Camp Johnson versus Effeminate Corbyn: English Masculinities Put to Vote

This article, ‘Camp Johnson versus Effeminate Corbyn: English Masculinities Put to Vote’, explores the nuanced and, often contradictory, ways in which white bourgeois masculinities get constructed in contemporary British politics. The article focuses on the polyvalent discourse of effeminacy in history and as it currently manifests in party discourses, and reported public opinion, on Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. I’ll be prompting readers to think about how Johnson and Corbyn both variously exploit, and repudiate, their effeminized political personas. In the wake of the June 8th snap General Election in the United Kingdom, my contribution requires us to think back, a mere week or so, to a time when Jeremy Corbyn was written off, by the many and not the few, as unelectable. This piece aims to bring into sharp relief those forces that we all tacitly accept, which ensure that some white men are deemed to be electable, whilst others are not.