Provisional Masculine Resources and Disastrous Gender Inequalities

Abstract

Drawing on participant observation and 139 in-depth interviews following a California megafire, this paper demonstrates how disasters work as social settings that generate and organize access to what I term “provisional masculine resources” while providing opportunities to articulate inequalities as natural and inevitable. These data demonstrate how gender regimes maintain flexibility in response to exogenous shocks (i.e., disasters) by shifting the definitions of and access to relational, gendered behaviors. Unequal gender regimes are produced and legitimated in disastrous times by (1) clarifying the complementary traits and behaviors associated with hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, (2) organizing potent social rewards around gendered relationships, and (3) providing opportunities to articulate gendered identities and behaviors as natural. In the case of fire recovery, provisional masculine resources explain how the means through which men accomplish manhood change in availability temporally, at different times producing positive social rewards and negative consequences, yet continuously work to uphold unequal, patriarchal gender regimes.