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MASCULINITY, Breadwinner Ideal & Precarity - Coggle Diagram
MASCULINITY
Neoliberal Feminist Cover Story
Empowered, Entrepreneurial Women
Chapter 4
Mompreneur, enterprising subject who has it all
Identifies the empowered woman discourse as ideological glue that sells neoliberalism as opportunity for women, individuals and nation states
Entrepreneurial, mompreneur, Third World woman figures become proof that markets and meritocracy are fair even as they rely on unpaid domestic labour
Chapter 5
Migrant women are invited to see domestic work and marriage migration as choices and paths to empowerment and modernity
the empowered First World woman depends on racialised feminised migrant labour, while Third world women are cast as heroes of development
Chapter 6
Neoliberal feminism exhausts women and discusively sidelines men
This cover story generates its opposite: some women long for a benevolent patriarch and some men feel displaced, making the manly protector attractive.
Invisible Dependence on Feminised Labour
Migrant domestic workers and caregivers (Philippines, FSU, India) sustain empowered womens careers
feminised carework props women's empowerment while displacing men's breadwinner roles
Exploited feminised labour allows men to reclaim status as women's protector, they support empowerment as long as it doesnt threaten their position
Migration as Path to modernity
For post colonial and post soviet actors, migration is framed as moving toward modernity
Manly Protector Cover Story
Technologies of Othering
Misogyny
Punishes women who refuse caregiving or challenge male authority
Frames some women as needing protection and others as bad
Homophobia
Elevates straight "traditional" family as basis of nation
Heteronationalism
Stigmatises queer genders as signs of Western decadence or national decline
Chapter 4
Suggests that as states compete and borders harden, nationalism becomes a key terrain where gender is performed.
Chapter 5
Nation states manage "modernity threats" and modernity promises around women's migration with gendered nationalism, framing women as symbolic property needing protection
Post-Soviet and postcolonial states worry that exporting women as domestic workers feminises and humiliates the nation, setting up a desire for strong masculine leadreship
Chapter 6
Uses Trump, Putin and Modi as exemplars of protector masculinity, mobilising misogny and homophobia to redefine who belongs to the nation.
Trump's America First Masculinity
Proejects predatory virility ("grab 'em by the pussy") while framing himself as defender of "real Americans" against immigrants, feminists and "weak" liberals
Misogyny mocks Hillary Clinton as well as used to degrade liberal males.
Putin's Taditional Values Empire
Shirtless photos signal raw strength against post-Soviet "feminised" weakness; "Gayropa" rhetoric paints EU as degenerate threat to Russian Manhood.
Misogyny celebrates mothers but crushes Pussy Riot feminists
Modi's Hindu Rashtra Fatherhood
Misogyny polices interfaith relationships and women's autonomy, reliying on ideas that Hindu women must be protected from Muslim "predators"
Homophobia aligns with Hindu nationalism, excluding queer and Muslim "others" from the nation
Masculinity is re-centered as the force that keeps India both truly modern (technologically advanced, entrepreneurial) and authentically traditional (Hindu, patriarchal)
Nation-State Competition & Modernity Claims
United States
Neoliberal meritocracy
creates an hourglasss economy that relies on migrant domestic workers and low-wage caregivers so elite women can embody thsi modern ideal while working class men lose stable jobs and status
As the US celebrates empowered women, white working class men move from failed providers to protectors of "real America" which regrounds masculinity in racialised nationalism rather than wages
empowered, entrepreneurial, white women as standard of modernity, migrant women sustain her
the Lean In executive, the mompreneur, the felxible professional who appears to have endless choices
Sells its global modernity through gender metrics and pop-culture images of liberated American women which legitimises hegemonic position
India/SSEA
Empowered Hindu upper cast women as icons of modernity
neoliberalisation and new middle class
underemployed men whose aspirations outstrip available jobs.
Modi offers these men a manly protector role of defending the Hindu nation from Muslims and other "internal" enemies, policing interfaith romance (love Jihad) and enforcing proper femininity for Hindu women.
Chapter 4
Conceptualises post colonial countries as in the "waiting room of modernity" where status is measured partly by gender order and empowered women imagery
Uses Gender to appear modern to investors and global institutions while differentiating itself from Western secularism and from its own colonial past
Former Soviet Union
Post soviet re-naturalisation of hetero-patriarchal family
women recast as housewives/ mothers
Putin weaponises this gender order to make a distinct modernity claim: Russia as a virile, traditional, Christian nation taht is more truly modern and free than "degenerate" Gayropa.
Homophobic laws, the elevation of the traditional family and war in Ukraine are framed as manly protection of the nation's women, children and moral order, turning masculinity into the core idiom of Russia's bid to climb the hierarchy of powerful states
Chapter 5
Post-soviet states try to look "european" while stigmatising migrant domestic workers and rehabilitating the hetero-patriarchal family
shock therapy, oligarchic capitalism and collapsing social protections produce harsh crisis of masculinity
men die younger, lose stable work and casted as failed breadwinners
In response
Chapter 6
Contests over modernity shifts onto the the terrain of masculinity: whose nation is mostly manly, traditional, yet free
Nation leaders translate global status competition into gendered nationalist projects backed by othering technologies.
national anxieties: exporing women as domestic workers seen as a modernity threat where marriage migration is read as both promise and danger depending on the context
Breadwinner Ideal & Precarity
Unattainable Breadwinner
Hourglass economy, deindustrialisation, loss of stable middle class jobs
Chapter 4
Deindustrialisation, hourglass economy and the state protection of capital strip out stable, unionised jobs that once underwrote breadwinning masculinity especially in the US and FSU
Emphasises that neoliberal meritocracy still measures men by individual breadwinner performance even as that performance becomes structurally impossible
Chapter 5
Global restructuring expands feminised, low wage-service job (care, domestic work, export manufacturing) and not equivalent "manly" jobs, undercutting men's provider status in sending and recieving countries
When women migrate as earners (Philippines, Ukraine, Moldova), male breadwinnders at home lose symbolic authority which intensifies masculine insecurity
Chapter 6
Names "anxious men whose breadwinner routes are blocked and who shift from provider to protector masculinity
White US men, Ukrainian men (Cossack heroism) and Hindu nationalist men in India reinterpret status away from wages toward guarding community, borders and "our women"
womens earning migration strips men's symbolic authority which fuels protector masculinities
domestic workers creates feminised reserve armies and transnational care chains
Marriage migration
women seek stable visas, economic security and sometimes modern egalatarian marriages
men in destination countries seek traditional wives to restore patriarchal masculinity
Anxious Men
working class men in the US undergo status degradation, humiliation and thus turn to race and nationalism when economic avenues collapse
Post soviet men in Ukraine link masculine worth to creadwinning and ,when impossible, to heroice nationalist masculinity (Cossack ideal)
In all nations stdueies show that men are disstressed both when they are not the main earner and when they are sole breadwinner