Posthumanism and the Man Question: Beyond Anthropocentric Masculinities

This book brings together the emerging insights of what posthumanism, new materialism and affect theory mean for ‘the man question’. The contributors to this book interrogate the question of how ‘Man’ as a gendered being is entangled with nature, culture, materiality and corporeality, and they explore ways to unsettle men’s sense of sovereignty to decentre anthropocentric masculinity.

Men have to move from the centre of privilege which grants them supremacy before they can open themselves to the decentred, embodied, affective, vulnerable and relational self that is necessary to embrace the posthuman. This book explores the extent to which this is possible.

The book will be of interest to academics, students and scholars across a range of disciplines who are engaging with the intersections of feminist studies with posthumanism and new materialism, especially as they relate to critical studies of men and masculinities. Chapters on fathering, pornography, ageing, affect, embodiment, entanglements with technology and nature and the implications of these issues for changing men and masculinities and the politics of critical masculinity studies’ engagement with posthuman feminisms will interest students and academics across these diverse disciplines.

Ulf Mellström is an anthropologist and Professor of Gender Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. He has published extensively within the areas of masculinity studies, transport and mobility studies, gender and technology, gender, risk and crisis management, engineering studies, globalisation and higher education and South East Asian Studies with a particular focus on Malaysia. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of one of the leading journals dedicated to studies of Men and Masculinities – NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. His recent book publications include (Forstorp and Mellström, 2018) Higher Education, Globalisation and Eduscapes: Towards a Critical Anthropology of a Global Knowledge Society and (Gottzén, Mellström and Shefer, 2020) Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies.

Bob Pease is Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University and Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. He has published extensively on masculinity politics and critical social work practice, including five books as single author and 15 books as co-editor. His most recent books include Doing Critical Social Work (co-editor, 2016), Men, Masculinities and Disaster (co-editor, 2016), Radicals in Australian Social Work (co-editor, 2017), Critical Ethics of Care in Social Work: Transforming the Politics and Practices of Caring (co-editor, 2018), Facing Patriarchy: From a Violent Gender Order to a Culture of Peace (2019) and Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives (co-editor, 2021).