Journal articles on the topic 'Hyper-masculine'

This article reflects upon being a female academic researcher in the hyper-masculine subculture of ‘football hooliganism’. With this subculture being a male-dominated field of study, the article argues that gender blindness has prevailed in most studies conducted by male researchers, with a failure to consider the positioning, practices and performances of the gendered self in the gendered field. Nor has this been a consideration of the rare female researcher working on the phenomenon. This article breaks this gendered silence by drawing on my own fieldwork experiences with (‘retired’) football hooligans to identify the methodological challenges specifically (re)negotiated as a female academic throughout the gendered research process and offers some strategies and field tips to future researchers faced with gendered incongruence with their informers. The key concerns for me were: first, gaining access to a hyper-masculine subculture; second, entering and developing rapport within the subculture; and third, ‘doing gendered research’ in the hyper-masculine field. Central to negotiating these challenges was a very conscious and performative presentation of self, often for self-preservation, during the research process. In practice, this sometimes required demonstrating that I had the (metaphorical) ‘balls’ in terms of my (gendered) image management. The article argues for consideration of the performativity of social research with a need for wider disclosure of the complexities and ‘messiness’ of qualitative research practices and the emotional labour required.

This article examines the “levee camp” as a social and cultural site for reconstituting rural black workers' masculine identities in the early twentieth-century Mississippi-Arkansas Delta. The construction of the Mississippi River's levees during this period depended heavily on the labor of black mule-drivers drawn from the Delta's cotton plantations. In spite of this dependency, the levee camps' exploitative commissaries and harsh disciplinary violence quashed workers' efforts to reclaim a sense of autonomy that was increasingly denied them on the region's plantations. However, partly in response to the perceived erosion of their authority within the sharecropper family, levee workers successfully used the notorious after-hours culture of the levee camps to construct a hyper-masculine image of themselves as “rough mens” who had been to the levee camps, enjoyed the sexual attention of camp women, and were manly enough to survive the murderous violence of white bosses and other “rough mens” alike. Using a series of 1930s labor investigations as well as early Delta blues hollers and songs about the levee camps, this article shows how black workers' efforts to cultivate this hyper-masculine levee worker image ultimately proved detrimental to their class interests. Levee contractors and foremen welcomed levee camp gambling, prostitution, drinking, and fighting as ways of reducing workers' wages and maintaining labor control in the camps. Ultimately, the levee camps provide a useful example of an all-male work site where gender had important, if unintended, ramifications for workers' class position.

How do powerful women in a hyper-masculine organization talk about power? To answer this question, we should explore both cultural contents and gendered politics that inform women’s discourse about social power. This article investigates how women morally evaluate their own and others’ power. Based on in-depth interviews with 34 women serving in senior military positions, I argue that they achieve a sense of self-worth and professional subjectivity through moral work. This symbolic work involves three main discursive strategies regrading power: (1) Drawing symbolic moral boundaries between themselves and the morally ‘degenerate’ military environment; (2) Using ‘performances of authenticity’ to constitute their moral worth; and (3) (Non-)apology to counter the accusation implicit in the social expectation that they must apologize for their power as women. These strategies allow these women to talk about power in moral terms, bring power closer to themselves, and at the same time claim moral subjectivity. By morally justifying the use of military power, they make the internalized ‘brass ceiling’ transparent. Thus, I argue that although women are agentic in constituting their worth, this is not necessarily done by way of ‘resistance’, but rather through discursive maneuvering that relies on the same oppressive discursive patterns designed to restrict their power. Accordingly, their efforts to constitute their selves and ‘do power’ are carried out within, rather than outside, the gendered moral logic of the organizational culture.

This paper presents a multi-media textual collage that shows rather than tells the lived experiences of my conversion of a DIY campervan over several months in a diesel mechanic workshop in Sydney, Australia. This is a “small culture,” (Holliday, 1999) to which I gained limited access as I developed craft skills and the confidence to speak back to relative, milieu-specific, gendered power. I use autoethnographic textual fragments written shortly after the moment to depict the struggle to acquire skills, build confidence, and cross “small” cultures in an unusual crafting context. Grounded theoretical insights are suggested as they relate to three things. First, I examine the nature of individual, self-directed learning as engendered by the non-expert, hands-on doing of craft supported by YouTube instructional videos. Second, I consider positive and negative affective identity factors, particularly feelings of competence or incompetence and challenges to my own (female, middle-aged, injured, and non-expert) embodiment. Third, I consider the collaborative, discursive ways in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities were talked into being as contingent, relational identities against the foil of a constructed “other.”

Octreotide is a potent somatostatin analog therapeutically used to treat several conditions including hyper GH secretion in patients with acromegaly. We infused, over 30 s, octreotide into male rats every 12 h for 6 days at levels considerably greater than typical human therapeutic doses. Unexpectedly, resulting circulating GH profile was characterized by pulses of higher amplitudes, longer durations, and greater total content than normal, but still contained an otherwise male-like episodic secretory profiles. In apparent disaccord, the normally elevated masculine expression levels (protein and/or mRNA) of CYP2C11 (accounting for >50% of the total hepatic cytochrome P450 content), CYP3A2, CYP2C7, and IGF1, dependent on the episodic GH profile, were considerably downregulated. We explain this contradiction by proposing that the requisite minimal GH-devoid interpulse durations in the masculine profile that solely regulate expression of at least CYP2C11 and IGF1 may be sufficiently reduced to suppress transcription of the hepatic genes. Alternatively, we observed that octreotide infusion may have acted directly on the hepatocytes to induce expression of immune response factors postulated to suppress CYP transcription and/or upregulate expression of several negative regulators (e.g. phosphatases and SOCS proteins) of the JAK2/STAT5B signaling pathway that normally mediates the upregulation of CYP2C11 and IGF1 by the masculine episodic GH profile.

This article examines the factors that inhibit the ability of female peacekeepers to make a unique contribution to peacekeeping operations based on their gender. The debates are examined in relation to the claims made about their ability to enhance operational effectiveness and reach out to the local population as women, compared to the actual experiences of South African peacekeepers’ deployed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc) and in Darfur/Sudan. The argument is made that factors stemming from both the military and operational context affect the optimal utilization of women in various ways. As most national armed forces tend to draw their peacekeeping troops from the infantry, women come under tremendous performance pressure when deployed and are obliged to assimilate masculine values in order to be recognised as ‘good’ soldiers. It is argued that this, coupled with the hyper-masculine peacekeeping environment which is hostile to women, undermines their optimal utilization, as well as their ability to infuse a more gendered approach in peacekeeping.

Non-disclosure of distress emerged as a key issue in examining pathways to suicidal action for a group of men. Disclosure of difficulties was viewed as un-masculine, as implying weakness and this was associated with feminine or homosexual type behaviour. Constant performative work, including hyper-performances, was required to project an image of strength and to conceal growing levels of distress. When extreme, this challenged their sense of a coherent self-identity. Performances were directed at family, friends and work colleagues and this inhibited others from identifying and responding to the distress.

AbstractSport is often considered a masculine area of social life, and few sports are more commonly associated with traditional norms of masculinity than ice hockey. Ice hockey is played with a great level of intensity and body contact. This is true for both men and women’s hockey. However, men’s ice hockey in particular has been subjected to criticism for its excessive violence. Sport has also been analyzed as an arena where boys and men learn masculine values, relations, and rituals, and is often linked to orthodox masculinity in particular. Tolerance for gender diversity and diverse forms of masculinity has generally increased during the last 30 years. However, orthodox masculinity seems to maintain a dominate position in sports, particularly in hyper-masculine sports such as ice hockey. In this article, narratives of masculinity and violence in professional ice hockey are a central focus. Through a narrative analysis of the biographies of two former National Hockey League (NHL) players, Bob Probert and Derek Boogaard, this article explores how narratives of masculinity and violence among hockey players have been described and how these narratives tell stories of the interplay between masculinity and violence in modern sport. The analysis illustrates how the narratives of the lives and careers of these athletes provide insight into the many personal risks and implications athletes in highly masculine sporting environments face. The analysis also illustrates how the common acceptance (and sometimes encouragement) of player violence and ‘violence against the self’ in ice hockey has led to many broken bodies, lives, and careers among professional male athletes.

The study addresses how young women navigate urban terrains that are characterized by high levels of interpersonal aggression and crime. It is argued that young women apply a range of gendered tactics to establish safety and social mastery, and that these are framed by the limits and possibilities imposed by a street-based hypermasculine script. The analysis rests on an ethnographic study among 25 young Danish women aged 13 to 23 experienced in engaging in street-based physical violence. The study suggests that explorations of female tactics can provide a useful method of analysis for understanding female agency in (hyper)masculine social terrains.

Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I attempt to draw connections between how the body interacts in Ukraine’s public and private sphere since the emergence of Femen in 2008. My research explores the ways in which deviant gender performances – such as the use of sextremism and hypersexualized acts in a hyper-masculine domain - have the ability to alter past meanings associated with the body. In such, the body becomes empowered through its own redefinition. Despite conflicting opinions about the effectiveness of this form of protest, this paper argues that Femen has successfully challenged conventional norms of femininity in the public sphere through its naked body protests by redefining the body as a political tool and as a site of liberation – thereby creating a space for politically active women in the traditionally masculine sphere of politics. The implications of this research provide insight into similar radical feminist movements that engage the body in overtly sexual and public ways. By understanding the body through Butler’s theory of gender performance, these feminist movements can be critically understood as resistant, empowering, and liberating.

Since the 1994 genocide and civil war, the Rwandan government has implemented an externally funded disarmament, demobilization and reintegration/security sector reform (DDR/SSR) programme culminating in the consolidation of armed groups into a new, professionalized Rwanda Defence Force. Feminists argue that DDR/SSR initiatives that exclude combatant women and girls or ignore gendered security needs fail to transform the political conditions that led to conflict. Less attention has been paid to how gendered relations of power play out through gender-sensitive DDR and SSR initiatives that seek to integrate women and transform hyper-masculine militarized masculinities. This article investigates how Rwanda’s DDR/SSR programme is governed by an oppressive masculine logic. Drawing on critical studies on men and masculinities and feminist work on peacebuilding, myths and the politics of belonging, it argues that Rwanda’s locally owned DDR/SSR programme places the military and militarization at the centre of the country’s nation-building programme. Through various ‘boundary-construction’ practices, the Rwandan government attempts to stabilize the post-1994 gender order and entrench the hegemony of a new militarized masculinity in Rwandan society. The case study draws on field research conducted in 2014 and 2015 and a discourse analysis of historical accounts, policy documents and training materials of the Rwanda Defence Force.

The growing presence of LGBTQ police officers and civilian personnel within police organizations, their presence at LGBTQ community events, increased recruitment efforts, and the emergence of LGBTQ advocacy groups within polic-ing invites research into the lived experiences of these police service members. My 2014 study of 21 LGBTQ sworn police officers in Ontario revealed that most officers believe their status and relationships in their workplaces are more positive today compared to other eras. However, it also found that they believe that police culture fundamentally retains a hyper-masculine and heterosexual orientation. A subsequent study of the intersectionality of gender and sexual orientation for gay female sworn police officers found that being “female” and being “gay” exposes LGBTQ female police officers to challenges regarding both their gender and their sexual orientation—specifically workplace harassment and having to conform to masculine “norms”. However, the research also suggests that these and other challenges in a police environ-ment based on sexual orientation are not as overt as those based on gender alone. Understanding such subtle differences is vital to creating inclusive and supportive work environments in which LGBTQ members can thrive and contribute as their authentic selves and find legitimacy and respect as police professionals.

This article discusses the work of 19th-century gender norms in the reception of contemporary piano virtuose, led by Clara Wieck Schumann and Marie Moke Pleyel. The discussion reveals telling discrepancies between the reception of the virtuose and their male colleagues, such as Liszt, who were mostly celebrated in hyper-masculine terms, as "heroes", "gods", and the like, while the virtuose were praised mainly on account of their visual appearance rather than virtuosic prowess, rejecting any comparison on an equal footing with the virtuosi. Finally, in a number of reviews, Wieck and Moke were explicitly proclaimed "honorary males" on account of their skills. This shows 19th-century gender norms at work, reserving excellence in any intellectual task to men, even when displayed by women.

The issue of social violence has received increasing attention by policy makers and commentators on public matters. The dominant approach to interpreting social violence emphasises individual pathological behaviour. Educators facing the reality of violent behaviour in schools are offered only limited approaches for coming to terms with both the reality and the interpretation of this social trend. The paper offers a critical cultural analysis, one that opens the way to a consideration of several factors at the centre of the violence phenomenon. In particular, it considers the construction of certain forms of masculine identity that are a result of tension between the contradictions inherent in the imperative of hyper-rationality, on the one hand, and the deep cultural logic which privileges adult status over that of the younger generation, on the other. The analysis of these trends includes some specific curriculum considerations.

This article seeks to understand the process of market-based identity-building by looking at the life stories of female hardcore gamers. A dual theoretical framework is used: identity-building through consumption and gender via symbolic violence. Analysis of the meaning attributed to the underlying consumption practices and identity mindsets in the face of a masculine market norm reveals the following: (1) the relationship between female hardcore gamers and the gendered norm of the gaming market for hyper-players; (2) the ways in which this norm is appropriated and (3) the typical path of the female gamers concerned. The findings enable a discussion about the notion of symbolic violence driven by the market, where gender becomes an identity resource that can be manipulated through consumption practices that can lead to a certain emancipation, primarily linked to the possession of capital.

ABSTRACTUgandan colonial authorities carved Bugisu and Bukedi districts out of Mbale district in 1954, isolating Mbale town as a separate entity. With ethnic tensions escalating as independence approached, Gisu and Gwere fought for Mbale's ownership. Empowered by decentralisation, Bugisu District Council pressed the colonial state to declare Mbale part of Bugisu, viewing the town as key to the region's wealth, and providing a symbolic status similar to that enjoyed by Uganda's leading ethnic groups. Gisu activists reinvented tradition as a tool of political advocacy, exerting hyper-masculine power over Mbale's non-circumcising Gwere residents through forcible circumcision. Gisu reformulation of a cultural practice within an urban struggle challenges previous categorisations of the Mbale case as merely another local obstacle to Uganda's peaceful decolonisation. Evidence analysed in this article contributes to a new understanding of East Africa's uneasy transition to self-government, and to the role of ethnic competition within late-colonial mobilisations more broadly.

In the Indian society, gender roles have played an important role in shaping the culture. However, due to technological advancements and change in societal needs, there is an evolution in the gender roles. This evolution has created a need to understand the gendered products from a new perspective. Therefore, this paper tries to discover the factors of consumption of gendered products and role of social media in shaping the consumption pattern and motivation of women in biking industry in India. Subsequently, to address the objectives, qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, netnography and projective techniques are applied and data is analyzed further. With the help of data analysis, it has been found that that Indian woman is motivated by a quest for freedom, independence and empowerment. The families and close-knit communities that they are part of, such as Bikerni Association of India, help them participate in a hyper-masculine product market.

This special issue is devoted to The Good Wife ( TGW) and unpacking the discursive divide between “quality” niche programming and mass entertainment broadcast programming. These essays question the conversations about quality swirling around a show that carries all the markers of prestige, but that also features the female protagonist, broadcast home, procedural roots, and soapiness often denigrated or overlooked by critics and academics alike. In response to the inherently gendered notions of quality, these essays re-center feminine subjects and interrogate masculinizing discourses through an array of approaches to a single series, analyzing TGW via the lenses of habitual mobile technologies, fashion, fantasy, and the labor of wifedom and motherhood. Analyzing this particular series through discourses of quality is not only a way to acknowledge a broadcast series within pre-existing standards of excellence but also a way to begin to reclaim television studies’ feminist roots from often hyper-masculine discussions of twenty-first-century quality TV.

This article attempts to discuss the cultural and comparative analysis between the visions in the novel The Whale Rider and the cinematic adaptation of the same. The novel and the cinema concentrated on the central character in the film Paikea and her struggles to break out of the hyper masculine orthodox visions of her grandfather Koro. It would then try to understand the implications of the cinema and its visions on gender and its reverberation and how it resonate the modern world in the cultural and political landscape of the present New Zealand and modern people. Maori culture of New Zealand also plays a big role in this novel and cinema. It connects its people both with each other and with the land. In the cinematic version we can see the traditional story is incorporated into the modern setting. The film used so many strategies, these includes extending the myth, re-applying it, or subverting it. But both film and the cinema tries to convey the main social issue the function of woman in a world controlled by men.

This paper explores issues relevant to youth, masculinity, Internet, and sport studies through a case study of the “anti-jock” (cyber)movement. The anti-jock movement is group of self-described “marginalized youth” who, through the production and consumption of anti-jock Websites, express dissatisfaction with and anger toward institutions that uncritically adulate hyper-masculine/high-contact sport culture and the athletes who are part of this culture (i.e., the “jocks"). Through these Websites, strategies of resistance against the “pro-jock” establishment are offered. An analysis of these sites acts as a departure point for considering how existing approaches to understanding youth cultural activity might be integrated with strands of new social movement theory to better account for more advanced forms of youth opposition/activism that have emerged following (and as a partial result of) the mass adoption of Internet-based communication. Also included is a discussion of the potential for anti-jock Websites specifically, and youth produced alternative-media generally, to empower youth and/or alter the oppressive forces that impact various “outsider” youth groups. The paper concludes with suggestions for future work that would extend and evaluate the ideas proposed here.

Abstract Since the late twentieth century, Buenos Aires has been widely publicized outside Argentina as a “gay-friendly” destination. This period has also seen increasing immigration to the city from other parts of South America, especially neighboring countries and others with sizeable indigenous populations. An ongoing popular national narrative highlights hyper-masculinity as a preeminently Argentine characteristic. Distinct discourses characterizing Argentina as racially white-majority and anti-foreign and anti-indigenous, overinvested in machismo, and at the same time welcoming to nonheterosexual foreigners seem, on the surface, to be at odds. In this essay I explore intersections among race, gender, sexuality, and foreign origin as cross-cutting planes of discourse, which are all subsumed within and constitutive of the Argentine national imaginary. While these distinct domains of reference can isolate and contain different sectors of Argentine society, I argue that it is the overlapping, simultaneous application of raced-sex terms that necessarily denies masculine superiority to others and promotes it among Argentine men. Ultimately, therefore, a “permissive” atmosphere cannot challenge heteronormativity. I consider the ways that racial and sexual epithets (including maricón and puto “fag,” boliguayo “Bolivian + Paraguayan alien” or “Indian,” and brasileño, literally “Brazilian” but code for “Afro-heritage/black”) are differently used in conversational settings and media reports about sports teams and sporting events, especially soccer, as well as during those events.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute with increased knowledge about gender in mining by exploring how women are discursively represented in texts produced by actors in the international mining arena. Design/methodology/approach The study combines corpus linguistic methods and discourse analysis. It implies a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, where the former is used as the point of departure for the latter, and where the material analysed is chosen on the basis of certain selected search phrases. The source for the study is the web, and the search engine used for the retrieval of data is WebCorp Live, a tool tailored for linguistic analysis of web material. Findings The analysis reveals that although the overarching theme in the women-in mining discourse is that women are needed in the industry, the underlying message is that women-in-mining are perceived as problematic. Practical implications The study shows that if mining is to change into a modern industry, the inherent hyper-masculine culture and its effects on the whole industry needs to be problematised and made evident. To increase the mere number of women, with women still heavily underrepresented, is not enough to break gender-biased discrimination. Originality/value The research contributes with new knowledge about gender in mining by using a method, which so far has had limited usage in (critical) discourse analysis.

While gender-based scholarship on the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is largely centred on a woman’s right to unveil, those adopting an LGBT+ framework tend to focus on human rights violations against homosexual males. This paper provides a more inclusive study in its assessment of the state’s oxymoronic approach to trans persons in Iran and the use of gender affirming surgery to reposition its subjects in line with hegemonic notions of “healthy” sexualities. In this context, the Iranian woman, bound by a particular conception of Islamic femininity, and the Iranian man, embodied by the hyper-masculine martyr figure, are promoted as the only genderisms acceptable to the state. This binary of hetero-Muslim male/female excludes all other expressions of gender. Ignoring the country’s historic array of masculinities and sexualities, the IRI criminalises gender “passing” in its limited notion of gender performativity. Furthermore, it utilises gender affirming surgery as a tool for repositioning divergent identities and sexualities within the state-sanctioned paradigm. While the state appropriates trans bodies to promote the ideal gendered subject, the framework of gender performativity is also adopted by regime critics to promote cis-gendered female agency: popular culture employs “cross-dressing” to contest the policing of heteronormative bodies and sexualities. Undoubtedly such methods are complicit in the continuation of discriminatory practices against trans persons in Iran.

Until recently injured veterans of the Afghanistan War (2001–present) and the Iraq War (2003–2011) were significantly absent in US media. However, veterans are becoming increasing visible in mainstream US media. This article suggests that the initial reluctance to represent injured veterans stemmed from the deep-rooted governmental and military need to reinforce the ideology of a masculinised US identity. American masculinity relies on the preservation of the hyper-masculine ‘all American hero’, hence the previous invisibility of injured or ‘damaged’ veterans in the media. However, the new wave of veteran images which is rapidly coming to the fore in US media indicates a shift in public perceptions of veterans. The central focus of the article is the recent increase in the visibility of veterans in US media, with veteran Noah Galloway featuring on prime time television show Dancing with the Stars, and photographer Michael Stokes’ photobook and online projects Bare Strength and Always Loyal featuring injured veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. While increasing the visibility of veterans in the media is commendable, Dancing with the Stars’ and Stokes’ representations present their own difficulties in terms of the narratives used by each to depict the veterans. Through a close textual analysis, this article examines how representations of injured veterans in US media have been transformed, explores the reasons for this shift and identifies the potential problems with the more recent depictions.

This paper examines the management of feminine identities in a women's rugby team in a rural British community. In so doing, the issue of new, and potentially problematic, forms of femininity are explored, with their attendant social consequences. The team, known as the Jesters, is situated in a social context which is dominantly masculine and heterosexist, with rigidly enforced gender roles. Due to their participation in rugby, a ‘man's game’, the Jesters are threatened with marginalisation for their apparent failure to conform to, and potential disruption of, established gender norms. This threat is managed through the performance of certain ‘inauthentic’ feminine identities (hyper-femininity and heterosexuality) on the part of the entire team. It is this ‘team identity’ which lies at the heart of this paper. This paper therefore examines the group dynamics of identity performance and negotiation. In negotiating ‘normal’ the Jesters are forced to confront changing gender norms and social contexts within the team itself. This paper also examines the difficulties faced by individuals when their own interests are opposed to the interests of the group of which they are a part. Although largely uncaring about the private lives of team members, the heterosexual members of the Jesters refuse to tolerate the performance of alternative versions of femininity when it may result in the exclusion of the team as a whole. This paper therefore examines the differing interests of heterosexual and lesbian femininities within a potentially marginalised group and some of the coping mechanisms adopted by both groups to develop a coherent team image.

Burhan Wani, the ‘pin-up boy’ of Kashmiri separatism was shot dead by Indian Special Forces in July 2016. Wani, a commander for Kashmir-based militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, was popular on social media for his advocacy against Indian rule in Kashmir and his calls suggesting violent insurrection against the Indian state. As a Kashmiri Muslim, Wani was doubly marginalised by the dominant Hinduised space of the imagined Indian nation; his reactive masculinity directly challenged the Hindu bravado he encountered in the state-sanctioned hyper-masculinity exemplified by the Indian Armed Forces. The article is inspired by the theoretical contributions of Jasbir Puar and Sudhir Kakar, who argue that the heteronormativity of society is produced through the homosexual and that the Hindu is constituted through the Muslim Other. Furthermore, utilizing Dibyesh Anand’s critical conceptualization of Indian nationalism as ‘porno nationalism’, the article argues that the way the Muslim is constituted is by fetishisation of the Muslim body as ‘hypersexed’, ‘abnormal’ and often criminal. Wani’s masculinity and his public representation constitute a nexus between the technological advancement that enables growing linkages between elements of the global jihad, the emergence of a transnational jihadi culture and him as a role model for young men, whose class and religious identity is superseded by the irredentist claims of the freedom fighter. Refocusing our attention from the superstructures of global masculine posturing to localized, individual experiences of violence, this article aims to reposition Wani, and Muslims, as integral to the masculinities of the Indian State.

First-person narratives of suicidal behavior may provide novel insights into how individuals with lived experience of suicide understand and narrate their behavior. Our aim was to explore the narratives of young men hospitalized following nonfatal suicidal behavior (NFSB), in order to understand how young suicidal men construct and understand their actions. Data were collected via narrative interviews with 14 men (aged 18–34 years) admitted to hospital following an act of NFSB in Cape Town, South Africa. Narrative analysis was used to analyze the data. Two dominant narratives emerged in which participants drew on tropes of the “great escape” and “heroic resistance,” performing elements of hegemonic masculinity in the way they narrated their experiences. Participants position themselves as rational heroic agents and present their suicidal behavior as goal-directed action to solve problems, assert control, and enact resistance. This dominant narrative is incongruent with the mainstream biomedical account of suicide as a symptom of psychopathology. The young men also articulated two counter-narratives, in which they deny responsibility for their actions and position themselves as defeated, overpowered, wary, and unheroic. The findings lend support to the idea that there is not only one narrative of young men’s suicide, and that competing and contradictory narratives can be found even within a dominant hyper-masculine account of suicidal behavior. Gender-sensitive suicide prevention strategies should not assume that all men share a common understanding of suicide. Suicide can be enacted as both a performance of masculinity and as a resistance to hegemonic gender roles.

In her recent book published after the election of Donald Trump as the US President in 2016, Cynthia Enloe argues that the patriarchy, similar to our smart phones, has updated itself as a reaction against the achievements of the second and third wave feminisms. The updated patriarchy has this time renewed itself through the beliefs and values about the ways the world works (2017). The competing foreign policies representing the hypermasculine hegemonic masculinity of the current world politics and its authoritarian leaders are the outputs of this new updated version of patriarchy. Enloe doubts that having gained sustainability with its updates, the patriarchy could be fought against simply with street demonstrations, as it was before. The patriarchy could be forced to retreat only by incessantly asking “curious” feminist questions that would expose all masculine patterns of life (2017). Continuously asking questions without giving up or giving in would make the patriarchy transparent and vulnerable. In the face of curious, non-stop questions from a gender perspective and the conscious use of the terms supporting gender equality, the patriarchy, albeit updated and sustained, does not stand a chance. Enloe explains the reason why incorporating gender in International Relations has been considered irrelevant by the power- and security dominated character of the discipline. Also, because the heavy majority of the academics associated with International Relations are male, it is them who choose what is important and worthy of ‘serious’ investigation (Enloe, 2004, 96). This masculine attitude, however, has been clearly excluding multiple human experiences and hindering their capacity to create new possibilities for peaceful co-existence in international relations (Youngs, 2004). As a matter of fact, when we look at the emergence of International Relations as a separate discipline, and the political theories that it takes as its first point of reference, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen) – the human rights document at the time of the French Revolution – Machiavelli’s The Prince; and Man, the State and War, written in 1959 by Kenneth Waltz, the founder of neo-realism, were the mainstream writings that brought liberal (libertarian) and realist perspectives to the discipline of International Relations, respectively. The fundamental aim of these texts was, in fact, to make an analysis based on history and ‘his’ problems. Although these texts put forward a desire for rights and freedoms, as well as the achievement of peace, these values are mostly targeted towards men. Thus, over time, the prominent concepts of International Relations, such as security and hegemony, were defined from a masculine and patriarchal perspective. For instance, from the theoretical view of realists, hegemony is attributed to the order established and led by the most powerful state of the international system– both militarily and economically– while sovereignty evokes the Hobbesian Leviathan (the Devil), with its masculine nature and might. Raewyn Connell responds to these masculine conceptualizations by pointing out that hegemony includes organized social domination in all spheres of life, from religious doctrines to mundane practice, from mass media to taxation (1998: 246). As Connell reminds us, “hegemonic masculinity” expresses the domination of men over women intellectually, culturally, socially, or even politically, thus establishing an unequivocal linkage between gender and power (Connell, 1998). Just as the Western approach to reading and identifying the East and its fiction found an answer in Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, the theory of political realism put forth by Hans Morgenthau was criticized by Ann Tickner for conceptualizing international politics through the lens of an assumed masculine subject (Tür & Koyuncu, 2010: 9). Critical theory and postmodernism, as alternative approaches in International Relations, drew attention to the otherization of different geographies, civilizations and identities. Yet, on the issue of gender equality, the otherization of women has not been sufficiently recognized; the superiority of man and patriarchy is made possible through the othering of women. From this point of view, it would be beneficial to make a holistic reading of the International Relations literature, and to dismantle these masculine concepts by asking “curious” questions of the discipline. In Terrell Carver’s words, “Gendering IR” is...a project; “gendered” IR is an outcome” (Carver, 2003: 289). In order to achieve such outcome, it bears utmost importance for the gender-equality advocates to insist on, institutionally and practically, gender-based approaches and to not agree with the priority list of the masculine agenda. Security, order, control and retaliation increasingly dominate the discourse shaping the world politics. The gender perspective in International Relations develops to create alternative paradigms that would break this vicious circle of (in)security. Feminist theory in International Relations has demonstrated significant progress since the 1990s and opened pathways in an uncharted territory. Cynthia Enloe, Ann Tickner, Spike V. Peterson and Christine Sylvester, among others, are the most prominent forerunners of this field. Through their works, feminist theory has adopted a perspective critical of the masculinity and the masculine values of international politics by taking not only ‘women’ but a wider category of gender into its centre. These feminist scholars have deconstructed International Relations theories by posing gender-related questions and displayed the masculine prejudice embedded in the definitions of security, power and sovereignty. The feminist theories of International Relations have thus distinguished themselves from the other theories of the discipline by paying a ‘curious’ attention to the power hierarchies and relation structures through inclusiveness and self-reflexivity (True, 2017: 3). As Cynthia Enloe puts it, the gender perspective in International Relations must first be guided by a feminist consciousness (2004: 97). The feminist International Relations, however, although more than a quarter of century has passed since its emergence, are still struggling with the masculine theories to be considered as an equally legitimate way of understanding how the world works. Various epistemological, ontological and ethical debates may have enriched the field (True, 2017: 1), but at the same time, too many as they are, such debates may paradoxically be accusing the spreading-thin of the gender coalition. The capacity of the feminist International Relations’ ethical principles to participate in the global politics has been limited to the United Nations Security Council’s decision number 1325 and the Swedish feminist foreign policy. The feminist attempt to facilitate substantial change and interaction by creating a normative agenda has been called ‘normative feminism’ by Jacqui True (2013: 242). Normative feminism is a project of institutionalising gender in foreign policy by focusing on socio-economic and political changes. The special issue here is our attempt to partake in this project of change in international relations. We have aimed to enhance the visibility of the gender norms of behavior and decision-making with the presupposition that they would pose an alternative to the masculine norms in International Relations by better supporting the human priorities of peace and co-existence. Adopting Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the feminist existence in international politics has an undeniable connection to engaging in continuous activities. As Rihannan Bury suggests, “what gives a community its substance is the consistent repetition of these ‘various acts’ by a majority of members.” “Being a member of community,” therefore, “is not something one is but something one does” (2005: 14). In Turkey, too, in order to challenge the recognition of the ‘hyper’ version of the hegemonic masculinity as the only viable world view, gender-charged normative discourses, interactions and agendas must be continuously created and multiplied. We hope that the Turkish literature-review and the articles published here will serve this purpose. As is the situation in all disciplines, the feminist International Relations has nurtured many onto-epistemologies, some in competition with one another. Such multitude, though definitely a richness, has been challenging the feminist stance’s capacity to stand united against the hypermasculine hegemonic masculinity. In her latest book, Enloe calls for a continuous struggle of a new and wider feminist coalition against the updated authoritarianism of the patriarchy –inspiring our title “Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give In!.” Such expanded coalition could rise on the common purpose of fighting male dominance and ignore the differences of discourse created by the debate on identity. The gender-guided change and transformation desired in international politics could be achieved more easily in this way (Hemmings, 2012: 148, 155). On this account, in parallel with Enloe’s proposal of establishing a wider consensus simply on peace and co-existence (2017), a new era, in which questions of identity will, for some time, not be asked, may be dawning. A grand coalition of consensus has better chance of resisting the authoritarian leaders of hyper hegemonic masculinity. Our special issue of Gender and International Relations opens with a Turkish literature review with the aim of introducing the topic to Turkish readers. Çiçek Coşkun, against a historical background, presents some of the prominent feminist scholars who have left their footprints in this very masculine area with their fresh gender perspectives. In doing that she offers us a comparative framework in which works by the Turkish and international scholars could be assessed simultaneously. Nezahat Doğan’s article seeks to establish the relation between global peace and gender by using the data obtained from the Global Peace Index, Gender Inequality Index and Social Institutions and Gender Index. In this way, adopting a currently trendy approach, Doğan investigates the interaction between gender and International Relations through a quantitative method. Zehra Yılmaz’s article discusses the temporary position of Syrian women asylum seekers in Turkey from the perspective of the post-colonial feminist concept of subaltern. The article aims to combine feminist migration studies and post-colonial feminist literature within the context of International Relations. Sinem Bal’s article questions whether the EU has designed its gender policies as an aspect of the human-right norms of the European integration or as a way to regulate market economy. Bal pursues such questioning through the reading of the official documents of the EU that prescribes what Europeanization is for Turkey. Thus, all articles constitute a well-rounded understanding of what gendered approaches can achieve in the current practice of international studies. The co-authored article written by Bezen Balamir-Coşkun and Selin Akyüz examined how the images of women leaders in international politics were presented in the international media. The selected images the three most powerful women political leaders list of Forbes in 2017 –Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Federica Mogherini were analysed in the light of the political masculinities literature from a social visual semiotics perspective. It is believed that such an analysis will contribute to the debates about gendered aspect of international relations as well as the current debates on political masculinities. Gizem Bilgin-Aytaç points out that the global policy that emerged after the Cold War and the emergence of the new way of approaching the IR from a feminist perspective have improved the scope of conceptual analysis in peace theories as well. Bilgin-Aytaç discusses global peace conditions with a gender perspective - in particular, referring to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, with a focus on exemplary contemporary issues. Fulden İbrahimhakkıoğlu, in her article, discusses the debate between Ukraine-based feminist group FEMEN staged several protests in support of Amina Tyler, a Tunisian FEMEN activist receiving death threats for posting nude photographs of herself online with social messages written on her body and the Muslim Women Against FEMEN who released an open letter criticizing the discourse FEMEN used in these protests, which they found to be white colonialist and Islamophobic. Thus, İbrahimhakkıoğlu aimes to examines the discursive strategies put forth by the two sides of the very debate, and unveiling the shortcomings of liberalism as drawn on by both positions, the author attempts to rethink what “freedom” might mean for international feminist alliances across differences.

SUMMARY This article examines the interplay between umlaut and plurality in Old High German as well as the modern language, a diachronic problem central to the theoretical literature on 'Natural Morphology' (NM). The NM analysis of these relations is revised on a variety of theoretical and emplrical counts. This examination results first in a reformulation of iconicity and markedness in the NM morphological typology, namely that umlaut+affix plurals are better understood as hypericonic but at the same time highly marked with regard to other parameters. Further, the rise of such forms in Old High German must be fundamentally philologically reanalyzed. For the masculine /-stems, the evidence points to a phonological origin of the connection of umlaut to plurality, rather than the morphologically-driven account usual in the previous NM literature. RÉSUMÉ Cet article examine l'effet réciproque entre la pluralité et les mutations vocaliques ('umlaut') en Vieux Haut Allemand ainsi que la langue moderne. Le problème diachronique est au centre du débat théorique de la 'morphologie naturelle' (MN). L'analyse du point de vue de MN de cette relation est revisée en considération de plusieurs aspects théoriques et emplriques. Cette investigation propose une formulation nouvelle de l'iconicité et de la théorie de la 'markedness' dans la typologie morphologique de MN; à savoir les pluriels de combinaison 'mutation vocalique-affixe' sont 'hyper-iconiques' alors que fort marqués relativement à d'autres paramètres. En outre, il faut réanalyser l'augmentation de ces formes en Vieux Haut Allemand dans une perspective philologique. Quant aux noms masculins à radicaux i, l'evidénce suggère une origine phonologique de la correspondance entre la mutation vocalique et la pluralité, plutöt que morphologique comme dans les analyses auparavant. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Umlaut und Pluralität im Althochdeutschen sowie im modernen Deutschen, ein Problem der historischen Sprachforschung, das im Mittelpunkt der theoreti-schen Diskussion zur 'Natürlichen Morphologie' (NM) steht. Die NM-Analyse dieser Wechselbeziehungen wird anhand von mehreren theoretisehen und em-plrischen Überlegungen revidiert. Dabei fiihrt die Untersuchung zunächst zu einer Neubearbeitung von Ikonizitat und Markiertheit in der NM morpho-logischen Typologie, namlich dadurch, daB Umlaut+Affix Pluralformen eher als 'hyperikonisch', aber gleichzeitig hinsichtlich anderer Parameter als stark markiert zu verstehen sind. Weiter muß die Entstehung solcher Formen im Althochdeutschen philologisch neu bewertet werden. Im Falle der maskulinen i-Stamme deuten die Daten darauf hin, daB der Ursprung der Verknupfung des Umlauts mit der Pluralmarkierung phonologische Griinde hat und nicht mor-phologisch motiviert ist, wie man gewöhnlich in der NM-Literatur ange-nommen hat.

Abstract This paper discusses the role of Christ of the Good Death as a key figure and symbol in a masculine performance by the Spanish Legion in its religious, historical and social context. We explain the recently emerging controversy with regard to the Legion’s performance by pointing out the rapidly changing gender ideology and practice in Spain. The democratization of the Holy Week celebration and ‘gentrification’ of the carriers of the processional images (pasos) over the past few decades, hint at less martial and proletarian notions of manhood.

AbstractThe purpose of this paper was to examine the relationships of homosexual male students at the senior high school level and their loneliness using parental bonding attitude as a moderating factor. An amount of 127 homosexual male senior high school students in Taiwan is studied. The Pearson correlation analysis and the hierarchical regression analysis are adapted to examine two proposed hypotheses. Based on the results, homosexual male senior high school students in both hyper-masculine and feminine gender roles are found to feel loneliness, but levels of loneliness of those who possess hyper-masculine gender role are relatively lower than those in a feminine role. In addition, the levels of loneliness of homosexual male senior high school students could be negatively affected by parental bonding attitudes (Care). Recommendations and suggestions for parents as well as teachers of homosexual senior high school male students and future studies are underscored at the end of this article.