Male managers struggling with hegemonic masculinity: Doing masculinity differently in affective-discursive practices

Since ethnomethodology’s seminal framework of ‘doing gender’ as a situated practice (West & Zimmerman, 1987), practice theories have further elaborated the performative nature of the “doings” and “sayings” of gender (Martin, 2003; Poggio, 2006). Applying discourse analysis and ethnographic methodologies, researchers have expanded to scrutinize both the “gendered practices” and the “practicing of gender” (Martin, 2003). Further investigating gendered subject positions as produced in the “embodied, material, and discursive entanglement and its accomplishment” has enabled scholars understand how the agentic and the structural aspects of gender are produced (Janssens & Steyaert, 2019, p. 525).
Contributing to such a discursive-material investigation of identities, I turn to Wetherell’s (2012) affective-discursive practices. Affective-discursive practices are those practices men and women are engaging in when they describe their emotional responses (Chowdury & Gibson, 2019). They highlight how subjects are invested in certain subject positions (Scharff, 2011). These practices are routines that are regularly applied and are hence normative. By exploring these practices, we can also highlight what is silenced or more difficult to talk about (Chowdhury & Gibson, 2019).
Analysing ten group discussions on issues of gender equality with male managers in five companies in Switzerland, I am investigating how men struggle for position (Wetherell & Edley, 1999). Exploring the affective-discursive practices in their talk I am able to show how they are not only “jockeying for position” (Edley & Wetherell, 1997), but both investing in hegemonic masculinity as well as in its critique. While they are critizing hegemonic masculinity in form of face time, full-time work, and the ideal of the heroic leader, they are at the same time struggling to establish stable subject positions calling at alternative masculinities. Although highly invested in the topic, hegemonic masculinity is creating a situative context for them, in which it is not easy to establish an unchallenged and stable masculine identity (Wahl, 2014). My findings are relevant in at least two ways: With regards to the direct context of studying gender equality, they deepen our understanding of how men engage and as well disengage with the topic (Benschop & van den Brink, 2018; Wahl & Holgersson, 2005). With regards to the stream’s discussion of researching (un)doing gender, I am arguing that my analysis of the affective-discursive practices sheds particular light on how gender is done, but also done differently.