Green your groin: Sustainability, men’s underwear and the wild

Abstract

Men and the environment, it seems, have a tenuous relationship. This article considers the challenge of men’s underwear and sustainability by focusing on advertisements designed to sell ecologically friendly underwear. One of the challenges that I highlight is how we are to ‘read’ these advertisements. This article takes it as a given that images are polysemous. Drawing on queer theory, I propose a series of readings that align with Sedgwick’s practice of paranoid and reparative reading. In the case of the paranoid reading, I show how these advertisements might be read as indicative and proof of hybrid masculinity theory. From this vantage, I move to a reparative reading that imagines other possibilities, particularly around nature and the wild. The goal of these readings is not to have one dominate over the other, but to show the nuance and complexity of masculinities in/and nature.