Nomadic Masculinity and the Problem of Male Suicide











Abstract
This paper argues that in order to combat the epidemic of male suicide in western countries, we might conceive of a subject position for men that is nomadic, as contrasted with restrictive, hegemonic, and unitary popular culture notions of what it means to be a man. I base this argument on a Spinozist-Deleuzian understanding of male bodies as sites which both affect and are affected by subtly complex intersubjective encounters, as opposed to predetermined actors following essentialized understandings of gendered behavior. I argue that the bodies and minds of men are capable of much more than popular conceptions of masculinity recognize. Rather than engaging in the cultural disparagement of men, this re-thinking of masculinity is a necessary antidote to the crisis of male health and male suicide, as well as the outward-focused abusiveness of toxic forms of masculinity.












Nomadic Masculinity and the Problem of Male Suicide

According to the World Health Organization, men are experiencing a health crisis, in spite of the fact that they “generally enjoy more opportunities, privileges and power than women” (Baker et al., 2014, p. 618). Men have a shorter life expectancy than women; they are more likely to die as a result of risk-taking behaviors and occupational hazards; they are less likely to visit a doctor when ill (and less likely to report illness when they do); they are more likely to fall into patterns of drug and alcohol dependence; they make up the vast majority of those incarcerated in the U.S. (Baker et al., 2014; NIDA, 2018; “Inmate Gender,” 2019). In 2017, the Center for Disease Control reported that 47,173 people in the U.S. alone committed suicide. Undoubtedly the number is higher when taking unreported suicides into account. Of these reported suicides, men account for 3.54 times as many suicides as women (“Suicide Statistics”). Across the world, the rate varies, from 3 to as many as 7 times as many suicides for men (Nock et al., 2008).
Contributing to the problem, numerous studies within the U.S. and UK have uncovered evidence that “traditionally” identifying men are less likely to seek psychological assistance in the form of counseling and psychiatric services (Addis, 2003; Berger, Levant, McMillan, Kelleher, & Sellers, 2005; Fischer & Good, 1997; Galdas, Cheater, & Marshall, 2005; Good & Wood, 1995). Much of this research focuses on degrees of alexithymia, defined as “problems identifying and describing emotions in self and other,” which is associated with interpersonal dysfunction and fear of intimacy (Sullivan, Camic, & Brown, 2015, p. 196). These personality characteristics relate to “traditional masculinity” and positively correlate with resistance to help-seeking. In an effort to consolidate this research, a recent meta-analysis of 37 different studies on the relationship between “traditional masculinity” and psychological help-seeking concluded that conformity to traditional masculine gender roles plays a part in the male suicide trend and goes so far as to suggest that “reframing a more fluid masculinity to integrate depression may boost help-seeking” (Seidler, Dawes, Rice, Oliffe, & Dhillon, 2016, p. 106).

Alongside this male health and suicide epidemic, there has been an increasing focus in popular and academic discourse on “toxic masculinity.” An online news aggregate lists 28 articles published in the past 3 years which discuss “toxic masculinity” or a minor variation of the term (“Articles on Toxic masculinity,” 2019). In academic parlance, the phrase “hegemonic masculinity” or “hegemonic masculinities” is sometimes preferred, stemming from the work of sociologist R.W. Connell (Connell, 2005). Many in academia, such as feminist scholar bell hooks, are speaking out against the violence that “patriarchy” perpetuates toward both men and women (hooks, 2005). The American Psychological Association recently linked traditional masculine gender norms to problems that men experience with intimacy, risk-taking behavior, help-seeking behavior, and more (American Psychological Association, 2018). The focus in these analyses is on the ways men abuse power and oppress minority groups (i.e. women, racial others), though as the APA article shows, the conversation also centers, at times, on the negative effects that men experience. Undoubtedly, these are pressing issues, and need be addressed. The issue of conceptualizing and championing a “more fluid masculinity”—if that is indeed the solution—is a thorny task, however. Whose masculinity? What kind of fluidity? Just how fluid?

Masculinity is a slippery concept, subject to differing cultural expectations. Sociologists note that “masculinity” as an overarching or archetypal figuration does not exist (Connell, 2016; Kimmel, 2018). Rather, they suggest, “masculinities” vary across and within cultures; they contain internal tensions and contradictions and are continually renegotiated—or socially constructed—in the context of everyday speech. There is a rich discursive empirical tradition of research in sociology and psychology which examines the ways that men speak about and construct masculinity in different contexts (e.g. Wetherell & Edley, 2014; Gough, 2002; Korobov, 2004). Many of these researchers view identity, and masculinity in particular, as personal states that are “achieved” through interpersonal discursive and institutional contexts, rather than innately endowed (Antaki & Widdicombe, 2008; Vandello & Bosson, 2013). Even the APA picks up the language of social constructionism when they acknowledge that gender and sex constitute “overlapping and fluid categories with multiple meanings,” but choose to focus on the “social experiences, expectations, and consequences associated with being a boy or man” (2018, p. 2), as opposed to more biological understandings of gender.

Despite the complexity of different understandings and ways of enacting masculinity, many outlets attempt to provide a general portrait of the “problematic” western man. The APA describes this form of masculinity as involving “emotional stoicism, homophobia, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance, and competitiveness” (2018, p. 11). Situating masculinity at the level of the body, Connell (2016) notes:

True masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men's bodies - to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body. Either the body drives and directs action (e.g., men are naturally more aggressive than women; rape results from uncontrollable lust or an innate urge to violence), or the body sets limits to action (e.g., men naturally do not take care of infants; homosexuality is unnatural and therefore confined to a perverse minority). (p. 45)

Cross-cultural research directly contradicts this essentialized understanding of the capacities of male bodies—e.g. Connell (2016) writes that there are “cultures and historical situations where rape is absent, or extremely rare; where homosexual behavior is majority practice (at a given point in the life-cycle); where mothers do not predominate in child care; […] and where men are not normally aggressive” (p. 47). A liminal space therefore exists wherein it is possible to “trouble” conventional understandings of masculinity.

Toward this end, I argue that we might conceive of a subject position for men that is nomadic, as contrasted with restrictive, hegemonic, and unitary notions of what it means to be a man. I base this argument on a Spinozist-Deleuzian understanding of male bodies as sites which both affect and are affected by subtly complex intersubjective encounters, as opposed to predetermined actors following essentialized understandings of gendered behavior. I argue that the bodies and minds of men are capable of much more than popular conceptions of masculinity recognize. Rather than engaging in the cultural disparagement of men, this re-thinking of masculinity is a necessary antidote to the crisis of male health and male suicide, as well as the outward-focused abusiveness of toxic forms of masculinity. It is furthermore the goal of this paper to take a critical look at feminist queer theory’s position within this debate, as well as current initiatives which seek to redefine a new and “healthier” masculinity, such as the positive psychology–positive masculinity paradigm (PPPM) (Kiselica, Benton-Wright, & Englar-Carson, 2016). In the next section, I explore a nomadic understanding of masculinity and what it offers to the current debate.

Nomadic Masculinity
A “nomadic” conception of masculinity requires a different framework for understanding both “the self” and gender. I draw here on the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his interpretation of the Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza, as well as contemporary Deleuzian scholars (e.g. Braidotti, 2012; Lorraine, 2012; Massumi, 1995; McDonald, 2018; Parr, 2005). Much of traditional gender understanding and even current theoretical analysis involves defining masculinity and femininity through constellations of opposing (some would say co-constitutive) attributes. This “top-down” and often naturalistic structuring of gender identity presents gender as something which exists prior to the individual, and to which the individual must conform at least in part, if they are to take their place in the symbolic structure of social relations. This a popular perspective in many domains, such as evolutionary psychology (e.g. Buss & Schmitt, 2011) and popular culture understandings based in a “boys will be boys” attitude. The situation of gender identity is far more complex than simply top-down prescriptions, but for now, it will be helpful to give a brief explanation of the Spinozist-Deleuzian ontology which grounds a nomadic understanding.

Rather than an ontology of specially classified existing objects or beings according to genus and species—what Deleuze refers to as an “arborescent” model of knowledge—Spinoza classifies natural objects according to their “capacity for being affected, by the affections of which they are capable, the excitations to which they react, those by which they are unaffected, and those which exceed their capacity and make them ill or cause them to die” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, p. 45). Arborescent here refers to the image of a tree, with its hierarchical structure of roots, trunk, and branches. It is not the hierarchical, scientific characteristics of an organism or set of organisms with which Deleuze is concerned, but with an organism’s potential to affect and be affected. This necessarily includes an organism’s ecological embeddedness and relatedness, because for him, individuation is always an “involution”—a “becoming” that is always moved and affected by its external relations. It is important to note that Deleuze is not arguing for a radical exteriorization of individuation, the likes of which some social constructionists may be accused. For Deleuze & Guattari, individuation is precisely this “involution” or “in-folding” of an organism’s involvement in a “pack” as well as a territory, as connected up with many ecological forces (1987, p. 241). Parr (2005) argues these forces to be as diverse as “geography, biology, meteorology, astronomy, ecology, and culture” (p. 12). Furthermore, this folding inward is not externally deterministic, but produces various possible modes of self-relation (e.g. as outlined by Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault and his work on ethics or aesthetics of subjectivity—see Smith, 2015). It is not just radical exteriority, but radical interiority as it (perhaps literally) finds itself at the nexus of many different relations. Outside and inside are in total relation, though this is not necessarily a harmony, but may proceed through “tensions, points of excess, the development of a tipping point or form of emergence, forms of becoming that coexist at best uneasily […] these points of instability are the sites around which individuality may emerge” (Grosz, 2012, p. 39) . Boundaries become—when conceived of at the molecular as opposed to the molar level—porous and negotiable and always in transition according to different affective thresholds within a world of multiple beings and their relations. Molecular refers to processes of micro-perception and ecological engagement at the level of affect, contraposed against the molar, which is concerned with stable, arborescent entities that are “hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, p. 16). The difference may be thought of, roughly, as the distinction made previously between transcendent/top-down and bottom-up, or what Deleuze terms “rhizomatic,” processes of thinking and enacting gender—the organized figure of man or woman versus the figure of a yet-to-be-known, partially undifferentiated body composed of multiple flows of affect which also exceed its boundaries. Deleuze uses the idea of the rhizome to counter this transcendental, “arborescent” understanding of the self, and of philosophical knowledge as well. A rhizome is a subterranean plant structure (e.g. a tuber) that exists and connects to other structures through lateralization and nonlinearity, as opposed to the hierarchy of a tree. Therefore, there is no “death of the subject” here, unless we mean the transcendent ideal of a fully autonomous and exclusively self-creating subject. The interiority of Deleuze’s subject is submitted to a process of externalization, but the external also presses inwards, enfolding into subjectivities.

What this means for a nomadic masculinity is the necessity of a partial “deterritorialization,” in Deleuze’s terminology. This refers to a “becoming-molecular” process, by which arborescent or transcendent structurings of gendered identity become destabilized through particular affective relations with other bodies. What is a body, in this framework? What is an affect? For Deleuze, a body is “any whole composed of parts, where these parts stand in some definite relation to one another, and has a capacity for being affected by other bodies” (Parr, 2005, p. 35). Under this definition, a body can be anything from a human body to “a body of work, a social body or collectivity, a linguistic corpus, a political party, or even an idea” (p. 35). A body here is not understood only as materially or organically composed, but as consisting of both dynamic internal relations related to “relative motion and rest, speed and slowness,” and external relations in terms of actions and reactions oriented toward a milieu. The simplest way to understand “affect” for Spinoza and Deleuze is to think of it as a passage or a transition in a process of becoming between organisms. It is conceived as outside of language or conceptualization, although it does contribute to the particular forms that symbolically inflected experiences, i.e. emotions, may take. Affect can become emotion through this process of being mediated, interpreted, and symbolized via language (Massumi, 1995). Deleuze and Guattari (1998) describe the different affects of a tick as involving its attraction to light, its sensitivity toward the proximal bodies of mammals, its digging into the skin and feasting (p. 257). They continue to say that in terms of affect, “a racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, p. 257), signaling this approach to understanding based in affective relations as opposed to hierarchical knowledge. What of the affects and potential affective relations of a male body? Creating a full list is impossible, given the complexity of a human (male) body and our inability to understand, a priori, its capacities. However, for the purposes of this paper, and at the risk of “emotionalizing” affect (again see Massumi, 1995), I would suggest that a male body is capable of a number of affective responses and relations: to tense up and act protectively, to soften and become receptive, to mourn and grieve, to be in open awe, to become furious and bristle, to create and express. The list is obviously an inadequate accounting of the exhaustive set of possibilities, but I hope that it begins to suggest a complex mapping of desire outside of arborescent prescriptions.

Where are these possibilities to be achieved? In what contexts? In combination with what other bodies, human and nonhuman? Here, Deleuze & Guattari (1998) encourage us: “Make a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment” (p. 257). This points to the significance of bodies-in-relation, as opposed to a bounded, individual body expressing itself ex nihilo, or by some power uniquely and privately possessed. To “make a rhizome” one must open oneself to others, human and nonhuman, and allow for a process of interpenetration and reconstitution, or as Deleuze would call it, forming “transversal” connections. These transversal connections are not mere transmissions of affect between dualistic, bounded subjects, but movements in “a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, p. 25). The idea of the transversal is perhaps best illustrated by Felix Guattari’s work at the La Borde mental health clinic in France, in the latter half of the 20th century, where patients, staff, and clinicians would share administrative and medical duties, participate in theatric productions together, and more—a horizontal, rhizomatic, and transversally organized community, as opposed to the conventional top-down hierarchies of many clinics (Guattari, Lotringer, & Dosse, 2009, p. 178).
Powers emerge and may be expressed in relation, and relations either amplify or diminish the possibility of embodying and expressing these powers to affect and be affected. As Deleuze & Guattari (1998) note of this ecological process:

“We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.” (p. 257)

As McDonald (2018) argues, if we adopt this Spinozist-Deleuzian perspective, we can begin to consider masculinity not from the perspective of transcendent morality, or an overarching, arborescent structure, but from an understanding of masculinity as “creative force with no allegiance to the male body other than its capacity to affect or be affected” (p. 57). For Deleuze’s Spinoza, an emphasis on transcendent morality is a consequence of the traditionally western privileging of the mind over the body—of the mind as that which must engage in “domination of the passions by consciousness” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, p. 18). Contrary to that understanding, Deleuze and Guattari (1998) argue that we must become aware of the fact that we know very little of what a body is capable of doing, and that we primarily experience the effects of our encounters with other bodies, rather than the causes of these effects (p. 19). The proposed antidote is, again, an emphasis on experimentation—a remaining open, flexible, as in the poet John Keats’s negative capability, or the capacity “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keller, 2015, p. 5)—with an ultimate aim toward encounters with other bodies which enhance our power as opposed to diminishing it, based in Spinoza’s ontology and Deleuze’s Nietzschean reading of that affirmative vision. This reversal of how we understand gender—at the level of affective relations between bodies, rather than transcendental conceptions—can begin to solve many of the problems that currently exist regarding restrictive, inhibiting, and damaging models of masculine identity. This can occur by freeing us from the arborescent demands and affective constraints of “man” and “woman” conceived in binary opposition—by refiguring our very ability to be refigured by our ecological relations with other bodies. This is not to say that male and female, as well as intersexed, bodies may not differ in their capacities to affect and be affected, because of their anatomical and morphological differences. Crucially however, for a nomadic understanding of masculinity, if these differences do exist, we cannot know them in advance, and we should consequently remain open to whatever virtual possibilities exist within and between us.

A nomadic conception of masculinity also does not necessitate a destruction or negation of the transcendent masculine identity position, but simply a holding-lightly, a circumspection as to its fixity. Deleuze is explicit in not endorsing a total deterritorialization of identity, which he links to drug addiction and other pathological forms of subjectivity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, p. 163). Nomadism is not self-negation as it relates to gender, but a refusal to foreclose on the nature of the (gendered) self. It asks a continually renewing question, according to continually changing situations and contexts: what affective, intellectual, and relational possibilities are now open to me? Who am I able to become in this moment, and with whom or what? Grosz (2005) describes these ontological becomings in terms of the “virtuality laden within the present” and argues that feminism must pay attention to the “unactualized latencies in any situation which could be […] instrumental in the generation of the new or the unforeseen” (p. 76-77). Lorraine (2012) also argues that feminists must pay attention to both the “actual” and the “virtual,” or “things as they are” versus “things as they could be,” concerning the distinction between transcendent or molar identities and “molecular becomings” (p. 21). The same may be said for those who are interested in reshaping masculinity. Gendered subjectivity according to this system of thought is porous and open to forming new and transformative connections. It creates a “home” rooted in its own nomadic activity, punctuated by contingent and impermanent identifications and crystallized relations. As Braidotti (2012) states:
“This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. The nomadic subject, however, is not altogether devoid of unity; his/her mode is one of definite, seasonal patterns of movement through rather fixed routes. It is a cohesion engendered by repetitions, cyclical moves, rhythmical displacement.” (p. 22-23)

To get more concrete, let us consider what happens when a man, identifying as masculine in a western country, encounters a situation that elicits as virtual possibility conventionally “non-masculine” affective movements. We can look at an example. A woman confides in her partner that she is hurt and confused by something he did. The man was unaware and so is confused or shocked at first, then defensive. Perhaps he registers this moment as “unreasonable” on the woman’s part, defending his intentions or his character against the “assault.” His body tenses. Is it masculine to apologize, to commiserate, to empathize, to become receptive, to enter into shared and vulnerable affective spaces with another? Perhaps in some cultures or situations the answer might be in the affirmative. From a Deleuzian perspective, if a man is called to empathize, but resists and becomes defensive out of a fixation with masculinity, this is a molar process, whereby transcendent or arborescent models of identity constrain particular movements of affect and affective relations with others. Under the figuration of a nomadic masculinity, however, this interaction may become molecular, or rhizomatic. Perhaps the man experiences the pull of this masculine identity—this defensive desire to protect an identitarian integrity—but he simultaneously feels the pull of an affective engagement with the woman, and he allows the latter force space to move, allows himself to be moved. He is not blind or counterproductively hostile to his own socialized habits and identity-related affective patterns, but he recognizes a greater pull—nomadically speaking, he allows himself to be drawn, by closely perceiving the affective and emotional movements of his body, into a contingent and molecular formation of identity grounded in moment to moment affective relations. He engages with the open capacities of his own body, the body of the other (the woman), and the virtual possibilities between them, to affect and be affected. It is not too idealistic, I believe, to suggest that when his body softens and becomes receptive to hers, they are together empowered—their creative force and joy enhanced. He (as she) is constituted by a multiplicity of different affective flows, and the molar sense of masculinity within which he has become recognizable to himself and others cannot account for the many creative branchings, affective pulls, and contingent social arrangements that populate and color his world. This masculinity is precisely a subjective formation which in effect curtails his affective possibilities and possible relations.

This example is not intended, however, to provide a new molar template; there are many situations in which empathy, softening, and receptivity may not be called for—where it may be dangerous to do so, or where it may not result in the collective empowerment of both parties. Context must always be taken into account. There is no formula for a successful nomadic masculinity, except insofar as nomadism provides a way to flexibly navigate social relations, while keeping an eye toward mutual enrichment, interpenetrative change, and the cultivation of joy.

Other Models of Flexible Masculinity
A number of alternative models related to both gender identity and masculine identity have emerged in the past decades. Perhaps closest to a nomadic understanding is queer identity. Queerness is a politically oriented identity figuration which has roots in the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Queerness emerges from the insight that gender, rather than being a purely natural phenomenon associated with a sexed body, is in some sense “performative.” Butler (1999) argues that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (p. 519). Butler thus locates gender identity in discursive and socially performed and reinforced habits. This shares common ground with a Deleuzian approach, because it emphasizes the contingent and relational aspects of identity, as opposed to their molar essentiality. Queer identities often challenge the binary aspects of gender, favoring a more ambiguous and disjunctive approach which centers a lack of fixity of gender categorization or naturalizing essentialism. It departs from Deleuze, however, in its lack of a fleshed-out ontology with which to ground a “bodily materialism” (see Nigianni & Storr, 2005). Barnard (2000) views this situation hopefully, arguing that post-structural philosophy can be understood as calling for this very elaboration of embodiment, despite or because of the primacy that post-structuralism places on language and social structures as the constituting forces of subjectivity.

Perhaps more significant for this paper than philosophical differences, however, is in queer identity’s place within culture and gender discourse. Research suggests that LGBT women are far more likely to identify as bisexual than are LGBT men (Gates, 2011). This is suggestive of a trend within masculine-oriented communities against fluidity of sexual orientation and likely gender orientation. Queer identities are among the most fluid available on the social “market.” Ingraham (2005) notes that some men do identify as what she calls “queer-straight,” but “queer heterosexuality” is considered both a marginal position within queer identity as well as a controversial one, given the suspicion many of those who identify as queer harbor toward heteronormativity (p. 112). It is not surprising that queer identity would fail to constitute an easy home for many men seeking to disrupt their understanding of a transcendent form of masculine identity. For many, “queer heterosexuality” is a contradiction in terms. A nomadic masculinity, however, avoids many of these issues. Nomadism is not associated with a particular sexual orientation or even a particular gender, though for simplicity’s sake the term “nomadic masculinity” is being used. “Nomad” may be a more appropriate identification, except that the connotation of masculine suggests a starting point on the road to a true nomadism. If the issue at stake is the relationship between “traditional” masculinity and male suicide, then it may be valuable to offer a point of transition for traditional men—indeed an identity figuration which makes “transition” its organizing principle. Queer identity holds little space for these kinds of questioning men, who may perceive themselves as being unwelcome within queer communities or the queer umbrella at large, and who may likewise seek to hold on to a sense of masculinity.

A second model which has recently emerged in the context of flexible masculinity is the “psychology-positive masculinity paradigm” or “PPPM” (Kiselica, Benton-Wright, & Englar-Carlson, 2016). Advocates of the PPPM approach argue that a “deficit” model of masculinity, focused on constructs like “toxic” or “hegemonic” masculinity, is insufficient for encouraging social change. Influenced by trends in positive psychology, they propose an understanding of masculinity based in “positive” masculine traits which they argue to be prosocial and conducive to health, such as self-reliance (or inner strength). As Lomas (2013) notes, however, the PPPM approach tends to reify traditionally masculine norms, rather than offering a true redefinition or reshaping of a “positive” masculinity, comparing it to the “neo-conservative ‘mythopoetic’ movement” which took shape in the 1980s, with the aid of figures such as Robert Bly (p. 183). From a Deleuzian perspective, even if the proposed traits succeeded in reshaping masculinity in a healthier direction, the approach fails to offer any criticism of a molar sense of identity and is unlikely to generate significant change at the interpersonal or sociocultural level. Rather, as Lomas (2013) notes, if the essentialized attributes of traditional masculinity are not called into question, it is conceivable that PPPM will simply reinforce extant social and economic structures which are harmful to women and other minority groups—and to men themselves (p. 184). Lomas (2013) proposes his own “critical positive masculinity” approach, which seeks to integrate some of the emphasis on a positive refashioning of masculinity with feminist and social constructionist scholarship, such as the Critical Studies on Men perspective (p. 184). Rather than returning to traditional masculine norms, critical positive masculinity focuses on how men might “resist these [norms], or at least reinterpret these in skillful ways,” with a greater emphasis on social justice (Lomas, 2013, p. 183).

Although Lomas’s response to the PPPM is laudable, nomadic masculinity takes a different approach, seeking to refigure men’s relationship to their bodies and the bodies of others. Rather than focusing on “resistance” or “reinterpretation” of traditional masculine norms, a nomadic approach operates at the level of embodied, ecological affect, and the virtual affective possibilities that exist between us and other bodies. Nomadic masculinity does not seek to negotiate with traditional masculinity as much as to refigure the (masculine) self’s relationship with molar identity formations at large. The result of this process would be a more open-ended and perhaps radical shift in masculinity, focused less on resistance and more on what Deleuze terms “lines of flight,” or those creative moments and virtual affective possibilities which present themselves in contingent situations, as passageways or potential movements that would cut across extant boundaries and produce new subjective formations. As with McDonald (2018), it is assumed here that the creative capacities of male bodies must necessarily be tapped into, heeded, and followed. Any approach that seeks to maintain masculinity as a kind of top-down, transcendent model, will not allow for the kind of affective flexibility and “becoming-molecular” that may be necessary for genuine transformation.

A nomadic program for masculinity is not necessarily concerned with labels or philosophical prescriptions. One need not read Deleuze to become nomadic; Deleuze’s Spinozist ontology simply provides a “way in” to thinking about and experimenting with the relationship between the body, its affects/affections, its ecological territory, and molar configurations of identity. It is just as likely for any approach which takes this “micro-perception” of affective relations seriously to be useful, at least in part—Buddhism and other contemplative disciplines, some forms of phenomenology, some forms of artistic experimentation and expression, and more (see Keller, 2015). All of these (and related) approaches share a commitment to the “deterritorialization” of transcendent, restrictive models of identity, in favor of an approach to life that considers what Lorraine (2012) refers to as our dynamic temporality:

On Deleuze and Guattari’s (Bergsonian) view, to think time in terms of what unfolds moment by moment in a Newtonian conception of extended space strips it of its dynamic intensity. Time as it is lived is rather a durational whole that shifts qualitatively as it unfolds in specific forms of reality, shifting further tendencies in becoming in the process. If we stabilize out of the flux of time an understanding of space in terms of stable objects and fixed relations, it is because this allows us to live. […] Thus, although our lives are always unfolding in dynamic temporalities, we take the constant forms that are the effects of relatively “territorialized” routines of life—habitually repeated patterns of inorganic, organic, semiotic, cultural, and social forms of life—to be the reality.” (p. 8)

As discussed earlier, nomadism does not advocate a form of un-boundaried and undifferentiated chaos as the ground for subjectivity. Deleuze is explicit in stating that rhizomatic processes crystallize into arborescent processes, and arborescent processes offer lines of flight back into rhizomatic processes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 15). Deterritorialization is always necessarily partial. Likewise, with Braidotti’s (2012) characterization of nomadic subjectivity, relative stability is found within the nomad’s own activities—its “seasonal patterns of movement” (p. 23).

	To conclude, it may be stated that in the West, masculinity and masculine norms are in a dangerous, but potentially creative moment of flux. Western culture is awakening to the violence that traditional masculinity has wrought upon men, women, and other kinds of bodies, human and otherwise. This paper began with a discussion of suicide, which is perhaps the “limit” of this kind of violence as it manifests its effects on men, driving them to self-destruction. Efforts are being generated in various camps to try to mobilize alternative conceptions and practices of masculinity in response to this issue, as well as the issue of masculine violence toward others. Some of these efforts, such as the PPPM, are more conservative in nature. Others, such as queer identities and critical positive masculinity, have an eye toward larger trends in social justice. As opposed to the dominance of a single perspective or set of practices, a concerted (and rhizomatic!) effort between many camps is likely necessary. Hopefully, this paper will contribute to the discussion and introduce a concern with molar forms of identity in their restrictive functioning, as well as the necessity of paying closer attention to our affective, ecological possibilities. This includes the realm of the virtual, of bringing into actuality creative opportunities for a refashioning of self, other, and their relation. Men who identify as traditionally masculine have had these virtual, embodied capacities cut off. Consequently, they have turned to substance abuse, externalizing violence, and for some, suicide. I hope this paper may spark discussion and exploration of what exactly we are missing, and how we can begin to attune our bodies and minds to the latent, revitalizing, and relational possibilities that exist around us.








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