Introduction

With a world that appears to be on an uncertain precipice, with wars and conflict occurring across the globe, increasing threats of environmental damage, and unparalleled political transformations, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that discussions of bodies, masculinities and sexualities are merely a distraction to what is “really going on” in the world. This appeal to a “real” world, in opposition to a world of academia sets up a series of juxtapositions, where in the real world, you need practical knowledge and skills that can address immediate needs, solve problems, and have tangible results. The academic world, in this pole, in contrast, is a world of disconnected abstract theorizing that has little relevance to everyday challenges. Placed in the context of growing right-wing sentiment in Europe and the United States, it is possible to see how an attachment to the “real”, the “everyday”, and the “ordinary”, feel so persuasive. It is through the seemingly emptied meaning of the “ordinary” where such terms gain their power to produce interpretation. Ernesto Laclau (2000) uses the notion of the “empty signifier” to capture the ways that “the people” in political discourse are empty, being filled with strategic meanings that warrant a political perspective or action. As such, “various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack’ (idem: 412). Perhaps it is the emptiness, or the ways that emptiness is “discoursed”, that helps us to grasp the nature of the shifts that are taking place and what that means for bodies, masculinities, and sexualities. This “perhaps” is imbricated with the clause of recognition of causal results or actions; or, differently, is the place where the supposed “unreal” world of academia meets and offers more than simply greetings to the supposed “real” world that, somehow, finds academia excised from it.