Masculinities Ageing Between Cultures

The edited collection brings together the theoretical frameworks of Masculinity Studies and Age Studies in order to explore multiple ways in which men age between different cultures, examining how concepts of age and gender are affected by cultural exchange. The individual contributions build on these frameworks to explore ageing masculinities with reference to the three key concepts of relationality, kinship and care. Addressing also a broad geographical framework in response to global mobility and migration, the essays in this volume examine exilic and transcultural experiences of ageing men from Northern and Eastern Europe, British and North American diasporic relationships including the Indian diaspora in the US, Chinese father images in the US-American context and Black British queer kinship, drawing its examples for conceptualizing relationality, care and kinship in-between cultures also from Brazilian society and African European contexts. The research questions are based on two main hypotheses, on which the contributors reflect, combining anthropological and cultural critical approaches with methods of close reading and literary analysis. The first hypothesis is that mobility is one of the crucial experiences of our time, which influences constructions of culture, affecting also constructions of gender and age. Related to this, our second hypothesis is that the cultural constructions of masculinities as they change across the life course have received too little critical attention. This is related to the even more punitive cultural constructions of female old age, which have therefore primarily been focused on in early feminist age studies. This constitutes a blind spot in humanities research, which the current volume addresses. In bringing together gendered aspects of movement and non-movement, forced or deliberate, with representations of ageing masculinities, the original essays in this volume begin to map a variety of cultural narratives of male ageing. The innovative contribution of this volume consists precisely in bringing together a first selection of case studies that address this link from the various perspectives of Slavic literature and film studies, American and English studies, medical anthropology, African studies, Scandinavian and Cultural studies. In bringing together gendered aspects of movement and non-movement, forced or deliberate, with representations of ageing masculinities, the essays in this volume are innovative contributions which constitute a first comparative mapping of cultural narratives of male ageing. The volume brings together experts within the fields of Masculinity and Age Studies with early career researchers.