Gambling advertising is often permeated by stereotypical portrayals of gender, including those of male gamblers as tough and successful. Simultaneously, representations of men in other advertising has become increasingly diverse, including emotional and sexualized, heroic and muscular portrayals. This article uses both these bodies of research to discuss Swedish sports betting commercials from 2019–2020. It shows that different commercials draw on diametrically different formulations of the game, emphasizing skill and luck, rationality and emotion respectively, which is conceptualized as different, gendered emotional interpellations. These include production of emotional or stoic masculine viewer positions, as well as the portrayal and evoking of emotions, and point to the psychic and emotional dimension of neo-liberal, consumerist culture, which strives to incorporate and exploit ever more aspects of the personal. The article furthers the theorizing of emotions in consumerist culture, contributes to gambling research by problematizing gendered ideas about skill and luck, and adds to studies of men in contemporary consumerist culture with discussions of emotionality, rationality, homosociality, and masculinized interpellations of different kinds.

Mannen i spelreklamen skildras på många olika sätt. Vad innebär de olika bilderna av spelare i reklam, och hur kopplas de till manlighet? Klara Goedeckes forskning visar att spel om pengar är en arena där även män får visa känslor. 

In 2018, a follow-up study of a 2015 study on the prevalence of gambling in Sweden indicated that women were in the majority among problem gamblers. This suggests a change in the gendering of gambling in Sweden. However, no such change is recognized in help-seeking data. This raises questions: are women in the majority among problem gamblers? If so, what is the significance of this? In this chapter, we discuss gender and gambling in Sweden, giving an overview of recent developments. We argue for a deepened engagement with gender, the gendering of gambling, and a greater methodological diversity within gambling research.

Postfeminist cultural representations have shown men as bumbling anti-heroes,and as sensitive and supportive of feminism. Research on postfeminist men hasmainly been based on UK and US cultural representations, while other contextshave received little attention. In this article, I deepen the understanding ofpostfeminist portrayals of men by focussing on Sweden and on formulations ofmen’s emotionality and sexuality. I also develop the idea of postfeminist feelingrules by relating it to men. The material of the study is Boys, a 2015 Swedish TVseries about two young feminist men. The article discusses several feminist-inspireddiscourses present in the series, including narratives of personal development,men’s emotions as in themselves progressive and a (semi)problematizationof heterosexuality, all of which reduce gender politics to concern mainly theemotional lives of men. The postfeminist feeling rules formulated in the seriesprivilege reflexiveness and, ostensibly, ‘letting out’ feelings and sexual desires.However, I argue that the series suggests a careful curating of emotional displays,excluding, for instance, aggressiveness. The article demonstrates the importance ofcritically scrutinizing mediated productions of postfeminist masculine positions indifferent contexts, and deepens the understanding of how postfeminism addressesand produces masculine subjects.

This book discusses men’s friendships in relation to queer, discursive, and intersectional feminist theories. It analyses stories of intimacy, touch, hugs, and conversations, connecting these with current discussions within feminism and critical masculinity studies on “new” men, men’s political activism, and how friendships are lived and conceptualised in relation to heteronormative relationship ideals. Drawing on individual and dyadic interviews with middle-class Swedish men, all engaged in or sympathetic to feminist issues in some sense, this volume shows that Swedish gender equality ideologies as well as feminist, therapeutic, neo-liberal, and individualist discourses prevalent in the Western world structured the men’s friendships and their engagement with gender politics. Chapters cover friendship temporalities, gendered friendship ideals, friendship as men’s politics, and friendship as performed in interaction. Bridging the literatures of feminist research and friendship, the author points to tensions and contradictions in pro-feminist men’s political projects and in contemporary masculine positions.

It has long been established that gambling is gendered; men gamble more and spend more money gambling than women. Games of strategy, associated with rationality, skill and control, have been connected to the production of masculine positions. Simultaneously, gambling offers emotional experiences, joy, suspense, and disappointment. Hope, thrills, and the alleviation of boredom arguably constitute the commodity in gambling, which, like other neoliberal consumerist cultures strives to incorporate and exploit ever more aspects of the personal (see Gill 2017).  

Affects and emotions may “break the hold of masculinity on a discretely defined male body”, disintegrate it, or render it vulnerable (Reeser 2017: 111), but they may also circulate and attach themselves to people in ways that reiterate familiar power relations (Ahmed 2014). In this paper, I scrutinise interviews with men engaged in multiple forms of online and “IRL” gambling, mainly sports betting, horse betting, and poker to discuss emotional aspects of their stories about gambling. 

Employing a view of emotions as produced and circulated through culture, discourses, and between bodies, I demonstrate that emotions and feeling rules were vital to how the men talked about and experienced gambling. Unsurprisingly, emotions were hidden, disciplined, and subject to very active management not least among the poker players, but emotions were also sought out, encouraged, and invested in, literally and figuratively. The interviews reveal the complexity of gambling; like emotions, it stretches across dichotomies such as mind/body, culture/biology, and individual/collective, and involves issues like money and risk. It connects in complex ways to the production of contemporary masculine positions within neoliberal culture, where emotions and emotionality are relentlessly used to interpellate and produce subjects while also being promoted as progressive. 

Gambling advertising is often permeated by stereotypical portrayals of gender, including those of male gamblers as tough, rational, and successful (Jouhki 2017). Simultaneously, in other advertising, portrayals of men are increasingly diverse, from the heroic and muscular to the emotional and sexualized (Frank 2014; Gee 2014). Cultural representations, such as commercials, produce “reality” in certain ways but not others, which connects them to power and subjectivity (Hall 1997; Gill 2007). In this paper, I present the concept emotional interpellations to discuss gender, rationality and emotionality, skill and luck. I show that sports betting and bettors are masculinized but articulated differently when it comes to emotionality and rationality, indicating a breadth of masculine positions. I add to studies of men in contemporary, consumerist culture, while also furthering the theorizing of emotions in it. Using feminist and critical perspectives, I contribute to gambling research by problematizing skill, luck, and gender.

Four sports betting commercials, parts of a larger sample of Swedish sports betting commercials from 2019-2020, were subjected to in-depth scrutiny, focused on protagonists, the discursive production of the commodity, and emotional states, including how emotions were tied to commodities and subjects explicitly and implicitly (Williamson 1978; Gill 2007). Emotional interpellations are attempts to produce emotional or stoic masculine (or other gendered) positions while also portraying and evoking various emotions. They capture both emotional flow and emotional integration (Kamp & MacInnis 1995), that is, the patterns of emotions portrayed and their integration with the commodity in question, aimed at pulling the viewer into the circulation of emotion. 

The results show that sports betting is alternately produced as emotional and rational, luck and skill-based. Commercials emphasizing luck produce sports betting as unpredictable, and emotionally thrilling. The masculinized viewer is interpellated as willing to show feelings, and as seeking out emotional responses through engaging with sports betting. These commercials suggest a closeness between (masculine) bettors, whose emotional responses tie them together. Tools from sports broadcasting, such as slow motion, connect these commercials to sports, but the emphasis on betting precludes sports-watching being connected to homoeroticism; instead, the bettor is turned into a proxy-athlete. Commercials emphasizing rationality produce sports betting as ultimately predictable, thus presenting another epistemology of betting than above. The masculinized viewer is interpellated as rational, mathematical, and well-prepared (see also Lloyd 1993), and winning is central. A closeness is suggested between bettor and athlete, as the athletes’ preparation and control mirror the bettors’. 

While consistent in their centering of men and the masculine, the emotional interpellations vary widely, a variation that connects to other portrayals of men in contemporary consumerist culture (Frank 2014; Gee 2014). The centering of emotions can be interpreted as subversive, but emotionality is made comprehensible through the connection with risk, sports, supporter culture, and consumption, and is an aspect of neo-liberal, consumerist culture striving to incorporate and exploit ever more aspects of the personal (Gill 2017). The commercials emphasizing control also tie in well with individualist, capitalist ideologies; there, other gamblers are competition, not company, and the (possible) success of the individual is promoted while the necessary failure of others is obscured. Thus, the emotional interpellations vary, but ultimately they converge in accommodating neoliberal discourses. 

It has long been established that gambling is profoundly gendered; men gamble more and spend more money gambling than women, preferring games of strategy to those of chance. Despite this, qualitative research focusing on masculine positions and gambling is scarce, as is research on gambling as a cultural, rather than e.g. a medical, phenomenon. Gambling advertising usually draws heavily on gendered stereotypes, including portrayals of male gamblers as tough and successful. Meanwhile, representations of men in advertising have grown increasingly diverse, with emotional and sexualized men accompanying heroic, muscular portrayals. 

In this paper, both these bodies of research are drawn upon to discuss a series of Swedish sports betting commercials which encourage the viewer to “bet hard” while also “being soft”. The celebration of “softness” is ambiguous but can be seen as referencing gender political discussions about men and masculinity. Engaging with hybrid masculinities theory, postfeminism, and discourses about gambling and betting, the paper demonstrates that meanings around “softness” are ambiguous, ironic, and serve to normalise gambling by distancing it from discourses about addiction. The commercials represent a shift in gambling advertising, but the linking of men’s politics to gambling also represents a new complexity in narratives about “new”, or “soft”, men.

It has long been established that gambling is gendered; men gamble more and spend more money gambling than women. Games of strategy, associated with rationality, skill and control, have been connected to the production of masculine positions. Simultaneously, gambling offers emotional experiences, joy, suspense, and disappointment. Hope, thrills, and the alleviation of boredom arguably constitute the commodity in gambling, while disappointment, frustration, and anger may be less pleasurable side-effects. 

Affects and emotions may “break the hold of masculinity on a discretely defined male body”, disintegrate it, or render it vulnerable (Reeser 2017: 111), but they may also circulate and attach themselves to people in ways that reiterate familiar power relations. In this paper, I use interviews conducted with Swedish men engaged in various forms of gambling, mainly sports betting, horse betting, and poker, to discuss how emotions became relevant to gendered experiences and views of gambling. 

Employing a view of emotions as produced and circulated through culture, discourses, and between bodies, I demonstrate that emotions were vital to how the men talked about and experienced gambling. Unsurprisingly, emotions were hidden, disciplined, and subject to very active management not least among the poker players, but emotions were also sought out, encouraged, and invested in, literally and figuratively. Gambling, like emotions, stretches across dichotomies such as mind/body, culture/biology, and individual/collective, but it is also surrounded by pervasive medical discourses, which centre risk, addiction, and individual responsibility. Men’s emotionality is often seen as inherently progressive, and gambling connects in complex ways to this claim and to the production of contemporary masculine positions and power relations.

Gambling advertising usually draws heavily on gendered stereotypes, including portrayals of male gamblers as tough and successful. Meanwhile, representations of men in advertising have grown increasingly diverse, with emotional and sexualized men accompanying heroic, muscular portrayals. In this article, both these bodies of research are drawn upon to discuss a series of Swedish sports betting commercials which encourage the viewer to bet hard while also being soft. The celebration of softness is ambiguous but can be seen as referencing gendered, political discussions about men and masculinity. Engaging with hybrid masculinities theory, postfeminism, and discourses about gambling and betting, the article demonstrates that meanings around softness are ambiguous, ironic, and serve to normalize gambling by distancing it from discourses about addiction. The commercials represent a shift in gambling advertising, but the linking of men's politics to gambling also represents a new complexity in narratives about new, or soft, men.