Crisis Ordinariness: Care and the Everyday Life of Reactionary Gender Politics

This paper explores how young boys’ involvement in the manosphere spaces is experienced in the ordinary, everyday life of heterosexual middle-class families. Drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’ conception of the family as a caring institution and Lauren Berlant's notion of crisis ordinariness, it investigates how seemingly egalitarian households make sense of and respond to their sons’ engagement with racist and male-supremacist digital spaces. Under neoliberal conditions, responsibility and care are increasingly framed through individualised narratives of risk and decision-making. Within this context, crises no longer appear as exceptional events but as ongoing processes of navigating the overwhelming. What the manosphere content promotes is most often considered “extreme”. However, based on in-depth interviews with white, middle-class parents in Ireland, I argue that what makes the “extreme” extreme is, in fact, its amplification of heteronormative and patriarchal practices embedded in everyday family life. These include protection, responsibility, and care, mediated through both emotional labour and the normative expectations of parenthood. Building on Lauren Berlant’s notion of crisis ordinariness, which conceptualises how affect and attachment unfold in conditions of ongoing and impending crisis, the paper traces how affective relations within the ordinary shape parents’ responses to perceived crises surrounding their sons’ involvement in reactionary online spaces. This process occurs as parents navigate uncertainty, responsibility, and care, revealing how the family mediates perceived threats. In doing so, the paper reframes the family not as a private sphere but as a crucial site where the affective politics of patriarchal order are both contested and reproduced, contributing to feminist and affect-theoretical debates on how ordinary attachments sustain reactionary formations.