“The Future of Masculinity: Beyond the Manosphere”

What does it mean to think trans masculinity in a time when the manosphere has made the toxic features of normative masculinity hyper-visible, while trans studies and American politics has largely turned its attention to the trans feminine? Drawing on Masculinity in Transition, this working group will consider the ways trans masculinity is caught in a double bind: at worst, assimilated into a fascist-adjacent imaginary of the "real man," and at best, apparitional within trans studies itself, where critiques of trans masculine desire as heteronormative and urgent calls to center trans femininity have left trans masculine subjects without their own scholarly archive. Reading this violence of erasure alongside the resurgence of overt fascist masculinity, I argue for a return to the butch and butch/femme histories that earlier feminist movements ostracized — what Bobby Noble calls the "no man's land" of gender — to ask what these archives offer for thinking masculinity otherwise. Beyond the manosphere is not a utopia but a recovery: of history, of butchness, of the unfinished feminist question of how to inhabit masculinity without reproducing its dominations-- a plea for history as method, and for a future of trans masculinity that refuses both invisibility and the manosphere's seductions.