LAUSR

What are the biopolitics of masculinity? How do masculinity studies contribute to the proliferation of neoliberal and biopolitical governance? While one might assume that these questions are of importance in a time, in which governance and social control extend into all aspects of life by making individuals take responsibility for the politics of life itself (Rose, 2007), they stand mostly unanswered and unaddressed in the current scholarly landscape. To be sure, biopolitics has figured as a central term within disciplines such as (medical) sociology, (medical) anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and not least gender studies ever since Michel Foucault’s work helped to propel biopolitics as a central analytics from the 1970s onward (Lemke, 2011). Yet within the critical studies of men and masculinities, biopolitics seem to be a marginal topic. Throughout its 21 years of existence, the most important journal within the field, Men and Masculinities, has published altogether only nine articles that make a mention of biopolitics in one way or another, none of them with biopolitics as their main focus. For NORMA, this number is four. In comparison, just within the last two years,Men andMasculinities published 106 and NORMA 30 articles that reference hegemonic masculinity. The Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Kimmel, Hearn, & Connell, 2005), which has been a central reference point in masculinity studies since its publication in 2005, makes no mention of biopolitics, and the forthcoming International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (Gottzén, Mellström, & Shefer, 2020) equally has no chapter entry that is dedicated to biopolitics and its relation to masculinity. While an informed exploration of the relationship between masculinity and biopolitics on the one hand and biopolitics and masculinity studies on the other is well beyond the scope of an editorial, I nevertheless want to offer some initial reflections on these points in the following paragraphs. Such an endeavor is important, I think, if we are to properly understand the contemporary politics of gender in their intersectional dimensions as well as current and future manifestations of masculinity, but also if we wish to take the critical in critical studies on men and masculinities seriously. I will start by introducing the four articles in this issue and will use their common points to develop a discussion of masculinity (studies) and its relationship to biopolitics, neo-liberalism, and capitalist society. The four articles in this issue of NORMA are broadly speaking all concerned with matters of change and intervention in regard to local manifestations of masculinity. Isabella Burgher and Michael Flood take a closer look at men’s caregiving practices in Northeast India. Based on fieldwork in the Mizoram region of India and interviews with men