Navigating masculinities

This article theorises masculinities as affective performances, which are shaped through the emotional labour of male academics. We explore how seemingly homogeneous masculinities fracture within Turkish academia, a numerically feminising yet male-dominated field shaped by neoliberal structuring and political polarisation. Drawing on 53 interviews with male academics and nine focus groups with 54 university students across four major Turkish cities, we show how male academics manage emotions in professional interactions, often performing emotional labour they neither name nor recognise. While many rely on norms of autonomy, control and emotional detachment, expressions of empathy, reflexivity and openness emerge, particularly among precarious or non-traditional men. We investigate diverse forms of emotional labour that either reproduce power relations (orthodox) or subvert them (heterodox) along three axes: emotional detachment versus connection; gender neutrality versus gender awareness; and vertical versus horizontal social relations. Academia is an affective field where control, vulnerability, reflexivity and detachment are mobilised as situated strategies in response to boundary violations, institutional precarity and the expectations of care work associated with feminised professions. Our contribution lies in identifying the concrete mechanisms through which emotional labour reproduces masculine authority under conditions of neoliberal metrics, authoritarian political pressure and patriarchal tradition and in developing orthodox and heterodox emotional orientations along three axes as an analytical framework grounded in these data.

affective performance · Authoritarianism · Care work · emotional detachment · Emotional labor · gender awareness · Masculinity · neoliberalism in higher education · Patriarchy · precarious employment · Reflexivity · Turkish higher education · Emotional Labor in Professions · Gender and Feminist Studies · Gender Roles and Identity Studies