MINISTERIO DE SALUD

Throughout my thesis, I have traced Man Up’s complex entanglements with governmentality, health, nationhood, mateship, masculinities, and materialities of existence. Exploring these entanglements has allowed me to unpack how the process of Manning Up goes far beyond the pressure to bottle up and release emotions. It is deeply concerned with a certain constrained category of heterosexual/homosocial/hegemonic masculinity that effectively constitutes what it means to be a mate, and thus, a ‘real’ man in Australia. Not only does this occlude the many other masculinities that may be entwined within this mental health crisis from its narrative, it makes re-shaping masculinity a matter of self-improvement, rather than taking into consideration those broader social, economic, and political conditions that are simultaneously disrupting men’s lives. It leaves us with a deeply complicated situation where not only are men expected to re-shape their masculinity in order to solve the suicide crisis, they are still required to maintain a certain standard of hegemonic and nationalistic masculinity in order to fit into Man Up’s narrative. To ‘man up’ then, after intervention, seemingly means to speak about your emotions, but still be strong, to embrace feminine qualities, but to not become feminine, to allow yourself to talk to your mates, but still hold yourself accountable for your own shortcomings as this new Man. Manning up, as the show redefines it, effectively still places enormous pressure on men to maintain a rigid category of gender identity and experience in a highly individualised framework, which reaffirms just how heavily gendered practice can be policed by techniques of government .

It is so critical then to move beyond Manning Up, and consider the relations between these masculinities amongst others, particularly those who are deliberately excluded from the hegemonic category, such as gay men, women, and people of colour, yet who are simultaneously implicated within this issue. This year in Australia, we have seen the already vulnerable LGBTQIA community exposed to the viciousness of the plebiscite ‘debate’, which has sparked a ‘20 per cent increase in people accessing LGBTI support services’ (ABC News, 2017: para 3). Yet Malcom Turnbull has claimed no responsibility for these issues, and persists to assert that Australians ‘have demonstrated that they can have a respectful discussion’ (in Karp, 2017: para 14). If respectful means taking to the skies to write ‘VOTE

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NO’, if respectful means graffitiing ‘NO’ on the fences of my friend’s streets that proudly don the rainbow flag, if respectful means intimidatingly telling me to ‘Vote No’ at universities and train stations, then I suggest Turnbull buy himself a dictionary.

Racism is also having major impacts on people’s health, education and social life, effectively causing ‘anxiety, depression and psychological distress’ (Priest et al., 2013: 122), and effectively contributing to the ongoing systemic and emotional violence against marginalised groups in Australia. In 2010, Indigenous youth suicide was 80 per cent of total Australian suicides, yet simultaneously governments continue to ignore the calls from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for ‘greater community involvement’, and let ineffective ‘outside programs’ dictate their lives (Australians Together website, no date). By occluding race from its narrative, Man Up effectively did a disservice to these groups, and reified the normality of whiteness in Australia, and what we imagine ‘real’ Aussie blokes to look like. Further, the issues women experience with men cannot be separated from those to do with hegemonic masculinity, particularly when we consider the high rates of physical, domestic, and sexual violence amongst women in Australia. On average, at least one woman a week is killed by a partner or former partner in Australia. One in three Australian women have experienced physical violence since the age of fifteen. One in five Australian women have experienced sexual violence. Eight out of ten women aged eighteen to twenty-four were harassed on the street in 2015 (Our Watch website, no date), including myself, often from the mouth of tradies, the same Good Aussie Blokes that I have spent the past ten months considering the well-being of. This is why it was so important that Man Up address women and femininity in relation to breaking down these masculine norms, as not only would it improve men’s lives, and the ways in which they relate to women, but women’s lives as well, and perhaps even decrease the volatile and fearful ways in which we encounter men. Women are not silent in these mental health/masculinity narratives. In writing this thesis, I have found myself having endless conversations with the men around me about it, and in ways I have acted as a useful resource for them as we discuss my research and reconsider those accepted truths about masculinity, and what it means to be a man. In considering masculinities in relation to other shifting categories of identity, we might find then that these

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Good Aussie Bloke masculinities are actually in flux, and are interacting with, and being re- shaped by forces greater than themselves. While these masculinities may never reach a final, idealised form, they are certainly not stagnant; they can continue to shift, move, and re-shape as we think through forms of selfhood and those collective conditions of existence that place pressure on men to move with them.

Much like the masculinities in Man Up, this thesis is something I have both worked with, and struggled against in an attempt to make sense of certain selfhoods, patterns of knowledge, and how we are situated amongst them. In this sense, I am indebted to the tools of thought I have gained from the rich, complex, and dynamic world of gender and cultural studies. These tools have allowed me to deconstruct, reassemble, disentangle, complicate and put into words the complex ways through which we understand identities and lived experiences. Critically, they have allowed me to think about how we move beyond Manning Up, or any other rigid category of gender that delimits our capacities, and allow not just these men, but ourselves, in all our capabilities, entanglements, flaws, thoughts, and desires, to just be.

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