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Abstract

Care is a global issue of critical importance in the formation of masculinities. The paper argues for a need to “decolonize” and “degender” care. In dialogue with Connell’s “hegemonic masculinity,” the article explores its conceptual resilience, advocating for further initiatives to engage with transforming the gender order. The concept of “caring masculinities” aims to achieve this, with the study providing a critical evaluation of the potential of this framework. It demonstrates how caring masculinities may augment dominant masculinities, consolidate colonial and gendered regimes, and produce care as a new masculine hegemony in neoliberal economies. However, it is argued that caring masculinities can progress by engaging feminist and decolonial insights on the structural, material, and regional disparities in care. It concludes by putting “care theory” into “care practice.” This entails mapping how caring masculinities is surfacing transnationally in pedagogy, policy and practice, and the times and spaces where it might proliferate.

Keywords

care caring masculinities Raewyn Connell decolonial fatherhood gender equality global care chains hegemonic masculinity masculinities race

Introduction

In wake of the popular theorization of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Messerschmidt 2019) has emerged a series of new contenders, vying in the slipstream of Gender Studies, Feminism, and Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM). Examples include such concepts as “caring masculinities” (Hanlon 2012; Elliott 2016, 2020), “hybrid masculinities” (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Eisen and Yamashita 2017), “inclusive masculinity theory” (Anderson 2009; Anderson and McCormack 2018) and clinical psychology accounts pertaining to “toxic masculinity” (Kupers 2005; Parent et al. 2019). From these competing gender taxonomies, it is argued that the concept of caring masculinities offers the most potential, in terms of refiguring gender relations and changing the gender order.

The article begins by exploring the reinvigoration of care as a meta-theory, for understanding human relationships. Care is a global issue, formative of masculinities and gender inequalities. As care relations are a fundamental axis upon which the sexual division of labor is produced in society, gender scholars have agitated for a “feminist theory of care” (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Held 2005), to undo masculinities (Elliott 2016; Hearn 2018; Warren 2022) and rethink care relations. Extending this approach, the paper argues for decolonial perspectives on care, that engage with the global migration of health workers, racial disparities in health provision, interdependencies between the global north and south, and inequalities underpinning neoliberal care practices.

The analysis then turns to appraising Connell’s (1987, 1995) promiscuous concept “hegemonic masculinity,” to explore why it has become such a fertile framework for understanding men and masculinities, some thirty years after its initial inception. Following this evaluation, the article examines the concept of “caring masculinities” which has emerged in critical dialogue with hegemonic masculinity and feminist theory (Hanlon 2012; Scambor, et al. 2014; Elliott 2016; Brandth and Kvande 2018). It is argued that care is of significance to CSMM as a means through which different masculinities and femininities are brought-into-being and come to be positioned through and against one another. Despite its appeal, I contend that accounts of caring masculinities need be situated through “material configurations of care.” This has significant bearing upon different men’s abilities to provide care when it comes to time, resources, opportunities and embodied competencies. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how care maybe incorporated into hegemonic masculinity. In such instances, rather than transform gender relations, care may serve to consolidate existing gender and colonizing practices. To avert this, I deploy a feminist-decolonial framework, reflexive to the constraints and possibilities for change. Finally, the article turns to pedagogy, policy and practice, putting “care theory” into “care practice” by mapping possibilities for transformation at local, national, and global scales.

Globalizing Care, Decolonizing Care: Feminist Care Perspectives

The coronavirus global pandemic has witnessed a reinvigorated approach to care. Chatzidakis et al. (2020, 889) declare care, “the buzzword of the moment” and it is said to have “reentered the zeitgeist” (Hobart and Kneese 2020,1). Care work may include a vast array of formal and informal activities, including childcare, elderly care, health care, domestic care, therapeutic care, self-care, nursing, and spousal care amongst other forms of caregiving (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Held 2005; Ruby and Sholz 2018). In this respect, rather than fixing the concept of care upon the elderly and infirm, this paper extends it, by recognizing the interwoven aspects of care in everyday life, where it appears as complex, contingent, multi-layered, and knotted activity that binds us each, to one another.

Critically, care is constituted through relations of power, operating as a vector in the sexual division of labor, demarcating men’s work from that of women. This means care is seen as “feminized” activity—low-paid, unpaid, part-time, and precarious labor (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Held 2005; Co-Author and Author 2022). Furthermore, the societal gendering of care means many women feel compelled to take on the role of primary caregivers. Here, “caring … is the constitutive activity through which women achieve their femininity and against which masculinity takes shape” (Graham 1983, 17). In contrast, ‘hegemonic practices amongst men are also about being care-free’ (Hanlon 2012, 22). The relational aspects of care, and how it operates to interpolate masculine and feminine subjectivities, remains a focus throughout.

Care is a global concern, core to the United Nation’s Global Sustainability Development Goals (UN GSDGs), but also reliant upon the transnational migration and movement of various health workers, knowledge and pharmaceuticals across time and space. Care is a profoundly gendered and raced concept (Bartos, 2019; Raghuram 2019; Sieler 2020). Decolonizing care means opening-up Western modernity and knowledge to the differently embodied experiences, encounters, and perspectives of Black, feminist, queer, Indigenous and minoritized people from around the world. Decolonization connects past colonial histories with contemporary geographies of care; makes gender, race, and class disparities central to care accounts; recognizes co-dependencies between the global north and south; illuminates the flow and circulation of migrant bodies to perform care in the global north; and acknowledges how modernity and whiteness is embedded in neo-colonial health practices, where race is an axis for the hierarchal organisation of international care regimes.

Material care technologies and therapeutic care practices are circulated around the world through an amalgam of “flows,” chains, and networks. Feminist-decolonial research on global care chains and therapeutic networks, has focused on women caregivers and the wider international division of labor, generating inequalities worldwide (Yeats 2004; Raghuram, Madge and Noxolo 2009; Kasper et al. 2019). This work demonstrates the ways in which global therapeutic networks and care practices are gendered, classed, and racialized at multiple intersecting scales. Research on global care chains demonstrates the “stretched out” geographies of care, through relations between the global north and south (Raghuram, Madge, and Noxolo 2009; Raghuram 2016). Global therapeutic networks further comprise the circulation of scientific knowledge, medical technologies, tissue samples, bodily organs, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines around the globe. The movement of human and non-human matter, including the “flow” of patients, service providers and material products are a feature of accelerated global therapeutic mobilities (Kasper et al. 2019), everyday “carescapes,” and postcolonial interdependencies.

Decolonial scholarship identifies the centrality of race in care relations (Näre 2010; Raghuram 2019; Prattes 2022), and the historically classed and racialized processes leading to “white care” (Sieler 2020) in the US being constituted as under threat by the prospect of “Obamacare,” via the Affordable Care Act (Lopez 2019). This impulse is felt where Elliott (2020) draws on black feminist scholar bell hooks to rethink care at the margins to include Black and working-class men. In consciously applying a decolonial framework, I draw attention to whiteness and the intersecting, and multi-scalar inequalities of neoliberal global care regimes. For example, in an insightful study of Sri Lankan domestic workers in Naples, Italy, Näre (2010, 70) discovered migrant cleaners were regarded as ‘asexual, submissive and docile’ despite being understood as traditional, patriarchal head of households in South Asia. This, I contend, is a product of their low-paid status, the gendering of work, and Orientalist depictions that have long-viewed South Asians as a “feminized race.” Because of the classed, gendered, racialized and hetero-patriarchal dimensions of caregiving, it is not surprising that scholars are agitating for an intersectional “ethics of care” (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Näre 2010; Lopez 2019; Raghuram 2019) that acknowledges economic disparities and social inequalities in global care regimes (England and Alcorn 2018).

Feminist research on caregiving has in large part focused upon the plight of women, including nurses, cleaners, au pairs, and domestic maids (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Held 2005), with little attention afforded to men and masculinities. However, the migration, mobility and motility of male nurses is changing care practices internationally (Kaspar et al. 2019) and questioning how we might understand masculinity, care, and the body (England and Dyck 2014). In Italy Gallo and Scrinzi (2016) found upper-middle class male clients with family care needs would outsource “dirty work” to migrant care-workers across lines of class, gender, and ethnicity, thereby perpetuating capitalist hegemonic masculinity and reproducing the colonial division of labor. However, in the case of diasporic male nurses migrating from India to Canada, Walton-Roberts (2019) found male nursing is a low-paid stigmatized career for men in India. Whereas in Ontario male migrant nurses, often from Kerala, found full-time employment in technically advanced positions that could alleviate them from, “less well paid, “caring,” deep emotion and body work” (33), characterized by care for the elderly. On one hand this indicates a reliance on high-skilled migrants, while on the other discloses how even within the “feminized” sector of nursing, care can be “masculinized” through medical professionalization (Hanlon 2012), removal of emotional labor, and separation from bodily dirt and disease.

The rise of dual income households has not lessened the burden of care on women. In short, to progress gender equality, it is necessary that the concept of ‘caring masculinities’ is no longer an oxymoron. ‘Caring masculinities’ is said to be ripe with potential (Elliott 2020; Elliot 2016; Scambor et al. 2014; Sheibling 2018; Hearn 2018). I argue that for the concept to concertedly challenge inequalities it needs to be situated through a critical feminist-decolonial optic, alert to the multiple inequalities and material configurations of care outlined. In the following sections I aim to “stretch the boundaries of care” (Bartos 2019), primarily by critically engaging with masculinities, and, in particular ideas, of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1987, 1995, Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), before turning to transnational practices of “caring masculinities” from men of different ages and backgrounds, with a focus on the white coloniality of care regimes.

Hegemonic Masculinity: Global, Relational, Plural, and Transformational

Raewyn Connell’s (1987, 1995) celebrated framework, pertaining to “hegemonic masculinity,” remains the most influential interpretation of men and gender power in feminist and CSMM. Since its inception, Connell’s (1987) pioneering term “hegemonic masculinity” has been ubiquitous in studies of masculinity, gender, and sexual inequalities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), its popularity is described as “unparalleled,” and its influence “omnipresent” in CSMM (Beasely 2012, 753). Connell draws on Gramsci’s (1971) notion of cultural hegemony in which ruling classes govern by consent, dynamically negotiating and incorporating emergent forms of popular dissent to maintain a male power base. While Connell’s theorization of masculinities is subject to critique (Collier 1998; Demetriou 2001; Hearn 2004; Wetherell and Edley 1999; Beasley 2008, 2012), and further elaboration (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), hegemonic masculinity remains a particularly compelling concept (Wegewood 2009; Messerschmidt 2019).

To begin with, hegemonic masculinity illuminates the global scale of patriarchy where men hold power over women throughout most parts of the world. Here, the concept is much more than the actions of one individual against another, rather hegemonic masculinity involves the material institutionalization of highly particular forms of masculine practice, that can only be achieved through social structures—government, law, family, education, religion, military, labor market and media practices. To this extent Connell convincingly argues against “sex-role theory” in favor of the social construction of gender, and by implication, the societal making of masculinity. In this regard, hegemonic masculinity, far from being inevitable, is the “configuration of gender practice” (Connell 1995, 77), accomplished through social action. This enables us to view the global dominance of men over women not as biological, but as profoundly ideological. Hegemonic masculinity operates then, as a cultural framework for the production and reproduction of gender patterns across a grid of power.

Secondly, hegemonic masculinity is a relational concept in dialogue with various versions of “masculinity” and “femininity” (Nayak and Kehily 2013). As such, it offers much more than a simplistic gender binary but a relational means of producing the gender order through “patterns of practice” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). Here, power is not only enacted against women, but also by some men over other “subordinated masculinities”—for example, gay, effeminate, racialized, or unemployed men. The effect is that while only a minority of men may occupy hegemonic masculinity as a material and discursive position, it nevertheless operates as a desirable norm. To this extent hegemonic masculinity is the most valorized version of being a man; its gravitational force is felt where other forms of masculinity orbit around it, are pulled into its stratosphere, and thereby come to legitimate its hold as an organizing principle in late-modern societies.

Thirdly, masculinity must be understood as diverse and plural. Acknowledging how it intersects with age, class, ethnicity, region, sexuality, and other social variables, means it cannot pass as monolithic; rather it is rendered multiple, mutable and myriad in its contingent formation. Beyond the polarity of “dominant” and “subordinate” masculinities are then to be found other stratifications of gender. This includes “complicit masculinities,” men who do not necessarily embody hegemonic masculinity, but nevertheless benefit from its advantages, as part of the “patriarchal dividend” (Connell 1995: 79). Towards the other end of the spectrum are “marginalized masculinities,” encompassing men on the peripheries of society with relatively little social power, such as the unemployed, homeless, or physically impaired. While these men may still enact forms of violence and abuse against women and men, what Connell terms “protest masculinity” (ibid., 109), such expressions are rarely legitimated by society and the prevailing gender order. Indeed, in such enactments, the radius of power is often localized, self-destructive and, relatively speaking, structurally impotent.

Fourthly, Connell is interested in possibilities for gender transformation, turning to feminist and queer scholarship for inspiration. For Connell (1995, 232) it is here that we can mine opportunities for a “degendering strategy.” The hope being, “a more humane, less oppressive, means of being a man might become hegemonic, as part of a process leading toward an abolition of gender hierarchies” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 833). Historical transformation in what constitutes hegemonic masculinity reveals significant change across time and place. For example, English aristocrats in the early Restoration period of the seventeenth century replaced the military influence in men’s clothing with an excessively flamboyant Baroque style of dress, often accompanied with ornate embroidery, lengthy bouffant wigs, makeup, and highly decorative apparel. However, the chalk-white face powder and makeup could be used to hide war wounds, and the wigs, baldness. The prevailing gender order then reflects the culturally intelligible forms of hegemonic masculinity deemed most desirable at a given moment. This means, ‘[h]egemonic masculinity’ is not a fixed character type” but remains “a position always contestable” (Connell 1995, 76) and subject to a dynamic interplay of power, negotiation and reconfiguration.

Transnational Caring Masculinities: Younger Men, Older Men, and Material Configurations of Care

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in “caring masculinities,”, prominent in CSMM. “Caring masculinities” has emerged through dialogue with Connell’s (1995) “hegemonic masculinity” and longstanding engagements with feminist research on care (Graham 1983; Risman 1983; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). However, “In contrast to feminist theory,” Ruby and Sholz (2018, 73) opine, “theories of masculinity barely reflect on care and care work.”. Emerging studies offer opportunities to address this, where for Elliott (2020, 1735), “Caring masculinities can be defined as masculinities that reject domination and associated patriarchal traits and incorporate instead ideals of care.” This nascent body of work encompasses conceptual, empirical, and policy-orientated investigation on caring masculinities; the primary objective being to enhance gender equality and disrupt dominating forms of masculinity.

Hanlon’s (2012) interviews with caregiving men in Ireland provides a rare empirical contribution, exploring men’s attitudes and practices of care. Significantly, care is seen as optional for men but obligatory for women. Hanlon found most men are not socialized into caregiving, felt they lacked nurturing skills, regard care as feminized activity, which in turn leads to gender subordination and loss of power. Utilizing feminist care theory and CSMM, Elliott (2016) offers a conceptual framing, arguing that men’s care can change gender relations, through a “practice-based” model focused on men’s caregiving practices. Subsequently, Elliott (2020) considers the significance of engaging with “marginal” masculinities to shift the locus of progress and change from the core to the periphery, challenging perceptions of white middle-class heterosexual men as harbingers for gender transformation. A further productive approach is found in work by Hearn and others, mapping policy change around masculinities, care, and gender equality (Scambor et al. 2014; Hearn 2018). Drawing on this, and further literature, I begin by highlighting the problematics of caring masculinities, focusing upon “material configurations of care” and the colonizing practices that give rise to intersecting inequalities. To circumvent this tendency, I then distil aspects of the caring masculinities thesis that have potential to transform the existing global gender order.

Caring Masculinities: Whiteness and Material Configurations of Care

A major claim in caring masculinities scholarship, is that “men’s care can effectively change gender” (Elliott 2016, 255), as doing care-work is, “antithetical to hegemonic masculinity” (254). Crucially, where hegemonic masculinity is produced through social structures, it is imperative that caring masculinities are not reduced to “individual choice” and innate dispositions. Care-relations are imbued with power and any “degendering strategy” (Connell 1995, 232), could be complemented through a “decolonizing” manoeuvre, recognizing global disparities and racial inequalities. Furthermore, “caring masculinities,” as a set of practices, is not distinct from hegemonic masculinity, but rather can be incorporated into this repertoire where it may be “colonized” and “masculinized.”

Material configurations of care are evident in the lived “carescapes” of young people. In Ottawa, Canada, Klodawsky et al. (2006) conducted 156 interviews with young homeless people and found that care, and its lack, were critical issues in youth welfare. Under neoliberalism, they indicate how mainstream government support for homeless youth focuses on education and employment strategies, to the detriment of care and wellbeing. Interviewing 40 marginalized white, young men living in rundown English coastal resorts, Bonner-Thompson and McDowell (2020) found the absence of family support and state resources enhanced precarity in young men’s lives, leaving many reliant upon a transient network of care from friends, siblings and others. This left many with uncertain youth transitions and open to the risks of alcohol, drug-addiction, and homelessness. During multi-site ethnography with unemployed young men and first-time teenage mothers in two English regions, Nayak and Kehily (2014) discovered young people were not only subject to dwindling state resources, but their bodies were routinely stigmatized as abject, undeserving, “out of place.” In a bid for respectability and inclusion many subscribed to a human ethics of care, that emphasized loyalty and strong local ties with friends, non-violence and, for teenage mothers, “putting baby first.” These studies on young people indicate how particular gender identities are produced and refracted through care, local context, and economic conditions.

Countering Elliott’s (2016, 254) claim that caring masculinities is the antithesis of hegemonic masculinity, are a series of studies on fathering and care (Doucet 2016; Hunter et al. 2017; Jordan 2018). The most thorough is Doucet’s (2016) longitudinal research with 134 participants, comprising interviews with Stay-at-Home Dads (SAHDs), couples with a SAHD, and breadwinning mothers in Canada and the US. Doucet’s (2016) aim is to interrogate if SAHD is a feminist concept. She concludes otherwise, since the concept erects binaries of work and care, and engenders individualized conceptions of choice, that have long been the subject of feminist critique. She further suggests that in countries like Sweden the SAHD concept does not exist due to better combinations of paid work and care work, longer parental and paternity leave, high quality day care and a broader national infrastructure of gender equality support. Approaches to caring masculinities need to be aware of regional political economy and how these material conditions shape family decisions. The SAHD is then a double-edged sword for feminist researchers; on one hand, it marks the radical potential for changing gender relations through dismantling the dichotomy of caregiving and breadwinning, but on the other, at least in Canada and the US (Doucet 2016), it is a response to neoliberal restructuring, the displacement of individualized care responsibilities to households, and a move away from public to domestic solutions to childcare. In such examples, the concept of caring masculinities is unlikely to be “radical,” but a position forged and negotiated through structural inequalities and disparities in neoliberal economies.

Material configurations of care appear in Tarrant’s (2018) research with British male carers in low-income families. She argues the concept of caring masculinities needs to be placed within “landscapes of care,” otherwise it fails to “offer a complex account of the social contexts in which caring masculinities might flourish or be supported” (36–38). Tarrant’s male participants found taking on new care responsibilities financially fraught if they were unemployed, retired, or unable to work. These dynamics are more pronounced in times of austerity with cuts in welfare benefit, a state withdrawal of services, increasing longevity and “care-precarity” throughout much of the global north (Boyer et al. 2017; Warren 2022), resulting in growing care needs in a shrinking state (England and Alcorn 2018). These processes serve to accelerate the international migration of healthcare workers to the north, reproduce colonial binaries (Prattes 2022), enhance white privilege, and engender the outsourcing of care from the public to the private sector; sharpening inequalities when it comes to who can afford care and of what quality that might be.

Furthermore, juxtaposing “caring masculinities” with “hegemonic masculinity” (Elliott 2016) risks solidifying and reifying these markers. Men occupy multiple subject positions that may be enacted in different ways according to time and place. Masculinities are gender practices, relational and co-constructed, where hegemonic masculinity may even incorporate aspects of care. In recent work Elliott (2020, 1724) acknowledges how “the intersection of margin and center reveals … movement across, between, around and within these spaces.” As Hunter et al. (2017) reflect, we cannot assume that hegemonic masculinity does not shape the meanings of care and fatherhood. Indeed, in narrative research with 70 SAHDs in Canada, Doucet (2004) discovered that most men were akin to the “complicit masculinities” Connell (1995) describes, prioritizing paid work above care, and viewing their own roles outside of work as substantially diminished. Similarly, in reviewing international literature on fathering, Hunter et al. (2017) speculate that caring masculinities reflect a “broadening” of hegemonic masculinity, as many men may seek to reassert laboring credentials through paid, unpaid and community work.

What is key to understand then, is how care emerges through a neo-colonial capitalist sexual division of labor that can come to augment patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative relations. Prattes (2022), as one of the few scholars to engage with race and coloniality in men’s caregiving, argues Elliott’s emphasis on “non-domination,” must extend beyond gender to engage with multiple intersecting inequalities. She identifies how “coloniality and racial systems of oppression remain anchoring points in many narratives of gender-equal ‘progress’” (726). These dynamics are evident in research on homecare in Italy, where men in upper-middle class households remained emotionally detached from the outsourced migrant caregivers dutifully attending to family members (Gallo and Scrinzi 2016).

The Janus-faced aspects of caring masculinities are revealed in participatory ethnographic research with young people, where men’s caregiving could consolidate or disrupt hegemonic masculinity according to situation and context (Bonner-Thompson and Nayak 2022). This is apparent in Lewington et al.’s (2021) interviews with 15 first-time fathers in Australia, identifying the continuation and contestation of masculine discourses in fatherhood, revealing how men could both adhere to, and admonish ideas of traditional masculinity. The material configurations of caring masculinities are found in some of the case studies Connell narrates of “protest masculinity”:

For instance, Jack Harley, a biker with a history of violence and a criminal record, feels no unease about staying home to do the childcare if his wife can get a better-paying job than he can. Several of his mates do just that. (1995, 109)

Notwithstanding the distinction between “hegemonic” and “protest” forms of masculinity, it is evident that Jack Harley is violent, homophobic but—like “several of his mates”—is unafraid to deal with the physical and emotional work of childcare. This deems it premature to speak of caring masculinities as antithetical to violence and domination, where men occupy multiple, mobile subjectivities. Although Elliott (2016, 2020) indicates the negation of violence and domination is a precondition for caring masculinities to exist, masculinities cannot be abstracted out from the material contexts which produce them. Care relations are suffused with power (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Graham 1983; Held 2005; England and Dyck 2014), their gendered, classed, and colonial histories foreshadow this.

Moreover, where “hegemonic masculinity” is used in the singular, “caring masculinities” need to be understood in their plurality, being differently practiced around the globe. For example, in South Africa Morrell and Jewkes (2011) found men often viewed care in patriarchal terms as “provision” and “protection,” while in North America some men evoked sporting metaphors to emphasize care-work as “heroic” (Sheibling 2018). Näre (2010) found Sri Lankan migrant male domestic workers in Italy, disavowed aspects of their cleaning and caring occupations, through a preference to discuss “masculine” chores including gardening, driving or fixing household items. Thus, men occupy multiple, complex, and contradictory subjectivities, where care and conflict are not mutually distinct, but are interwoven, forming diverse tapestries of masculinity. In some cases, care can unthread conflict as men change and evolve over the life-course, in others it may signal the knitting together of an extended pattern of patriarchy where fathering is the “highest valued” (Prattes 2022, 737) form of caregiving, the apex of masculinity. This could mean that the “new” involved father, may in time become hegemonic, being associated “primarily with White middle-to-upper class fathers” (Hunter et al. 2017, 6).

The tendency to idealize fatherhood as the exemplar of caring masculinities is underpinned by whiteness and its imaginary associations with modernity, progress, and equality. Historically ideas of the “good parent” are premised on “white bodies” and institutions (Sieler 2020; Prattes 2022). Sheibling's (2018) empathetic online study of predominantly “white, heterosexual, and class privileged” (15) fathers in North America, denotes how caring dads present as “real heroes,” thereby incorporating care into the framework of hegemonic masculinity and augmenting whiteness. Within these white male blogging circles, men could be upheld as “saviours” or “superdads” (Kaufman 2013), affirming “heroic narratives” (Doucet 2016) of caring fathers as virtuous, “responsible kin” (Gallo and Scrinzi 2016, 372)—projections of whiteness which silently cast Black, Indigenous, migrant and minoritized fathers as deviant, absent, or dysfunctional.

The coalition of white fatherhood and care is activated when political pressure groups, including certain Father’s Rights campaigners, utilize “caring masculinities” to assert men’s rights in ways that consolidate and maintain white male dominance (Eisen and Yamashita 2017), what Jordan (2018) terms, “masculinizing care.” At its most extreme, “the ‘radical’ aspect of care can bleed into right-wing and white supremacist politics as much as it upholds leftist utopian visions” (Hobart and Kneese 2020, 8). Poeze’s (2019) research on Ghanaian male migrant fathers in the Netherlands implodes the racialized narrative of Black fathers as dysfunctional through focusing on wealth and status. Those who had acquired citizenship, working rights, and good employment invariably maintained strong ties with their children, having money for remittances, visits home and social media technologies to maintain regular contact. However, for undocumented and low-income Black Ghanaians with limited access to resources, familial relations with offspring often deteriorated. As Prattes (2022, 726) alludes, the tendency to equate white middle-class men as talismanic “exemplars of masculine care,” overlooks the structural privileges enabling these practices. She convincingly argues if critical race thinking continues to be bypassed in scholarship on caring masculinities, the concept itself risks becoming “a tool of racialization” (721).

Caring Masculinities: Changing Men, Changing Care

Despite shortcomings to the caring masculinities thesis, it is an “emerging concept” (Elliott 2016). Where Connell reflects upon hegemonic masculinity as a “rather bleak theory” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 833), caring masculinities is hopeful. There are certainly transnational examples of caring masculinities as progressive and beneficial to the lives of men, women, and children. In post-conflict Sierra Leone, masculinity previously centered on being a provider, the difficulties of accomplishing this role saw young men redefining masculinity through care. Following Ebola, McLean (2021, 795) recounts how, “Many young men now see it as their role to perform childcare activities such as feeding, bathing, and dressing children. In fact, simply ‘being there’ seems to be taking precedence over biological paternity.” Rather than appropriate hegemonic masculinity, many performed “alternative masculinities tied to love and care” (800). Telephone-interview research with 25 SAHDs in the US, reveals men may forge closer relationships with their spouses and children in the longer term, leading them to articulate a renewed perspective that “caring is masculine” (Lee and Lee 2018). In Norway, Brandth and Kvande (2018, 87) discovered valorized masculinity was less about “status and resources,” instead “care competence” was the desirable attribute for working fathers.

Significantly hopeful accounts of men’s care extend beyond the prism of parenting. Hanlon’s interviews with male domestic carers in Ireland, illuminates how over time and through experience, “feelings of self-esteem, respect and competence” (2012, 137) could flourish amongst committed male caregivers, transforming their sense of identity. In a pioneering account of older male carers Fisher (1994, 677) reports, “There are circumstances where men accept the obligation to care, undertake intimate personal care, and derive identity and reward from their caring work.” Caring masculinities may be an emerging concept, but male caregiving is longstanding. Milligan and Morbey (2016) discovered older men were often unprepared for care work, found it isolating, but those with extended family and community connections could derive self-worth through spousal care. Indeed, in the UK it is estimated that men make up merely 16 percent of the paid care-worker sector, however when it comes to unpaid family care this figure rises to 42 percent, indicating large numbers of men are involved in the hidden labour of caregiving (SuperCarers 2018).

Increasing longevity and a care crisis mean many men are likely to become caregivers. For example, in Italy, Gallo and Scrinzi (2016) discovered some working- and middle-class men learned embodied skills from care-workers, where “cash-for-care” benefits failed to stretch to meet needs. Such findings concur with Risman’s (1986, 95) rigorous anti-essentialist study of 141 single fathers, which concludes, “men can Mother’ and that ‘mothering’ is not an exclusively feminine skill.” While tempering some of the high expectations of caring masculinities as a utopian solution to gender inequality, the transnational accounts in this section demonstrate the transformative potential of caring masculinities as proposed in recent scholarship (Scambor et al, 2014; Elliott 2016, 2020; Hearn 2018). To further develop this, I turn to pedagogy and policy—translating “care theory” into “care practice.”

Caring Masculinities: Pedagogy, Policy, and Practice

The insights generated from research on male caregivers, is critical to understandings of gender and care. In North America Sheibling (2018) contends “dad bloggers” are reconstructing masculinities through collaborations with feminism, charities, and brand-marketing. Boyer et al. (2017) speculate that ongoing recession and male unemployment could lead to an increase in SAHDs, where male caregiving could transform gender relations. Such possibilities are an evident, though often overlooked, aspect of the coronavirus pandemic (Warren 2022). Media has focused on the rise in male domestic abuse during lock-down, with less attention given to improved family relations generated by men working from home, spending more time with children, and carrying out routine domestic tasks often undertaken by women. Within the UK, there are some signs men are rethinking care commitments, with a surge of “remote workers” emigrating from the city to reside in coastal and rural locations.

Elliott (2016, 241) argues “caring masculinities” is imbued with “the potential to change men and gender.” Since her generative article there have been some inroads by way of pedagogy, policy, and practice. According to Chatzidakis et al. (2020, 889) the coronavirus pandemic has stimulated a “discursive explosion” of care that has inflected public discourse. They argue this creates possibilities for an inclusive feminist project of care, that could be taught to boys at an early age, to “universalize care.” These ideas are put into practice in recent research with children in English Primary Schools, highlighting the value of men’s caregiving, demonstrating how it can be eclipsed by hegemonic masculinity, or reconfigure masculinities altogether (Co-author and Author 2022). In workshops at the annual Dad 2.0 Summit in North America care pedagogies offer ways of socializing boys and men (Sheibling 2018). In South Africa, Morrell and Jewkes maintain caring carves open pathways to gender equality, concluding, “men’s engagement in carework deserves to be an explicit goal of interventions aimed at ‘changing men’” (2011, 9). To this extent, caring masculinities has global reach and “real world” implications for gender transformation, where care equality has the potential to challenge, refigure and transform gender relations.

Indeed, gender equality is one of the 17 UN GSDGs (2021), detailing how the pandemic increases the “burden of unpaid domestic and care-work” upon women, further ostracizing them from the labor market. Hearn’s single and co-authored research exploring the development of supra-national policy frameworks of gender equality and “caring masculinities” in the European Union is instructive (Hearn 2018; Scambor et al. 2014). Reviewing a series of European reports, Scambor et al. (2014) identify a growing interest in engaging men in practices of gender equality, leading Hearn to argue that such policies, “are very much to do with care and caring” (2018, 29). In this sense, critical practices and policy on caring masculinities have the potential to impart regional and global influence upon multiple issues that connect to equality. This might include rethinking responsibilities for childcare, elderly care, domestic care, work-life balance, paternity leave, global care networks and the broader sexual division of labor.

Esquivel (2021) deems the institutionalization of care policies in Latin America and parts of the global south “transformative,” where rights, autonomy, wellbeing, and agency are achieved for caregivers and recipients. The impact of policy is further traced in Nordic countries, where extended paternity leave, with full-pay for 10 weeks, is deployed to encourage working fathers to be caregivers. Brandth and Kvande (2018, 73) maintain “policy has influenced the norms of fatherhood,” where “fathers are expected to use their leave quota and be more than simply family providers.” What this, and studies by Scambor et al. (2014) and Hearn (2018) make clear, is that policies on caring masculinities not only support gender equality on the world stage, including the global south (UN GSDGs 2021; Esquivel 2021; Morell and Jewkes 2011), but have benefits for men too, when it comes to health and wellbeing, improved spousal and familial relations, and the negation of risk-taking and violent acts, which has detrimental effects on men’s lives.

Ruby and Scholz (2018 79) remark how Elliot’s conception of caring masculinities is focused on men, yet there is pressing need to engage boys and younger generations (c.f. Bonner-Thompson and Nayak 2022; Nayak and Bonner-Thompson 2022). Indeed, there is evidence that a “practice-based model” (Elliott 2016) of care is beating a path towards mainstream school pedagogy, illustrated in the latest Department for Education (DfE) guidance for Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) in England and Wales (Nayak and Bonner-Thompson 2022). The guidance, updated since the pandemic, places a pronounced emphasis upon practicing care. The rubric contains sections on, “Families and people who care for me,” and recognizes the intimate value of “Caring friendships” (DfE 2020), an area of mutual reciprocity that may offer new pathways for caring masculinities (Ruby and Scholz 2018). The guidelines for Primary Schools state that children should understand their mental wellbeing and physical health, be able to communicate about their own and others” feelings and learn to practice self-care techniques. This is a significant step forward, where classroom issues of health were individualized, focusing on bodily health, the benefits of dietary nutrition, exercise, and sleep.

Despite these welcome early interventions, there is sparse engagement with the neo-colonial gendered inequality of care regimes and the need to target young men specifically with pedagogies of “caring masculinities.” As Connell (1995, 239) previously remarked, “there is little discussion, informed by research on masculinity, about education for boys in modern mass schooling systems; let alone the principles that would include girls as well as boys in an educational process addressing masculinity.” This is still largely the case, certainly in the UK. Indeed, in the fifty-page government guidance for RSE (DfE 2020), there is no mention of masculinity. The closest we get to any engagement, is in advice to teachers concerning on- and off-line sexual harassment. The guidance imparts that, “assumptions are not made about the behavior of boys and young men and that they are not made to feel that this behavior is an inevitable part of being male,” followed by the rejoinder, “most young men are respectful of young women and each other” (DfE 2020, 14).

Clearly, there is some way to go. However, for scholars working in CMMS, feminist, queer and gender studies, such pioneering initiatives are a landmark moment. The focus on emotions, wellbeing, caring friendships, as well as the intimate aspects of care relationships, dovetail with a feminist collective ethics of care and a move to a “Careful World” (Ruby and Scholz 2018). This could extend to encompass a decolonial approach, tracing and privileging “southern knowledge” as the genesis for many contemporary bodily care techniques, including meditation, mindfulness, yoga, herbal remedies, acupuncture or reflexology. In ethnography with young people in English Primary Schools, we disclose how boys orientate themselves through and against care relations, which are productive of different types of masculinities. Weather young men are caring, careless or carefree, reveals differing dispositions to gender and masculinity. The research further found men’s care could be “recuperated” into the existing patriarchy to augment traditional notions of masculinity—for example the male “breadwinner”—or “redistributed” in ways that disrupt the prevailing gender order (Bonner-Thompson and Nayak 2022). Understanding how, when and where the practice of “masculinizing care” (Jordan 2018) may occur, or not, is pivotal to progressing policy, pedagogies, and practice on caring masculinities.

Conclusion: “Decolonizing” and “Degendering” Care

The paper takes forward research on masculinities in a series of ways. Firstly, it offers critical appraisal of the conceptual resilience of Connell’s “hegemonic masculinity” to understand its longevity in CMMS and gender studies. It is argued its success rests with the ability to: address male dominance at local, regional, and global scales; disclose masculinity as a social, historical, and relational category; emphasize multiple, diverse, and competing forms of masculinity; and open out masculinity to feminist and queer critiques, with a view to elicit potential transformations in the gender order.

In contrast, caring masculinities have “been insufficiently theorized and barely been investigated empirically” (Ruby and Scholz 2018, 81), indicating further scholarship is required if the concept is to travel beyond CSMM in the way hegemonic masculinity has (Beasley 2012; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). While Elliott (2016) considers caring masculinities as transformative for gender relations, what little empirical evidence there is, is nuanced; signalling complexity, ambiguities, and diversity in men’s caregiving practices, though this does not rule out the potential for change (Hanlon 2012; Milligan and Morbey 2016; McLean 2021). Asking if male care-work leads to gender equality Morell and Jewkes (2011, 30) conclude, “Our answer in this paper is both yes and no,” reflecting how some, but not all men, refigured masculinity. In research on young recipients of care Bonner-Thompson and Nayak (2022, 1252) acknowledged, “ambiguous results where care is an unstable, diffuse and flexible felt practice.” This suggests caring masculinities can be a path to liberation, but “it is equally important to be aware that they do not have to be” (Ruby and Scholz 2018, 79).

Secondly, rather than conceive of “caring masculinities” and “hegemonic masculinity” as fixed typologies, where the former is the antithesis of the latter (Elliott 2016, 254), they are instead, material and social constructs, embodied through gender practices. Moreover, it is possible for hegemonic masculinity to incorporate care into the patriarchal order, extending rather than unsettling male authority. This suggests that there are times when the “radical” potential of care (Hobart and Kneese 2020) risks being recuperated, refigured (Bonner-Thompson and Nayak 2022), masculinized (Jordan 2018; Hunter et al. 2017), whitened and colonized (Sieler 2020; Prattes 2022). This remains a key issue that future research on caring masculinities needs to be attentive to.

Thirdly, by considering care as meta-theory, I utilize an intersectional feminist-decolonial framework as a critical optic through which to view global care practices, highlighting their multi-scalar, intersecting inequalities. In doing so, neoliberal ideologies that result in “carewashing” (Chatzidakis et al. 2020) and colonial practices of “whitewashing,” are made transparent and laid bare for critique (Sieler 2020; Lopez 2019). The repertoire reconfigures power by focusing on care interdependencies between the global north and its southern counterparts. This is evident not only in the transnational migration of doctors, nurses, caregivers, and other healthcare service providers, but also in the circulation and “flows” of knowledge, technologies, human and non-human matter around the globe. Caring masculinities cannot be abstracted out from these “uneven” postcolonial interdependencies, to do so whitens the concept (Prattes, 2022). Instead, decolonizing care puts race inequalities at the heart of these interrelations, globally situating our everyday “carescapes.” This may further generate ways of doing caring masculinities that displace whiteness as the “master trope“ of fatherhood (Poeze 2019; Prattes 2022), care and caregiving (Näre 2010; Gallo and Scrinzi 2016; Morell and Jewkes 2011; McLean, 2021).

Fourthly, the concept of “material configurations of care” is utilized, revealing how this may work to impede or mobilize caring masculinities. This is less about whether individual men occupy “open” or “closed” masculinities (Elliott 2020) but the material framework enabling this. Thus, transnational accounts indicate that changes in parental leave, childcare support, education, and policy initiatives on care may greatly enhance gender equality, facilitating spaces for caring masculinities to proliferate (Brandth and Kvande 2018; Esquivel 2021; Scambor et al. 2014; Hearn 2018). Growing interest in workplace wellbeing, extended paternity leave, strategies for homeworking and work-life balance, offer productive avenues for shifting gender relations. However, material configurations have also seen neoliberal care regimes commodify care, relegating public health to the responsibility of individual households and private agencies. The redistribution of care and the impact of austerity, precarity and the pandemic, mean unemployed, working-class, and elderly men are increasingly likely to be involved in caregiving (Hunter et al. 2017; Milligan and Morbey 2016; Tarrant 2018; Warren 2022). Contrastingly, middle- and upper-class households may outsource care to migrant laborers, reinscribing hegemonic masculinity and white coloniality.

The paper indicates that policy and material configurations of care are pivotal to the bringing-into-being of subjectivities and the making of caring, uncaring, and careless masculinities. Policy and pedagogy create the infrastructure through which change can occur, while material configurations mark out the challenges and possibilities for caring masculinities to “rework” the gender order. In the shadow of the coronavirus global pandemic, it remains to be seen if international governments, organizations, and institutions pursue caring masculinities as “a concept whose time has come” (Hearn 2018, 41), or let slip the opportunity for a radical, global, restructuring of care relations.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/M500513/1,Newcastle University).

Author Biography

Anoop Nayak,PhD,is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at Newcastle University,UK. His research interests lie in three areas: race,ethnicity and migration;masculinities and social transformations;and youth transitions and social inequalities. He is co-author of Gender,Youth and Culture: Global Masculinities and Femininities (2nd ed.) with Mary Jane Kehily;a monograph,Race,Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World;and a recent co-edited collection,Young People and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene (2022). He is currently working on the following projects,“ Boys to Men: New Templates for Masculinities ” (funded by the ESRC) and “Challenging ‘Rape Culture’ and “Building Consent: Pedagogy and Practice in Young Lives” (funded by Newcastle University).

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