Short Abstract

This panel tackles men’s bodies as sites and archives of polarisation—terrains of negotiation across diverse spaces. Through acts of modification and performance, it explores how flesh and materiality mediate masculinities' contradictions, crafting presence amid instability.

Long Abstract

Across prisons, urban streets, gyms, clinics, and digital platforms, men modify, adorn, and discipline their bodies through acts that register the contradictions between endurance and vulnerability, visibility and discretion, dominance and care. The modified body, we suggest, is an ethnographic archive: its matter has been shaped by interactions with the conditions and pressures of our current times. Taking materiality as both method and medium, this panel explores how flesh, skin, and bodily technique mediate masculine self-making.

We invite ethnographic explorations of how men rework and re-signify their bodies amid shifting economies, crises, and moral orders. We encourage contributions that move beyond the binary frames often associated with masculinity, seeking instead to think through the diverse, resourceful, and even creative labour of gender across specific conditions and contexts. How are men intervening in their bodies? How are masculinities being reworked through techniques of the body? Through what gestures, techniques, and affective investments do men fashion themselves? How do these interventions negotiate broader inequalities and contradictions?

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