Description
This article examines the 2024 US presidential election as a pivotal moment for contesting the US autobiographical narrative through what conceptualise as phantasies of masculinity. We argue that, during the campaign, competing phantasies of masculinity were integral to collective narrative and electoral contestation, showing that the Republicans phantasised masculinity in hegemonic and hypermasculine terms, while the Democrats emphasised care but ultimately reproduced traits of hegemonic masculinity. This domestic contestation, ultimately 'won' by the Trump campaign, subsequently shaped US foreign policy actions, now characterised by a display of hypermasculinity. Beyond offering an empirical account of the role of masculinity in the US autobiographical narrative, the article makes two key contributions to International Relations theory by integrating feminist scholarship on masculinities with a Kleinian approach to ontological (in)security. First, it advances ontological security research by theorising the foundational role of masculinity in collective autobiographical narratives, with particular attention to hierarchies of masculinities. Second, it enriches feminist scholarship by examining the translation of masculinity into phantasies that structure the psychological and affective dimensions of narrative contestation. The article calls for deeper engagement between feminist and ontological security approaches to better understand how dynamics of ontological (in)security in global politics are fundamentally gendered.
