Paper short abstract

The reenactment of Calcio Storico operates as a meta-historical dispositive where masculinities are performatively remade through risk, irreverence and intercorporeal trust. Shaped by displacement and heritage politics, "calcianti"’s bodies symbolically reclaim presence in an overtouristed Florence

Paper long abstract

Calcio Storico Fiorentino (CSF) is a re-enactment of the Renaissance game of “calcio”, specifically the “siege match” of 1530, when soldiers of the Republic of Florence played to mock the imperial troops besieging the city. Current celebrations consist of an extremely violent ball game held in the historic centre. Since its “reinvention” in 1930 with the support of local Fascist leaders, the festival has functioned as a script through which calcio players have expressed and redefined masculinity and “imagined” Florentine identities. In a historic centre reshaped by overtourism and neoliberal urban transformations, the CSF has become a site where participants symbolically reclaim presence in identitarian spaces from which they feel increasingly excluded by heritage politics.

The iconoclastic bodies of the players perform a dual movement: they affirm anachronistic masculinity while simultaneously expressing vulnerability and the desire for recognition within each team. By training together, calcianti collectively mould their bodies to embody the “Florentine” virtues of the “siege match” players. This produces a shared ethos – positioned in tension with the institutional apparatus of the CSF – in which risk, violence, irreverence, mutual support and intercorporeal trust become devices for shaping the self.

The CSF provides a “meta-historical frame” through which participants assert their presence in Florence’s history, cultivating a feared-yet-admired public persona and forging bodies that confer respectability and a sensual, unmentionably erotic visibility. Calcianti’s bodies operate therefore as ethnographic archives, shaped by displacement, precarity and the frictions of contemporary Florence, and central to the process of reworking masculinities.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the linguistic figure “rajarse” (cracking) as it circulates in Mexican society to trace its articulation in Mexican cultural productions and therapeutics. I show how “rajarse” assembles with healing, masculinity, and bodily practice in drug recovery centers in Tijuana, Mexico.

Paper long abstract

Drug addicts in Mexico have established mutual-aid, residential drug recovery centers otherwise known as “anexos.” Influenced by 12-step philosophy, these institutions are highly popular and a response to the absence of large-scale public health initiatives. In this paper, I examine therapeutic processes (Csordas 1997) as gendered, specifically how in three male-only drug recovery centers in Tijuana, Mexico, masculinity mediates their therapeutic practices. Specifically, I ethnographically explore what I am calling the therapeutic ritual of “raja-tablas” to link the semantic and performative resonances with an archive of “rajarse” and everyday speech. I analyze how an archive of cultural productions from the Mexican Golden Age Cinema to intellectual texts like Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) produce a sociohistorical body (Butler 1988) associated with “rajarse”. This archive grounds how a body is presupposed in Mexican contexts that articulates (Hall 1996) or assembles (Zigon 2015) with therapeutics, wherein rajarse, as it circulates outside and inside healing spaces, frames or orients addicts towards others in confrontative, sometimes, violent ways to heal. I show how masculinity as a sociohistorical force and an archive is shaping the self, the body, and healing practices or “therapeutic violence” (Garcia 2024).

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography in Havana, this paper examines la perla—subdermal penile beads—as a bodily technique through which men negotiate masculinity, precarity, and respect. The modified body emerges as an archive of endurance, desire, and relational value.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines la perla—the practice of inserting beads beneath the skin of the penis among men in Havana—as a bodily technique through which masculinity is made, tested, and reworked under conditions of economic crisis and social precarity. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in working-class neighborhoods and everyday street life, the paper approaches the modified body as an ethnographic archive: a material record of relations, moral economies, and affective investments that shape masculine self-making.

Rather than treating la perla solely as a marker of hypermasculinity or sexual performance, the paper shows how it operates as a relational form of embodied capital. Based on life-history interviews with men who underwent the practice in prison, during military service, and through street-based networks, it traces how the pearl circulates across institutions that discipline male bodies while also generating alternative forms of value, respect, and recognition. Pain, risk, and endurance emerge not as proofs of domination, but as techniques through which men negotiate vulnerability, belonging, and moral standing among other men and within intimate relationships.

The paper further reflects on how masculinity is produced in and through the ethnographic encounter itself. Access to these narratives unfolds through gendered and affective negotiations, situating the researcher’s body as part of the field’s relational economy rather than outside it. Attending to these dynamics, the paper argues for masculine self-fashioning as a situated practice assembled through bodily intervention, narrative performance, and relational recognition across shifting political, economic, and institutional conditions.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on research in Greece, this paper examines how aging bodies shape masculine selves. Challenging the self/body dichotomy, it discusses how materiality and bodily orientations in later life enable older men to negotiate multiple –private/public, past/present– masculine selves over time.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on anthropological research into aging experiences and the construction of embodied masculine subjectivities in Greece, this paper examines how bodily materiality, techniques, and orientations are constitutive of masculine selves in later life, by challenging binary oppositions associated with aging. It takes as its analytical starting point a rupture articulated in my interlocutors’ self-narratives between an inner, concealed, unchanged “self,” grounded in the mind, soul, or heart and an external, observable “body” that is visibly transformed, deteriorates, ages, and persistently resists attempts to sustain a sense of continuity over time.

Engaging anthropological and feminist perspectives that challenge the ethnocentric, Cartesian self-mind/body distinction, and foregrounding the centrality of eneryitikotita, “the state of being active”, in the cultural construction of (heteronormative) masculinity in Greece –as a shifting yet persistent discourse, embodied practice, and bodily orientation across the life course– this paper discusses two crucial aspects of this dichotomy that emerge through critical consideration.

First, it frames the dichotomy as a culturally situated and gender-specific performative gesture that reflects tensions between private (internal) and public (external) dimensions of the self, rather than an unyielding rupture between a unified, cohesive self and a fluid body. Second, focusing on the multiple temporalities of self-narratives, it highlights interlocutors’ ongoing negotiation between past and present embodied selves, in which shifting bodily materiality is not positioned as external to or in opposition to the self, but instead emerges as a privileged site through which multiple versions of the masculine self are redefined and integrated over time.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how young Romanian men engage with socialist-era cars as restoration projects, exploring the intersection of masculinity, repair practices, and nostalgia in post-socialist society. It analyzes how middle-class aficionados construct identity through working-class skills.

Paper long abstract

The social memory of the socialist car lingers vividly in the networks of young car restaurateurs and reparation aficionados in Romania. The socialist car is a throwback to a different time when, especially men, were expected to repair things. While society prescribed masculine dominance over technical education, embedded social relations in garages and car tinkering contributed to reproducing and performing masculinity. The socialist car generated certain types of sociability throughout its users, characteristic of repair societies; it embodies a set of practical and skilled knowledge that can shed light on the way in which society and gender work.

Young, middle-class men can afford buying old, socialist cars and turn them into historical restauration projects. Yet, performing such practices in a post-repair society leads most to reach for the help and service of the former generation of mechanics. How come middle class men, born after the demise of socialism, show interest in cars that are symbolic of a different era?

The nostalgic return of the socialist car in the contemporary landscape points to a biographical question on how masculinity is reiterated through repairing practices.

When reproducing the working-class-type of labor in a digitized world and a highly neoliberal context, the aficionados imagine and depict a symbolic construction of socialist masculinity. The act of tinkering is something enticing for them, bringing authenticity to their identity. While the technical working-class skill is valuable, as a scarce resource, the social status and cultural capital of the man working in a liberal job increases.