Affects of masculinity

This chapter provides an empirical analysis of how power and domination feel, addressing an understudied dimension of critical research on men and masculinities. It examines the “bourgeois male promise of happiness” through becoming “somebody”, more specifically, a “(happy) influential leader” and illustrates how career success can create conflicts between social expectations and self-relations. The analysis explores positive feelings of power (speed, supremacy, invincibility, homosocial recognition) and their embodied dimensions and shows how these affective foundations of masculinity can transform from pleasure to critique, for example when men recognise the gap between promised and actual fulfilment.