Phallic Affect, or Why Men's Rights Activists Have Feelings
Abstract
The men’s rights movement and its academic offshoot “New Male Studies” are considered in light of the turn to affect. I argue that affective utterances, “I feel,” become phallic in the men’s rights movement and function in a defensive mode. Unlike the phallus as guarantor of masculinity, which is currently up for debate, the affective utterance cannot be denied—that is, affect is wholly subjective. However, we can, as theorists, ask questions about how and why affect is being used.
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Biographies
Jonathan A. Allan is Tier II Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory and Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Brandon University. His research brings together critical studies of men and masculinities, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theories. His first book, Reading from Behind (University of Regina Press, 2015), is a study of anality, gender, and affect. His current project, The Foreskin Archive, is a study of the foreskin that cuts across disciplinary divides and brings together literary and cultural studies, religious studies, the biomedical sciences, psychology and sociology, and a range of other disciplinary modes in its attempt to understand the foreskin.
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Article first published online: March 9, 2015
Issue published: April 2016
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