Between armor and rift: Virility as myth, masculinity as experience
The volume "Masculinité" (Grasset, 2025) brings together literary texts, essays, and reflections that reveal masculinity not as a fixed identity, but as a historically fraught and currently fragile field. The starting point is the distinction between virilité and masculinité: while virility denotes the narrow, normative ideal of the tough, dominant, invulnerable man, the contributions show the contradictory experiences of real men who suffer under these expectations or fail to meet them. The texts tell of boys forced into rituals of toughness at an early age, of fathers who want to pass on strength and in doing so reproduce violence, of bodies shaped and marked by work, sports, circumcision, or migration, and of men who are crushed between cultural models of masculinity. In the introduction, Dantzig diagnoses masculinity as a historically overloaded power construct that simultaneously privileges and deforms, and whose dark sides—dominance, violence, destruction—must not be ignored. Habib-Rubinstein's presentation shifts this finding into literary practice, interpreting the volume as a laboratory of plural voices in which no new norm is established, but rather fragility, doubt, and exploratory movements are made visible. This creates a multi-voiced panorama of masculinity in transition: exhausted by the myth of virility, open to new, uncertain, and narratable forms of manhood.
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