Between Silence and Vulnerability: Masculine Identity, Therapeutic Culture, and the Politics of Emotional Discourse in Contemporary Brazil

This paper examines the contested terrain of masculine identity in contemporary Brazilian public discourse, drawing on a close reading of a televised intellectual exchange in which philosopher Luís Felipe Pondé engages with questions about what heterosexual men want, how they express emotion, and how they have been positioned within feminist-inflected social narratives. Situating this exchange within a broader theoretical framework that includes R.W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, Eva Illouz’s sociology of therapeutic culture, and recent scholarship on the manosphere and MGTOW movements, we argue that contemporary masculinity is caught between two competing demands: the inherited stoic ideal, which locates male care in action rather than verbal disclosure, and an emergent therapeutic norm that pathologizes emotional silence. We further contend that the displacement of men as a category of academic inquiry has produced a discursive vacuum increasingly filled by reactionary countermovements. Rather than adjudicating between these poles, we propose a framework of “expressive pluralism” that recognizes multiple legitimate registers of masculine affect without reducing care to vulnerability performance. The analysis carries implications for gender studies, public health discourse, and the sociology of emotions.