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Conclusion: Friendship Politics as Feminist Politics?

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Men’s Friendships as Feminist Politics?

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences ((GSSS))

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Abstract

This concluding chapter discusses the political potential of the interviewees’ friendship politics, composed of explicitly politicised as well as implicit and taken-for-granted notions of friendship expressed during the interviews. The chapter scrutinises genealogies and implications of how men, masculine positions, and friendship were politicised, and it discusses whether the friendship politics can be called feminist or not. The chapter concludes with an outline of a possible field of feminist friendship studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Relatedly, emerging research on asexuality argues that important relationships are not necessarily based on romantic or sexual closeness. Instead, platonic or asexual relationships should be valued in their own right (see Dawson et al. 2016). There is great potential in putting asexuality research and feminist friendship studies in dialogue.

  2. 2.

    The “best friend” may function as an accessory in a postfeminist, normative femininity (Kanai 2017), while close friendships between men may be part of a postfeminist articulation of “woke”, “posthomophobic” masculinity (Becker 2014; Goedecke 2022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Klara Goedecke

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  1. Klara Goedecke
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Goedecke, K. (2022). Conclusion: Friendship Politics as Feminist Politics?. In: Men’s Friendships as Feminist Politics?. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11771-8_6

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