Short Abstract

This workshop examines how actors mobilize the past in negotiations over masculinity, how masculine ideals are enacted, embodied, and transformed in practice, and how these processes shape imagined futures across diverse and potentially opposed political contexts.

Long Abstract

Masculinities are contested in struggles over how men should act, what authority they may claim, and what responsibilities they should assume. Such questions also arise within social movements, where established masculine ideals and practices may be defended, revised, or rejected. In these negotiations, actors may invoke historical figures, memories of political struggles, traditions, or imagined past orders.

References to past masculine ideals are particularly visible in right-wing conservative movements. Here, social change is often interpreted as a loss of masculine strength, authority, or responsibility, accompanied by calls for their restoration. Yet past images of masculinity can also serve as sources of orientation, contested resources, or negative reference points in other political contexts.

The workshop examines when and how actors draw on such images to interpret contemporary change and shape social futures. Which historical or imagined pasts are invoked, and which understandings of masculinity are associated with them? How are these connections established in practice? How are past images of masculinity narrated, represented, rehearsed, or embodied - and how are they adopted, transformed, or rejected? What understandings of community and social order emerge through these processes?

We invite ethnographic, historical, and interdisciplinary contributions from different regional and political contexts that examine how pasts become consequential in contemporary negotiations of masculinity. Together, we ask what sets masculinities in motion and in which directions they move.