Becoming-masculine? Po-ethics and the Practice of an Everyday Life

Both historically and at present, the sociopolitical landscape of Latin America has been mired in the monoculture of machismo: an arborescent violence ingrained throughout processes of male subjectivation that precede any consciousness of its consequences on the capacity for life and for alterity to flourish. Its influence, formative of the culture it occupies, and necrotic in its effects, remains hegemonic in both its prevalence and invisibility in the lives of many. In the face of this condition, this article asks how alternative processes of male subjectivation can be affirmed and directed towards situated, response-able and singular but nonetheless collective forms of masculine becoming. It argues for a practice of an everyday life: a materially embedded, micropolitical metamodelisation of masculine relationality which reframes machismo as one mode of (necro)relation among many forms of masculine expression, both actual and virtual. Following an introduction to the context of subjectivation and machismo, outlines of material and practical experiments ground and punctuate the article's theoretical framework. These exercises, based on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, complement a Guattarian ethico-aesthetic sensibility and inform a micro-ritual-based formulation of affective politics. Functioning simultaneously as invitations to action and practical expressions of thought, these experiments illustrate how the practice of an everyday life can embed alternative forms of thinking and living masculinity in imagination and experience. Finally, these embodied attempts at practising potential masculinities make imperative a kind of po-ethics: the affirmation of our co-actualisation of the world as a creative act which, however partial our affective capacities, makes of living an immanent process not of moral responsibility, but of ethical co-composition with alterity.