside its hegemonic ideal, the threat they pose is of a viral kind—they are often conceived as wanting to replicate themselves within their host, corrupting it. Queer, trans, working-class, Black, Brown, foreign masculinities, and more, commonly appear in conservative discourse as threats to the survival of the oedipal family and of the heteropatriarchal state—as forms of corruption (their) “children” should not be exposed to. As emasculatory infections they ought to be immunized against. In a highly networked heteropatriarchal and capitalist culture that is both deeply paranoid about ensuring the survival of its own hegemony and one in which the figure of the virus has become central to its episteme, attempts to both corrupt and defend masculinities have been articulated by viral means. That is, by means of a virologics of infections and counterinfections that “assemble, create, and transform the value-differences [of] bodies, spaces, and cultures” (Schillmeier 2020: 14).

Viral Masculinities therefore aims to contribute to that very space of critical analysis by bringing together articles by a diverse group of scholars whose work explores, in one way or another, different enactments of twenty-first-century masculinity, forms of masculine embodiment, and the plasticity of masculinities themselves at a time when masculinity has become a major topic of critical debate in both popular culture and academia, and in the context of the highly networked nature of contemporary capitalism.

In “Bottom Value: Critiquing Top Supremacy's Instrumentalization of Bottomly Risk in Queer Theory and the PrEP Debates,” Jordana Greenblatt narrows down on the paradoxical discursive formations of “risk” that have become endemic to the sexual practice of bottoming. They explore how many queer theoretical approaches to bottomly risk's self-shattering potential have tended to disingenuously transpose risk from bottoms to tops and, thus, from sexual position to gender identities—that is, from those who bottom to all men who have sex with men, repurposing viral risk as a form of validating rather than shattering masculinity. Writing against that tendency, Greenblatt critically engages with discourses criticizing PrEP for increasing gay male promiscuity and reducing sexual responsibility and shows how they parallel Christian objections to vaccinating girls against HPV infection. In doing so, their chapter recuperates the receptive and/or feminized qualities of bottoms in order to map the vulnerability of the latter as a sexual position that cuts across the gender binary as well as the various biomedical interventions, which have attempted to mitigate it by ensuring bottoms and/or women remain the sole custodians of sexual restraint.

Greenblatt's contribution to this special issue highlights how biomedical technologies are surrounded by often conflicting affects and discourses and can offer opportunities both for liberation and self-affirmation as well as for containment of viral threats to both the body and the body politic. Technologies like PrEP are examples of what Kane Race (2016) calls “reluctant objects.” While, on the one hand, they can be deployed as forms of biopolitical control, on the other, they also have the potential to sustain new forms of democratic participation and to trigger new kinds of subjectivities and world-making (Florêncio 2020; Schubert 2019). Like viruses themselves, they too are politically ambiguous (Galloway and Thacker 2007). For that reason, they are surrounded by heavy forms of state regulation that confer biological and sexual citizenship only to the “good” subjects who use them “properly” and for “legitimate” aims. Citizenship—that is, the symbiosis of body and state—is the concession one gets for not being too virulent a threat; for being a threat the host body can survive.

Yet, while the highly networked nature of contemporaneity benefits the circulation of goods, capital, ideas and labor on which capitalism depends, it can also facilitate the penetration of foreign threats into the bodies of both citizens and nation. For that reason, beyond triggering a series of complex security responses, viral communications are also source of paranoid anxieties (Parikka 2016; Wald 2008). If we take into account the masculine idealizations of the modern autonomous body and body politic, these paranoid anxieties are also anxieties about an always-already imminent threat of emasculation of individuals and the state.

In “God's Viral Warriors: Christian Nationalism, Masculinity, and the Representation of Self,” Jason Luger introduces and discusses the figure that gives name to the article, the body-building, god-abiding, warrior of (mostly-)US white nationalism that moves across online and offline geographies. A figure of contractions often hailing from non-urban areas, this particular patriotic warrior is religious, a father, and cares for himself and his wellbeing. At the same time, his ego multiple is also one fueled by far-right ideologies, misogyny, white supremacy, and other authoritarian values which he disseminates virally online. For Luger, this new kind of contemporary muscular masculinity problematizes the impermeability of spaces usually defined against each other—the online and the offline, the rural and the urban, healthy and unfit, working and middle class, center and margin, mainstream and underground, and so forth—while simultaneously creating a particular culture of masculinity that is highly closed and policed from outsiders. His is a kind of masculinity that is simultaneously hegemonic but also—and to different extents—queered.

Joseph De Lappe, Gavin Brown, and Cesare Di Feliciantonio's “‘Must Be Clean, Safe, and Discreet’: The Lexicon of Discretion in Men's Same-Sex Online Hookups” also explores non-urban geographies of masculinity and their interfacing with digital spaces. Looking at the usage of the term “discreet” as a self-descriptor on the UK-based dating site FabGuys, popular with older men outside large metropolitan areas, the authors claim “discreet” is not so much a way to negotiate the closet but, rather, many partial closets, all with their own specific modes of discretion. That is, it is a term that users deploy to navigate a wide variety of personal realities, desires, understandings of risk and practices of risk-taking and risk-management. It does not conceal a particular closeted identity but, instead, it constitutes a form of what the authors describe as “highly articulate indirectness” that exceeds the epistemologics of the “closeted gay” and is facilitated by the affordances and media ecologies of twenty-first-century hookup technologies.

Delving deeper into the psychopathology of contemporary masculinist paranoid anxiety, Jac Lewis's contribution to this issue builds a critique of what he calls “acid fascism,” the alt-right alternative to Mark Fisher's “acid communism” (Fisher 2018). Drawing from David Felton's 1972 text Mindfuckers, which explores the use of psychedelic drugs in reactionary countercultural movements of the 1960s, as well as from contemporary alt-right digital cultures, Lewis's contribution engages with the urgent political and philosophical challenges posed by a new kind of fascistic male subjectivity. This new acid fascistic male subject is one that “straddles a line between his obsessive policing and preservation of the idealized body as an immutable coding of being and the intensive flows of cybernetic, financial, and affective sensibility, which both endow and decode this paranoiac stance.” Finding a precursor to this warrior of contemporary alt-right masculinities in both the hippie masculinities of the Summer of Love and its darker counterparts embodied in Mel Lyman's 1966 Fort Hill Community, Lewis argues that Acid Fascism is the expression of a desire for an experimental, rather than utopian, reactionary consciousness. Unlike earlier, more historically familiar, kinds of fascism, Acid Fascism embraces a kind of acceleration that is at ease with the morphing complexions of masculine identities understood as erratic spawns of mutant reactionary affects.

Finally, drawing from the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jernej Markelj's “Viral Times, Paranoid Masculinities: AI, Nerds, and Technological Contamination” examines the paranoia at the center of twenty-first-century forms of masculinity. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the author offers a critical lens through which to understand paranoia both as an affective response that frantically polices and defends the borders of masculinity, and a persecutory delusion that zeros in on the supposed discovery of a putative conspiracy preventing men from functioning properly. Using as an example the ways in which self-driving cars have been seen to call into question masculinist ideas of autonomy, mastery, and control, undone by the forces of capital, Markelj argues that paranoid masculinities end up desiring their own repression in order to hold on to their very identity. Ultimately, rather than trying to understand what masculinities are in the context of contemporary viral cultures, Markelj makes a case for thinking masculinities not through the prism of identity but, rather, through attending to their affective constellations. In order to escape paranoid regimes of masculinity, the question should be not what masculinity is but what masculinity can do.

While the topics of each of the contributions to this special issue may appear only loosely connected—having masculinities as their single unifying thread—they all try to grapple with the plasticity of masculinities in the present viral conjuncture. In our viral times, masculinities are not so much in crisis as they are caught in a process of viral becoming. One of the defining features of today's masculinities—of contemporary processes of becoming-masculine—is indeed the way in which contemporary technologies, with their virologics of dissemination and control, have become weaved into twenty-first-century iterations of masculinity, whether progressive and utopian or reactionary and nostalgic. Whether we talk about the alt-right masculinities replicating through social media, the sexualized masculinities of gay hookup apps, or the antiretroviral masculinities of PrEP subjects, the contemporary masculine body is a viral assemblage—an arrangement that is simultaneously so saturated and dense in code, and so porous to flows of information, that it makes no sense to cling to older divisions between nature and technology, inside and outside, public and private or personal and political, despite what some neo-reactionary political voices may otherwise say. Twenty-first-century technologies are accelerants in the becoming-viral of the embodiments and subjectivities that modernity brought about. They amplify, inform, shape, reshape, trouble, reify, hinder and discipline flesh, affects, desires, and pleasures all at once. Masculine bodies—like all other bodies—are thus both constituted and held together as interfaces, as threshold formations cut across and in-formed by a variety of technologies that can lift us up and make us cum; that can make us larger, more joyful and invincible but also more frail, diminished, and weaker; that can both amplify and quieten—sometimes to the point of deadly silence—the frequencies to which our bodies and subjectivities vibrate, allowing us to resonate with others in intimate ways or to partake in dangerous dissonances; beautiful major harmonic progressions or tense diminished fifths, tritones that can be our own undoing or sometimes part of an exquisite jazz chord, a blue note offering a chance for resolution, a transition or an opening into new, more capacious and unexpected becomings.