Leonardo Olivos Santoyo, Luis Fernando Gutiérrez Domínguez, and Fernando Huerta Rojas (eds.). (2024). About Games, Emotions, Violence, and Other Fraternities: Feminist Approaches to the Generic Experience of Being Men. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 328 pages.

Abstract

Despite the vast body of existing literature on the gendered condition of men, we are currently experiencing a global moment in which the prevalence of pressing problems such as violence perpetrated by men against girls and women, emerging forms of hypermasculine right-wing extremism, increasing militarization in certain regions of the world, and extractive (masculine) policies regarding human and non-human life, among other urgent issues, compel us to continue questioning, insistently and without hasty answers, the role men play in transforming a world where inequality and injustice seem to be the norm. Thus, this book, coordinated by Leonardo Olivos, Luis Fernando Gutiérrez, and Fernando Huerta, emerges as an effort to continue reflecting on and problematizing, from different theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches, the ways in which gender is embodied by men. Not with the aim of reiterating well-known identity characterizations about what it means to be a man, based on masculine mandates that refer to the demonstration of strength, heterosexual obligation, the adoption of the protective and provider role within the family, and so on. Instead, the question posed by these works refers to how these gender identities are always defined within complex emotional, social, political, historical, psychological, and material frameworks, allowing us to understand, as Joan W. Scott (1988) has stated, that the category “man” never attains a definitive, transcendental meaning.