With a world that appears to be on an uncertain precipice, with wars and conflict occurring across the globe, increasing threats of environmental damage, and unparalleled political transformations, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that discussions of bodies, masculinities and sexualities are merely a distraction to what is “really going on” in the world. This appeal to a “real” world, in opposition to a world of academia sets up a series of juxtapositions, where in the real world, you need practical knowledge and skills that can address immediate needs, solve problems, and have tangible results. The academic world, in this pole, in contrast, is a world of disconnected abstract theorizing that has little relevance to everyday challenges. Placed in the context of growing right-wing sentiment in Europe and the United States, it is possible to see how an attachment to the “real”, the “everyday”, and the “ordinary”, feel so persuasive. It is through the seemingly emptied meaning of the “ordinary” where such terms gain their power to produce interpretation. Ernesto Laclau (2000) uses the notion of the “empty signifier” to capture the ways that “the people” in political discourse are empty, being filled with strategic meanings that warrant a political perspective or action. As such, “various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack’ (idem: 412). Perhaps it is the emptiness, or the ways that emptiness is “discoursed”, that helps us to grasp the nature of the shifts that are taking place and what that means for bodies, masculinities, and sexualities. This “perhaps” is imbricated with the clause of recognition of causal results or actions; or, differently, is the place where the supposed “unreal” world of academia meets and offers more than simply greetings to the supposed “real” world that, somehow, finds academia excised from it.

In a previous introduction to an issue of JBSM, we talked about how COVID-19 carried anthropomorphic traits, where political strategies were becoming almost embodiments of key political figures. The result was that the political directions of travel illustrated how political leaders and their value systems became configured through the demonstration of masculinities. We witnessed the machismo of Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the Churchillian-like war rhetoric of Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. What was less obvious in these accounts was how such culturally popular figures carried an authoritarianism that could often lead to open contempt of notions of social justice connected to gender diversity, religious difference, sexual rights and migration. In the case of Nigel Farage and his political party, Reform UK, it is Great Britain that has become endangered and victimized, noting a broken nation that requires a leader to take back control of their borders, money and laws. More specifically, “Record mass immigration has damaged our country. The small boat crisis threatens our security. Multiculturalism has imported separate communities that reject our way of life. Divisive, ‘woke’ ideology has captured our public institutions. Transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children” (Reform UK 2024: n.p.).

Michael Billig (2017) in his use of “banal nationalism” provides us with an understanding of how certain events can seem innocuous but at the same time can have a devastating impact. Yates’ (2015) work on the UK political party UKIP and its leader captures this sentiment beautifully. Nigel Farage during the 2014 election attempted to construct a man-on-the-street persona, what Yates refers to as “blokey”. Sara Willott and Antonia C. Lyons (2012) pointed out in their discussion of gender relations in the context of men and drinking, there is something authentic and genuine about a “bloke”. Associated with a low-class social status and with an affinity to a traditional gendered division of labor that is underpinned by an unambiguous heterosexuality, with a “bloke” you “get what you see”. “Blokes”—the saying goes—”tell it as it is” and do so with a genuine, honest and—somewhat—persuasively uncompromising way of talking. In this, the bloke is empty of pretense or more specifically meaning, they just are. With the sleight of a semantic hand, “you get what you see” ontologically flattens and disappears values. This appeal to being a “bloke” not only empties them of intolerance and injustice but simultaneously projects it onto others. This “bloke” positioning uses this same up-close magic to seek to legitimize itself as it does to try and delegitimize questions that might go against their interest—those truly material questions about violence, death, and power. The “bloke”—of Farage or Bolsonaro—is more acquainted with bar-room banter than they are with data-driven research.

Of course, such empty signifiers need context to make them work. In the manosphere—“an umbrella term for various groups online opposing feminism and adhering to a belief that feminist values dominate society and must be fought back” (Engstrand 2024: 2)—there is the suggestion that the natural order of gender relations has been disrupted and that such disruption is connected to feminist thinking and values. In the narratives identified in Dickel and Evolvi's (2022) research on participants in the manosphere, men position themselves as victims of injustice when violence against women is politically and legally addressed. Various countries and researchers around the world have witnessed something similar in the responses to a recent summit in Canada that was committed to challenging gender injustices in education, gendered health inequalities, and violence against women. The organizers tweeted out some of the work that was taking place in these areas and received trolling that talked about the summit undoing men's nature, making men submissive and compliant, hatred of men, and that anyone working in the academic field of masculinity studies is a danger to society. Not only were men more generally viewed as victims, but what was striking was the intense emotional vilification that the conference organizers and those attending received. There was an underlying fear and defensiveness that critical masculinity studies would have endangered ‘ordinary’ men but also society in general.

It was not only the social justice project that received attention but the participants at the conference themselves. So much of the antagonism centered on the belief that the conference was an attack on men and traditional (patriarchal) masculinity. One of the more interesting responses aimed toward the delegates was, “your wife's boyfriend must be so proud of you.” What we notice from this scenario is that this rhetoric, a set of extreme values, becomes packaged as a set of ordinary, everyday common-sense values.

Just as in the aforementioned conference, at the world's biggest election campaign in 2024, that of Indian PM Modi, we saw how the masculinity of the nation became an important theme. A key part of his campaign message was that his Bharatiya Janata Party was going to restore the manhood of the state, something that was being lost due to terrorism. Sagnik Dutta and Tahir Abas (2024) point out how during the election campaign the message of Modi's party was that the motherland of India was under threat from terrorism and that the protectors of the nation—his political party—were required to bolster the defense of the nation. Dutta and Abbas argue that “masculinity performs the task of securitization and reinstates a sense of ontological security” (idem: 17). The “recovery of martial strength and prowess is meant to undo this project of humiliation and protect the unity of the motherland” (ibid.). The consequence of this was that protecting the nation involved serious challenges to civil rights and democracy. As such there is an attempt to re-establish the natural order of society through an appeal to a protective masculinity. This “natural” order falls in alignment with the supposed “real” of the foregoing discontinuities of the world being constructed.

This divide of “real” and constructed is embedded in the wave of right-wing populism that is becoming increasingly visible across Europe. A fear of loss of masculinity within nation-states is predominantly articulated through right-wing views on migration, transphobia and homophobia where left-wing/liberal elites are in effect cuckolding the nation through their advocation of social justice policies. André Keil (2020) points out that across Europe there has been an increasing share of the vote going to right-wing populist parties. In their analysis of political speech in Germany, they point out how right-wing speakers talk about the need to reinstate masculinity with the idea that Germany's natural masculinity has been lost and requires reclaiming. Keil goes on to suggest that: “The individual fear of effeminisation is equated to the impotence of the state in protecting its citizens against the alleged threat of mass immigration” (idem: 10). It is therefore notions of a restoration of a lost masculinity that become important as the assumed restoration of national pride and status that may also be about recuperating the masculinities of men in those nations.

Much has been written about how Donald Trump and his political rhetoric mobilize and support particular forms of masculine practices. In the run-up to the election in 2024 there was an attempt to connect with young men through various social media influencers closely connected to the manosphere. Trump and his administration represented him in a patriarchal style of a fighter for the nation. The bloodied picture of Trump and Trump supporters wearing bandages symbolically representing the assassination attempt fed into a discourse of a “fighter” of and for national values. This bled into a discourse of him being the nation's protector and leans into family values. This fits what James W. Messerschmidt (2021) calls a “dominating masculinity”, where Donald Trump's campaign aimed to strip him back to being a “fighter”. At the same time, this stripping back of values reinforced an attack on social justice. Social justice policies in the Trump campaign were re-narrated as damaging social engineering that resulted in the destabilization of the family, community, the economy, and ultimately the nation. Policies that support women's, transgender, migrant, and environmental issues were viewed as interfering and oppressive to a natural, ordinary order. In his speech in Reno on December 17, 2023, Donald Trump pointed out that on the day that he gets elected he will “sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children”. In his speech, Trump invokes the notion of protecting “innocent life”. Victims are depoliticized, emptied of any pre-existing agency, resulting in the need for what Miriam Ticktin (2017: 586) names as “predatory compassion”. The power of the empty signifier is that any political persuasion can fill it. In the context of a politics of tolerance, it is not that the notion of innocence is problematic but that right-wing politics are telling stories about the wrong victims. The more radical approach developed by Ticktin is to deconstruct and problematize innocence, to undo the binaries through which power and its deployment operate. This, then, brings us full circle.

At the beginning of this short introduction we placed the discussion of bodies, sexualities and masculinities within the juxtaposing binary of the real and abstract. In a world of fast-moving global risks and challenges, what can the study of bodies, sexualities and masculinities offer? An initial response was to see that the crisis, whatever its form, operates at a cultural level and is not separate or outside but is integral. When we talk about crises, whichever are occurring at any given moment, we are inescapably talking about how bodies, sexualities and masculinities are part of that crisis and how they often manifest through them. More fundamentally, moving forward, we need to be always involved in the process of recognizing that when we posit such juxtapositions about the real and unreal, we engage in sustaining that which creates its own bind. We should not let go of bodies, sexualities and masculinities, but must think about the way we fill those terms with meaning and how we attach such terms to our pursuit of that which lies in the overlapping realms of the real world and the academy.