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.