Joseph L Kidwell
Dominant masculine configurations persist not through intrinsic psychological stability or widespread conscious endorsement, but through coupled recognitional and reinforcement dynamics distributed across institutional, economic, national, and digital fields. Drawing on social ontology and the sociology of recognition, this article proposes a persistence mechanics for hegemonic masculinity under contemporary conditions of labor precarity, militarism, nationalist mobilization, and digital communication. One consequence runs against intuition. Configurations are routinely reproduced by participants who do not approve of them, and routinely critiqued by those who continue to reproduce them-because participation and approval are different modes of relating to a configuration and operate in different fields. Recognition-dependent configurations stabilize through convergent field reinforcement and embodied disposition. When they rigidify, they generate characteristic harms: humiliation, exclusion, recursive alienation. They reproduce through four distinct infrastructural logics-compensatory, sacrificial, reanchoring, and amplifying-each sustaining the configuration from a different angle. What is widely described as a "crisis of masculinity" is more precisely recognitional destabilization: the erosion of the infrastructure sustaining particular hegemonic configurations, not the collapse of masculinity as such. Restorationist politics, manosphere amplification, and resurgent nationalist masculine projects are predictable consequences of that destabilization-not opposed conditions but the same dynamic operating in different registers. The questions this motivates are empirical: how do states, economies, and digital platforms recruit, reward, and marginalize masculine configurations, and under what conditions might alternative infrastructures emerge?