Masculinity, Affect and the Search for Certainty in an Age of Precarity

The spirit of 1968 was marked by the emergence of new social movements shaped by the emancipatory wishes, ideals and discourses of freedom that found expression across different spheres of Western culture, politics and society. The complicated legacy of the psychosocial, cultural and political currents that emerged at that time can be found in contemporary formations of right-wing masculinity, where the libertarian insistence on the importance of free speech has been appropriated as a defence against the mores of so-called ‘political correctness’. This strategy is increasingly mobilised by men in media and online platforms as an attack against identity politics - and feminism in particular, which as a political and cultural movement also can be traced back to the progressive politics of 1968.

The social, cultural and political forces that emerged a little over half a century ago provide an historical starting point for this article which discusses their legacy for the contemporary relationship between the shaping of far-right masculinity and a desire for certainty in an age of uncertainty and precarity. Today, late modernity is regularly characterised by sociologists in terms of its ambivalence: on the one hand there is fluidity, disorganisation and uncertainty, and yet on the other, there is a reactive wish for certitude, authority and a move towards rationalization - as is often discussed in relation to the forces of neoliberalism which also have their roots in the last quarter of the 20^th century (Bauman, 2000; Crociani-Windland, 2019). As psychoanalytic scholars remind us, such contradictions which take place at socio-political and cultural levels are also bound up with the experience of affect and the processes of unconscious fantasy (Elliott, 2013; Stavrakakis, 2019). Whereas the term ‘emotion’ is defined as being linked to the ‘relatively conscious’ socio-political realm of discourse, ‘affect’ refers to the seemingly irrational, unpredictable spher