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.