Across the twenty-first century, masculinity has emerged, somewhat contradictorily, as both an unstable and overdetermined discursive category, shaped by the converging pressures of neoliberal economic restructuring, racialized hierarchies, resurgent authoritarianisms, and digitally mediated cultures of misogyny. Reel Men, Real Trouble brings together four papers that examine how contemporary cinema exposes and reimagines masculinity that is produced, strained, and reconfigured in an era of pronounced political volatility. Moving across U.S., French, and transnational contexts, the panel understands masculinity as a fragile and contested formation produced through political economies of precarity, the manosphere’s entanglement with right-wing populism, symbolic economies of nuclear power, racialized terrain of sport and assimilation, and spatial violence of gentrification. Taken together, these papers show how recent films foreground the psychic, bodily, and relational costs of hegemonic masculinity while also staging emergent alternatives grounded in care, intimacy, and collective survival. By centring cinema as a critical site of aesthetic and political negotiation, the panel argues that global film offers a uniquely powerful archive for understanding, and tentatively reimagining, masculinity in crisis.

Turning first to the spatial and affective dimensions of Black masculinity under urban precarity, Brandon J. Manning reads The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) to examine how gentrification, homelessness, and environmental instability reshape masculine attachment to place and to one another. In a city where survival depends on fragile forms of companionship, the film foregrounds intimacy, touch, and artistic practice as alternative modes of Black masculine belonging. Manning argues that by reimagining placemaking beyond patrilineal inheritance and hegemonic violence, the film locates emergent masculinities in vulnerability, relationality, and the shared inhabitation of precarious space.

If Manning locates alternative masculinities in the reconfiguration of place and intimacy, Matthew Gee turns to the racialized and diasporic formation of masculinity through sport and popular culture in recent Asian American cinema. Reading Boogie (2021) and Chang Can Dunk (2023), Gee argues that contemporary coming-of-age narratives displace earlier assimilationist frameworks by centring Black cultural forms, particularly basketball and hip-hop, as the terrain through which Asian American masculinity is negotiated. Yet this shift produces new tensions: masculinity is constructed through cross-racial identification that both enables and destabilizes belonging. Through attention to intergenerational conflict, interracial dynamics, and the gendered roles surrounding the protagonists, the paper reveals how Asian American masculinity is recalibrated within a multicultural but uneven field of racial power.

Shifting from these negotiations of race and belonging to the ideological production of masculinity in the digital and political sphere, Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora examine the pervasive influence of the manosphere in three recent films Eddington, One Battle After Another, and Bugonia (2025). Situating these works within the post-pandemic convergence of neoliberalism, right-wing populism, and resurgent authoritarianism, the paper traces how cinematic narratives register the entanglement of misogyny with contemporary political formations. At the same time, it asks what forms of resistance, if any, these films imagine, probing whether they merely reproduce the logics of reactionary masculinity or open space for its critique and undoing.

Finally, Julie Catel extends the inquiry to the technopolitical and infrastructural dimensions of masculinity, analyzing how nuclear power operates as a longstanding emblem of militarized virility in French political culture and cinema. Reading Hubert Charuel’s Météors (2025), Catel shows how the film dismantles this association by foregrounding the lived experiences of working-class men tasked with managing nuclear waste. As the protagonist’s bodily deterioration mirrors the toxicity he is employed to contain, the film exposes the disposability of masculinized labor under nuclear capitalism. Yet in its depiction of care and dependency between male characters, Météors also gestures toward alternative masculinities grounded in vulnerability and relationality, challenging the hardened ideals of dominance that nuclear discourse traditionally sustains.

Taken together, these papers trace how contemporary cinema not only registers masculinity in crisis but also interrogates the very narrative forms through which it is made legible, revealing the limits of hegemonic, state-sponsored scripts while gesturing toward more relational, care-centered modes of being. In doing so, the panel engages the question of emancipatory narratives through cinematic texts that imagine masculinities that can exceed, refuse, or rework the forms that institutions demand and sustain.

Each presentation will be no longer than 12 minutes (including the third one with co-presenters, who will share their presentation time of 12 minutes). The remainder of the time (15 minutes) will be dedicated to a question and answer session, moderated by the presider.