Faculty Research Fellows Talk with Angelica Ferrara

Angelica Ferrara: "Men Without Men: The Male Friendship Recession as a Structural Component of Patriarchy’s Reproduction"

Ferrara’s ongoing book research (Men Without Men; Simon & Schuster US/Penguin Random House UK) investigates the trend of male social network decline in the Global North and its consequences on women’s unpaid labor and relational autonomy. This talk will delve further into the theoretical basis of her work, which argues that men’s higher rates of loneliness are not merely symptomatic of patriarchy but rather one of the structural components that facilitates its persistence. She introduces mankeeping, an extension of Carolyn Rosenthal’s 1981 theory of women’s kinkeeping, which Ferrara defines as the resulting labor that women take on in order to shore up losses in men’s social networks and reduce the burden of men’s isolation on families, the heterosexual bond, and on men themselves. She supports these theoretical positions with evidence from her ongoing data collection.

Angelica Ferrara is a 2022-24 Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Clayman Faculty Affiliates are welcome to attend the lunch seminars.  All Stanford academics are eligible to become Clayman Institute Faculty Affiliates. Please RSVP to Lea Gottlieb (lgottlie [at] stanford.edu (lgottlie[at]stanford[dot]edu)) if you wish to attend.