This paper develops the concept of plastic masculinities to describe forms of masculine subjectivity that are affectively attuned, relationally constituted and reworked through intergenerational encounters. Drawing on her theoretical framework developed in Deleuze and Masculinity (2009), Hickey-Moody models masculinities as an open, processual and ethically generative assemblages. Rather than treating masculinity as a stable identity or a sociological category organised around hierarchy and dominance, this approach reconceptualises gender as an assemblage of affects: practices, bodies and relations.
Following Deleuze (1994, Deleuze & Guattari 1987), masculine subjectivities and bodies are plastic: capable of being shaped and reshaped through encounters, intensities and temporalities of experience. Plasticity here does not imply infinite flexibility or voluntarism, but a situated malleability; structured yet transformable, patterned yet open to variation. This framing shifts the analytic focus from what masculinity is to what masculinity does, and crucially, what it can become, facilitate, stick to, and make. Engaging with critical masculinity studies (Connell 1995, Elliott 2016, Kimmel 2005, Whitehead & Barrett 2001), the paper situates plastic masculinity as a departure from hegemonic, complicit and protesting forms that reproduce gendered power asymmetries. While existing scholarship has articulated “caring masculinities” (Elliott 2016, Held 2006) as alternatives grounded in equality, emotional openness and non-violence, this paper extends that work by theorising care not as a normative attribute or ethical add-on, but as an emergent capacity of assemblages. Care becomes an effect of relational configurations, produced through practices of attention, responsiveness, and co-presence.
Intergenerational relationships are central to this model. Sites such as fathering, mentoring, teaching, cooking, home making and community-based arts practice are conceptualised as dynamic fields of becoming-with, where masculinities are continually negotiated and transformed. These relations disrupt linear models of inheritance and authority, instead enabling reciprocal processes in which both younger and older subjects are reconfigured. Plastic masculinity thus operates through temporal multiplicity, holding together memory, anticipation and lived encounter in ways that allow masculinities to be re-authored across time. Plastic masculinity is not proposed as an ideal type or prescriptive model. It is a minoritarian formation; fragile, contingent, and unevenly distributed. It emerges within and against dominant gender orders. Its political and material force lies in its capacity to reorient masculine subjectivity toward interdependence, vulnerability and collective flourishing without stabilising these qualities into a new orthodoxy. By foregrounding affect, relation and intergenerationality, Hickey-Moody offers a framework for understanding how masculinities can be reconfigured as infrastructures of care within contemporary social life. Plastic masculinity names a shift from masculinity as structure to masculinity as process, a mode of becoming that is responsive to others, open to transformation, and oriented toward sustaining shared worlds.
References
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Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). Deleuze and Masculinity. Singapore: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1
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