Masculinities, Emotional Cultures & Feeling-States. Notes on theory and from the Field: Polyamorous Expansive Masculinities

Abstract

There is a dominant trend in American masculinities research to align men and their gendered performances to an underlying schema of negative emotions (e.g. reserved, phallic, non-relational repertoires, avoidant of reciprocation, highly aggressive, and masculine alexithymia). The present article sets to problematize this dominant trend. To explore this problem the article is separated into five sections: (1) reviewing the problem by studying the cultural construction of masculinities; (2) offering theoretical notes on emotional cultures, feeling-states, practices, and a generalized front of sympathetic concern; (3) introducing polyamory as an emotional culture and social movement; (4) exploring poly men and their re-socialization into a deeper performance named expansive masculinities; (5) connecting polyamory and other positive masculinities (e.g. expansive, connecting, relational, and deeply communicative) to American cultural history framed around Freudianism, corporate practices, feminism, consumer society, and other cultural politics of recognition.