1. Introduction
Modern capitalist societies depend on growth, i.e., on the permanent and limitless expansion of economic activity. In the degrowth debate, it has often been argued that this societal compulsion to grow is not only rooted in an economic system geared around profits and in hierarchical societal structures that enforce participation in 'the economy', but that it has also deeply inscribed itself into the worldviews, sensibilities and practical dispositions of people living in such societies (Eversberg, 2014; Latouche, 2005; Schmelzer et al., 2022). Yet, while in a growth society everybody's subjectivity - how we relate to ourselves and the world - is profoundly influenced by the effects of this expansionary logic. The forms that this assumes vary widely according to the different ways in which people are involved in how growth is generated and experienced, and the kinds of work they are typically tasked with - in short, on their positionality in society, intersectionally understood (Crenshaw, 1989). That is, not every subjectivity into which growth has inscribed itself as a 'normalcy' can be rightly labelled a 'growth subjectivity' (normalcy can also be viewed critically, even experienced as unbearable). Still, it seems possible to describe a certain logic or 'grammar' of relating to oneself and the rest of the world that is logically most in line with the demands and promises of growth. When actively internalised, it 'anchors' the growth imperative within the individual, turns them into its willing agents and faithful believers, and thus strengthens the growth-centric and structurally externalising imperial mode of living.
In this narrower sense, we may conceive of the growth subject as a subject accustomed to asserting itself as an actively sovereign agent by accumulating ever greater and more far-reaching capacities for action while negating or denying its own dependency on others' care and the natural environment. As a massphenomenon, this type of experience and the subjectivities it has formed haveonly become possible under conditions of expansionary modern societies since the onset of the fossil age.
In the dominant cultural imaginary of growth societies, this figure of the growth subject is powerfully gendered: it is coded as masculine.The classical figure of the white bourgeois, the agent of capitalist expansion, is that of a man seeking to optimally deploy the resources at his disposal so as to rationally and purposefully enlarge them (Harrison, 1999; Hunt, 1996; Tosh, 2005).
This image, however, makes the social and natural preconditions of such supposedly sovereign activity invisible. And it conceals the fact that this kind of agency could only be asserted based on hierarchical divisions of both a symbolic and practical nature, allowing the socially privileged male to appropriate nature and the labour of those excluded from such privileged status. 'Masculine domination' has thus become inscribed in the gendered division of labour of capitalist societies as well as in their cultural imagery, which associates masculinity with public visibility, independence, strength, technological dominance and control over human and nonhuman nature (Biesecker & Hofmeister, 2010; Bourdieu, 2001; Federici, 2004; Merchant, 1983).
This does not mean that only men are growth subjects and that others are not, nor that all men have incorporated growth subjectivity in the same way and to the same degree - but rather that key aspects of growth subjectivities are coded as masculine due to the historical genealogies of their cultural understandings. In fact, within modern growth societies the cultural, social and economic logics that structure people's everyday experience are so deeply impregnated with 'masculine' principles of expansion, exclusion and competition that these leave a mark on everybody, regardless of gender. Growth societies are inherently androcentric societies because their inner logic makes masculine growth subjectivities the norm and the condition for success. While everybody is to some degree subject to 'masculine' growth subjectivation, the variable forms of 'hegemonic masculinity' that arise as epitomes of the successful growth subject are most readily adopted and performed by men (Connell, 2005; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Pule & Hultman, 2021; Salleh, 2017).
This historically constituted relationship between gendered subjectivities and modern capitalist expansionism is crucial for understanding the logic of growth societies and possible alternatives. Feminists have long been pointing this out and calling for a more thorough engagement of the entire degrowth spectrum with gender relations and patriarchal dominance (Abazeri, 2022; Barca, 2020; Bauhardt, 2014; Dengler & Strunk, 2018). They have rightly highlighted the invisibilised caring relationships and the enormous amount of labour, symbolically and economically devalued as 'feminine', without which all the achievements of those male heroes of capitalist development would not have been possible. A complementary aspect of the feminist challenge to the degrowth community, however, has long received too little attention: The difficult question of what role(s) men and masculinities might play in the course of social transformations away from growth dependency (Khanna, 2022). How can masculinities rooted in the logic of growth and dominance be overcome? What alternatives to existing conceptions of masculinity are conceivable that would not stand in the way of degrowth transformations, but could play a fruitful part in fostering them?
In this essay we want to suggest that the approaches to transforming self- and world-relations that are present in degrowth debates and practices contain a number of core elements of what it will take to overcome the bourgeois-capitalist mode of subjectivation. Degrowth societies will have to be very different from capitalist modernity, not merely in terms of their material and institutional infrastructures and the logics according to which they are organised, but also in terms of how people conceive of themselves and relate to others as well as to extra-human nature. Capitalist modernity's expansive-individualist ideal of growth subjectivity will need to be supplanted, succeeded or replaced by degrowth subjectivities that reintegrate precisely those relations whose externalisation it had been built on. One of the most challenging aspects of these transformations is that they will require particularly far-reaching change to currently prevailing conceptions of masculinities.
2. Degrowth's lessons for the phaseout of hegemonic masculinities: (Re-)Production and Deprivileging
[...]
3. The relational subject
[...]
4. Conclusion
One of the greatest and most underestimated challenges to degrowth transformations will lie
in how to foster the changes in subjectivities and processes of subjectivation that these entail
- and particularly challenging will be the transformations of growth-dependent masculinities.
To give just a few initial pointers on what this might entail, we have suggested three core
dimensions of potential degrowth subjectivities: relationality, conviviality and resonance. Of
course, all three of these dimensions can be strengthened and enabled by socio-political
changes often discussed in the degrowth spectrum, including the radical shortening of
working hours for all and the breaking up of gender-specific patterns of division of labour.
Overcoming the 'male breadwinner' model of the family in favour of a more balanced division
of labour and redefining work and the status of employment are key. In fact, they are the very
conditions for creating the possibility for genuine time prosperity and stable axes of
resonance in all spheres of life - beyond coercion stress, and competitive pressure. Such
reforms in the field of work are key to transforming masculinities in the transition beyond
growth because they enable different and more diverse experiences and can thus help in
establishing connectedness and mutual dependence rather than separateness and supposed
independence as a basis of subjectivity.
In conclusion, let us offer one further reflection on the relevance of care as a key field of such
transformed experience. For the relational subject, notions and practices of care - which
androcentric growth subjectivity has displaced as its constitutive outside - undoubtedly play
a central role. In terms of transforming masculinities, assuming responsibility for caring
relationships and learning to practically live 'caring masculinities' (Elliott, 2016; see also
Hultman & Pulé, 2018) is certainly crucial. But as great an emancipatory progress the
establishment of such caring masculinities would undoubtedly be, as practices and self-
conceptions of active caring they do not necessarily touch on the very fundamental taboo of
male, growth-oriented self-relations, namely the reality of one's own dependence and
mortality. In addition to 'caring masculinity', therefore, the aspect of 'needy masculinity', so
far perceived as more of a deficiency, might have its own transformative potentials (see also
Kastein, 2019). For needing others, needing care, is the real experiential core of that
inescapable human condition that all hegemonic masculinities have been forged to ward off
with all their might, and which they again and again symbolically negate by attempting to
assert dominance using all kinds of technical prostheses.
Experiencing oneself as passive, as dependent, as needy (rather than desiring), is perhaps the
strongest, and therefore most powerfully repressed, antithesis to a masculine identity. While
caring masculinities, such as positive concepts of emancipatory fatherhood, still allow the
male subject to experience himself as active, as influential, as a force shaping the world, the
conscious experience of existential dependence - as symbolically purged from boys' identities
in rites of passage to manhood and hitherto experienced by most men only in situations of
acute illness or in old age - calls masculinity as such into question in a very practical and very
effective way. It is precisely because 'passive masculinity' is an oxymoron against the given
subject-historical background that such experiences are so central. And they are
constitutively part of human existence, merely cut off from becoming part of the constitution
of masculine subjectivity by a multi-layered protective shield of material, discursive, social
and mental technologies. Bringing passive masculinities and relational subjectivities to the
surface may be one of the keys to the truly profound transformations of self-relations that
are necessary, especially in the context of debates on degrowth. They could seriously
destabilise the boundaries of what would still be adequately described as 'masculine'.
References
[...]
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE REPORT
|
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dennis Eversberg is head of the BMBF-funded junior research group 'Mentalitaten im Fluss. Vorstellungswelten
in modernen bio-kreislaufbasierten Gesellschaften' ['Mentalities in Flux. Social imaginaries in modern circular
bio-based societies'] at the Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany. Dennis
does research in political sociology, the study of social-ecological movements, environmental politics,
mentalities and social structure. He currently works on the mental preconditions and consequences of post-
fossil transformations, the subjective limits to capitalist growth regimes, the degrowth movement, and
authoritarian nationalism.
Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian, social theorist and climate activist. He is a post-doctoral researcher
at the Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, and is active at the Laboratory for New Economic Ideas in Leipzig,
Germany. His main interests include the political economy of capitalism, social and environmental history,
climate catastrophe, neoliberalism and alternative economics. He is author of The Hegemony of Growth. The
OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and co-author of
The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism (Verso, 2022).
|
![[groups_small]](groups_small.gif)