This paper presents emerging findings from my ongoing PhD research which explores the contemporary lives of working-class men in post-industrial Tyneside, North East England. At a time when right-wing and reactionary politics are gaining momentum both within and beyond electoral politics (Mondon and Winter, 2020), this research investigates how such narratives are taken up, negotiated and/or resisted within men’s own biographies and how they produce particular versions of masculinity that are embodied and enacted in place.
Although acknowledging the importance of critically interrogating men and masculinities within formal or institutional politics, this paper focusses on the everyday geographies through which political subjectivities are lived and felt. With regards to the North East, there is a wide-ranging body of work which explores the 2019 collapse of the ‘Red Wall’ (MacKinnon, 2020), which saw an end to traditionally safe Labour constituencies, alongside focus on changing voting patterns across the region post-Brexit.
Empirical findings from my research show that men in Tyneside firmly recognise both the place and people within to be ‘Labour voting’. Such an understanding is deeply entwined with (past) notions of respectability and moral claims tied to place. However, at present there is both ambivalence and disillusionment towards electoral or ‘traditional’ politics. By using a classed and gendered lens I explore how understandings of ‘politics’ in Tyneside is changing with men both taking up and, at times, resisting right-wing reactionary and authoritarian discourses.
My research uses biographical (walking) interviews and extended social observations to explore the ways in which men understand themselves in the context of their post-industrial landscape. I will highlight the importance of a grounded, local view gained via exploration of the everyday as site to better understand men and masculinities in politics. Such an examination will demonstrate the ways in which social categories of gender and class intersect and operate alongside affect and emotion in the making of current political subjectivities, thus exploring masculinity(ies) and politics beyond the ballot box.
