This article re-examines archaic and classical treatment of beer drinking to argue, contra Nelson, that beer in archaic and classical Greek texts is not primarily feminine nor does it necessarily feminize its drinkers. Rather, a review of sympotic lyric, historiography, ethnography and Athenian drama demonstrates that beer is primarily an ethnic marker with no inherent gendered connotations. At the same time, in contexts where definitions of Greek masculinity are being constructed, beer can gain gendered connotations which enhance the ethnic otherness of the beverage and contribute to the definition of the Greek man. Any gendered implications of beer, furthermore, come not from the beverage itself but from the method of consumption, of sucking through a tube of sorts rather than sipping from a cup. This article thus argues that beer in the Archaic and Classical periods marks non-Greek status first and foremost and only secondarily effeminizes drinkers through associations with oral sex in contexts where ideas of masculinity are in play.

In their 2007 essay “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” feminist scholars Ava Baron and Eileen Boris urged labor historians to consider “Why and in what ways … bodies matter for studies of work and the working class.” While scholars have written histories attentive to cultural assumptions about bodies at work, the impact of employment on the human body, and people’s experiences of their working bodies, little consideration has been given to the ways bodies matter for unemployed workers. This article uses Baron and Boris’s invitation to labor historians as a point of departure, but asks, in what ways do bodies matter for studies of people without work? Specifically, in what ways did bodies matter for unemployed working-class men in 1930s Britain? Using parliamentary papers and debates, published first-person narratives, and government documents, I demonstrate that prolonged unemployment was a bodily crisis for working-class men, who expected—and were expected—to direct their bodies and minds to productive labor. Critical Disability Studies scholars’ have emphasized the need to interrogate ableist norms that produce a “corporeal standard,” which for working-class men meant bodies and minds able to perform productive work. Ableist structures, policies, and practices, intersecting in the 1930s British case predominantly with gender and class identities and norms, challenged unemployed men, who experienced unemployment in ways that situated them outside the working-class masculine corporeal standard. To explore these issues, I focus on two closely linked concepts: fitness and employability. During the 1930s, British politicians, bureaucrats, and unemployed men assumed that men who had been without work for prolonged periods of time would not have the physical and mental fitness to be re-employed. I introduce the concept “embodying unemployment” to capture the relationships among discourses, bodily and emotional processes, and material conditions that shaped policy decisions, unemployed men’s experiences, and practices to enhance fitness and employability, highlighting the various perceptions of what caused unemployed men’s bodies and minds to deteriorate from the ableist norm and what strategies might slow or arrest the feared changes.

Within contemporary feminism, perspectives on men being feminist range from those who are “viscerally opposed” to those who argue that engaging with men more systematically is “the most consequential move feminists can make.” While some feminist political scholars have called to expand the feminist agenda to include analyses of men as gendered, resistance to this expansion is significantly entrenched, and men who identify as feminist are frequently regarded with distrust. Yet, if feminist efforts are to transform deeply entrenched gendered power structures, there is good reason to engage fully with the many ways all conceptions and practices of gender work to maintain and/or challenge current power structures. This article offers a relational approach to feministing—that is, an approach grounded in becoming feminist through praxes centred on uncovering points of solidarity across and within gender identity categories, the pursuit of coalition-oriented politics and the prioritization of accountability through action not identity.

Regardless of any socially held perceptions of privilege or power differentials, boys and men present unique developmental vulnerabilities and disproportionate rates of specific mental health problems, such as disruptive behaviour disorders, substance misuse and completed suicide. Moreover, men are less likely than women to seek help for psychological distress and adhere less well to treatments. In this brief article, some of the unique mental health problems experienced by boys and men are reviewed within a developmental perspective and general clinical guidance is outlined to improve adherence and treatment outcomes.

This article studies the narratives of counter-urbanization as presented in contemporary South Korean documentaries. In recent decades, there has been a surge of ethnographic media productions with a return-to-nature theme, highlighting urban-to-rural migration. What appears as a Thoreauesque pursuit of pastoral life in the woods reveals the traumatic aftereffects of the 1960s-80s rapid industrialization as well as the 1990s Asian Financial Crisis that resulted in layoffs, bankruptcies, homelessness, and migration. This article analyzes a selection of counter-urbanist documentaries through the dual lens of social class and masculinity, especially considering South Korea's hypermasculine industrialization and neoliberal ethos of survivalist individualism. It also examines cross-generational perspectives on counter-urbanization to recover human agency.

Indonesia's volcanoes are places of recreation, aesthetic production, and scientific knowledge-gathering, as well as sites of pilgrimage, spirituality, and natural disasters for locals as well as international travellers. In this article, I focus on volcanoes as historic sites of labour to demonstrate the entanglement of colonial tourism and science with local forms of work and knowledge, and to reveal the origins of the porting and guiding work that takes place on Indonesia's volcanoes to this day. Using Tina Campt's method of “listening to images,” I show how colonial photographs, albeit partial sources, make modes of subaltern labour visible that written sources routinely minimised, restoring porters, guides, and what I call “camp domestics” to histories of service, science and geotourism in Indonesia. Recognising the homosocial setting of the colonial scientific expedition and the peculiar physical challenges of the volcano environment, I also examine the negotiation of Indonesian and European masculinities and their intersection with class and racial hierarchies on the volcano. The article thus reflects on how Javanese workers’ spatial and social mobility entailed the negotiation of opportunity as well as exploitation on tour.

Recent years have witnessed growing attention to popular culture’s role in the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of global political life. This article extends this work by focusing on games targeted at young children as a neglected, yet rich site in which global politics is constituted. Drawing specifically on the Heroes of History card game in the Top Trumps franchise, I offer three original contributions. First, I demonstrate how children’s games contribute to the everyday (re)production of international relations through the contingent storying of global politics. Heroes of History’s narrative, visual organisation, and gameplay mechanics, I argue, construct world politics as an unchanging realm of conflict through their shared reproduction of a valorised, masculinised figure of the warrior hero. This construction, moreover, does important political work in insulating young players from the realities and generative structures of violence. Second, the polysemy of children’s games means they also provide opportunity for counter-hegemonic ‘readings’ of the world even in seemingly straightforward examples of the genre such as this. Third, engaging with such games as meaningful objects of analysis opens important new space for dialogue across International Relations literatures on children, popular culture, gender, the everyday, and heroism in world politics.