Masculinity in Motion: Emotional Flexibility in Transnational Professional Masculinity

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10. Masculinities: Crisis, Politics, and Transition

Abstract

Masculinity in Motion: Emotional Flexibility in Transnational Professional Masculinity
Liat Sheffer and Danny Kaplan, Bar-Ilan University
Description
This paper examines how globally mobile white-collar professionals sustain gendered and classed advantage while living in prolonged family separation. Based on 31 in-depth interviews with Israeli long-distance commuter fathers, senior professionals in high-tech, defense, finance, and agribusiness whose families remain in Israel while they work abroad for extended cycles, the study explores how global career demands intersect with contemporary expectations of emotionally involved fatherhood.
Israel constitutes a strategic case due to strong pro-natalist norms and strong expectations of paternal involvement, intensifying tensions between mobility and family presence. Participants describe recurring strains: diminished status upon returning from prestigious global arenas to domestic space; loneliness despite dense professional networks; and limited institutional support for managing family separation. These tensions reveal the emotional costs embedded in transnational professional mobility.
In response, interviewees develop what emerges from their narratives as emotional flexibility: the incorporation of therapeutic discourse, reflexive self-monitoring, and intentional self-development into their professional and familial self-understandings. Emotional awareness is framed not as vulnerability but as competence, enabling endurance, self-regulation, and continued commitment to demanding global careers. Emotional strain is translated into individualized projects of self-work rather than structural critique.
Crucially, this adaptive capacity is classed. Access to therapeutic repertoires and the ability to convert emotional strain into projects of self-optimization are unevenly distributed and tied to elite professional positioning. Emotional flexibility thus operates as a stratifying resource, differentiating globally mobile professionals from those less positioned to mobilize such repertoires.
The findings show that contemporary hegemonic masculinity is not displaced by emotional expectations but reconfigured through their incorporation. By integrating reflexivity and therapeutic language, transnational professional masculinity reorganizes itself while preserving core commitments to mobility, competitiveness, and career centrality, thereby reinforcing gendered and classed hierarchies within global professional fields.
Key Words: Hegemonic Masculinity, Transnational Professional Masculinity, New Masculinity, Theraputic Discourse, Long-Distance Commuter Fathers, Gender and Class.

Authors

• LIAT SHEFFER, BAR ILAN

• Danny Kaplan, Bar Ilan University