The Settler: A Forgotten Typology

Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics (1993) was published more than 30 years ago. In it, Bauman analyzes ambivalence and uncertainty as key characteristics of the relationship between the moral subject, moral responsibility, and moral norms in late 20^th-century societies. Particularly interesting is his ethical typology of the tourist and the vagabond, in which spaces, translations, and meanings of the world were characterised as a relentless exploration of places that were always commercial, sensory, elusive, and extraterritorial. Bauman’s interpretation of the styles and ways of being of men and women at the end of the 20^th century brought together pilgrims, nomads, vagabonds, and tourists. He transformed the latter two into the distinctive postmodern ethical typology, and used the former as comparative points of reference (Bauman, 1993). Since the end of the 20th century, Bauman’s work has nourished theories, such as consumer culture, digital nomadism, and touristification (Kassam, 2025). However, a more detailed reading of Bauman’s text provides one of the keys to thinking about the present state of masculinities. He said on nomadism at the end of 20^th century: ‘Unlike the settlers, nomads are on the move. But they circle around a well-structured territory with long invested and stable meaning assigned to each fragment’ (Bauman, 1993, p. 240). Indeed, that comparison between nomad and settler is a very good clue to understanding the importance of the settler in current times. In fact, Bauman’s quote reveals a possible interchangeability and the permeable nature of the meanings associated with nomads and settlers. It is not entirely clear whether the traits of stability, structure, and temporality are mutually exclusive or the result of a fusion of both characteristics. This, far from being a cause for criticism, could rather be an indication of the traits linked to settlers that have become clearer in recent years.

The most significant aspect of this growing evolution of the settler’s prominence has been related to religious fervor, which symbolically and factually seeks to shape contemporary social life, as well as the development of a multifaceted and complex relationship with the spatial and ecological dimension, a prolific fashion for rural life and traditions, and an emotional and reactive behaviour towards what is considered foreign. The resulting morality is that of an ever-experimental and bordering reference as an existential foundation, backed by a type of historical masculinity—simultaneously rooted in time and timeless, of its moment and a continuous cultural identity with key precedents in the past’ (Greven, 2016, p. 32). These are some of the reasons why the actions and feelings of the settler are now the very epicenter of ongoing global moral conflicts. 

Community or citizenship are now understood or interpreted from a settler’s perspective. In contemporary cities, the constant portrayal of migrants as potential enemies, social benefit takers, or violators by radical or extremist political groups transforms the status of property owner or possessor into a veritable invisible barrier of distrust, hindering the establishment of community ties. As the settler mentality intensifies, citizenship ceases to be an acquired right and becomes a condition that must be conquered and defended. This initiates a veritable race to establish a longer, more legitimate, or performative history of possession, integration, or community ties, in order to discredit or devalue those who do not possess such conditions. Within the framework of freedoms, a sense of liberty arises that intensely and performatively demands the protection and legitimacy of sanctuaries, which operate under the dual dimension of being considered sacred spaces and battlefields. This experience of constant practice and belonging to the group for defense and worship finds a prototypical representation in the figure of the settler.

Masculinities are now being constructed based on categories such as settlers, settlements, shelters, sanctuaries, farmers and squatters. Men’s self-definition, even if imaginary or projective, is related to these places, incorporating emotions, rituals, and images that reconfigure the city. The President-King, political pastor, the rural tourist Abbey, the white Afrikaner farmers or the sound baths in fields (Cornelius, 2025) are just some of the manifestations of this settler’s experience and identity. Citizenship becomes an increasingly difficult privilege to attain, and the colonial shadows grow ever larger over the worn-out democratic lights (Celeste, 2023; Illouz, 2023; Hurel, 2024,). But these new trends have a specific type of settler as their most conspicuous representative. A more detailed description of this type will be given in the next section.

Cowboy’s Anatomy

In the context of a post-war scenario in the mid-20th century, a movement of English playwrights, screenwriters, and writers emerged called the ‘angry young men,’ which embodied an anti-classist stance and questioned the prevailing privileges and inequality with titles such as: Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956), The Servant by Joseph Losey (1963), and with dialogues like the following: ‘Among your own people there were too many who were powerful, the competition was too great, but here, among lesser men —here among the yobs, among the good-natured yobs, you could be King. KING. Supreme and powerful’ (Olivas Fuentes, 2015, p. 506). More recently, Michael Kimmel turned this tendency and style linked to melodrama and theatricality into a characterisation of 21st-century white American men, with a combination of rage, nostalgia, conservative attitudes and violence: Angry White Men (2013). 

Kimmel’s conversion is part of a thousand-year-old tradition of mechanisms for restoring masculine power and authority, which in the American case can be summarised over two centuries as self-control based on physical fitness, the rejection of anything considered feminine or feminising, and exclusion assumed to be nativist, racist, or anti-immigrant sentiment (Kimmel, 2013, pp. 48-53). One specific type of settler can even better represent the masculinities described by Kimmel: the cowboy. 

Historically, the establishment of real and symbolic boundaries between civilisation as an experiment and the untamed land has meant establishing, defending, sanctifying, or expelling, a task that has been and continues to be characteristic of the cowboy identity. The cowboy is the most conspicuous product of those ‘men of experience’ referred to by Captain John Smith in New England in the first half of the 17th century: ‘only someone who has experienced colonial conditions and proved capable of managing the English under his charge has any chance of “subject[ing] the Salvages”’ (Egan, 1999, p. 41).

At the beginning of the 21st century, post-heroic Western masculinity combined the concept of war as an aberration of the culture of poverty and masculine typologies such as rednecks or moshavniks, associated with agricultural settlements or the ‘noonday’ (south) of American geography and culture (Bastenier, 2003; Illouz, 2008; Richter, 2009). Twenty years ago, this type of man was described as follows: ‘He lacks any kind of emotional expressivity. He has no emotions. [H]e never longs for anything, or misses anything, or feels depressed. He does not know the concept of “being depressed”’ (Illouz, 2008, p. 221). But now, the cowboy represents precisely all of this. An expressionless state of mind, deeply heroic, proudly rural, stoically functional, and distrustful of the therapeutic style. If the contemporary difficulty in establishing boundaries has its emblematic and dysphoric signs in border patrols, immigration courts or transphobic styles and narratives, the cowboy spirit is the symbol of possible composition and the longed-for (re)balance. The representation of the cowboy dramatises a historical emotional management of constantly expanding borders ‘westward, overseas, and into space [, because t]he ever-receding frontier was a gendered safety valve, siphoning off those who hadn’t yet succeeded and giving them a chance to start over’ (Kimmel, 2013, p. 20). The cowboy has always been a frontier specialist. The recovery of masculinity, settler behaviour, and frontier politics have never been better represented than in the figure of the cowboy. 

The glamorous globalisation of the cowboy today is proof of his central role in explaining the contemporary human condition. Around the world, we are witnessing a cowboy revival with different experiences and expressions such as Bluegrass Festivals, Kevin Costner’s The West, Country Festivals, Neo-Westerns, the Camper Jamboree, Women’s Cowboy Boots, Cowboy Carter, and Yellowstone. And these are just some of the brands, trends, spaces, and products that confirm the triumph of the global cowboy aesthetic. Even in the culinary sphere, we must not forget that is typical of the cowboy ‘performative meat eating [as] a demonstration of virility and restraint; or power and savagery’ (Kennedy, 2023). 

Similarly, the colonial roots of the cowboy spirit have links to current phenomena such as the No King protests, voluntary servitude, and la vassalisation heureuse (Garcés, 2025; Le Grand Continent, 2025; Leigang and Helmore, 2025). In all these cases, the key is a reduction in the sphere of citizenship with a renewed prominence of landowners or the emerging power of techno-feudal lords, the criminal resolution of conflicts or differences, the predominance of bullets over words, the digital and analogue ‘monarchist fashion,’ or the triple political connection between the Bible, bullets, and beef (Kohout, 2025; Watts, Hofmeister, and Camargos, 2025; Barboza Tello, in press). It is clear that the trend of the fashionable cowboy is also an expression of a longer process of decolonisation that has never managed to shake off its ‘cultural cringe’ and its ‘filial connection to the imperial centre’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 2025, p. 109). The typical cowboy style is also functional to this mandate: ‘[f]ear of the monarch’s punishment ensures compliance’ (Nussbaum, 2018, p. 7). With all these traits in full swing at the moment, there is no good news for democracy and equality.  

Provisionally, we can mention two activities that are typical of cowboys. The first is that life in a new climate and environment forges new bodily capacities to survive and thrive, something that can be linked to geographical individualism and temperance; and the second refers to the ability to experiment, progress, and exploit nature, a kind of utilitarian and productive experimentation (Jay, 2008, pp. 180, 181). Contemporary masculinities need to project, imagine and recreate these traits of masculinity predominantly in digital spaces using the power of images and rituals, which now seem to be more important and attractive than combating social inequality or expressing and seeking conventional psychotherapeutic adjustments to male subjectivities. 

The Modern Factory of Religious Enthusiasm

An important element linked to the current popularity of the cowboy is religiosity. This element has its own history, closely tied to the Anglo-Saxon experience and the founding of North America as a nation. Below, I will explore some characteristics of this religious element related to the cowboy experience.

About forty years ago, in a report by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Priority Urban Areas, these words were recorded: ‘…[o]ften threatened, often struggling for survival, often alienated from the community it seeks to serve, it is often also intensely alive, proclaiming and witnessing to the Gospel more authentically than in many parts of “comfortable Britain”’ (GSCE, 1985, p. xvi). Since those years, faith and religion have continued to grow increasingly in the heart of cities around the world. Whether as moral revolutions, discourses on the ‘Evil Empire’ or ‘Western decadence’ (Jackson, 2012; Lo, 2018), colonial legacies or responses to catastrophes—the arrival of Gospel Outreach to Guatemala around the same time is an emblematic and deeply ominous case (Corry, 1985)—, the role and space of religion in the last fifty years have changed dramatically. 

Thus, at the beginning of the current century, it was recognised that the characteristics of the global resurgence of religion were, as pointed out by Habermas, the rise of fundamentalism, the consolidation of missionary activity in different parts of the world, postmodern religiosity as a defining characteristic of the era, and ‘the political instrumentalisation of the potential for violence inherent in some of the major religions’ (Habermas, 2020, p. 82). Another very specific aspect about subjectivities and religious experience is that it is deeply connected to the American lifestyle and the global American dream. In Sloterdijk’s (2020 [2017]) words, religious Americanism is: ‘a union between prospecting mentality and devotion to success [, and, as a result, if] American religion is directly connected to the search for a successful life, faith becomes an experimental activity’ (p. 221). With religious phenomena constantly evolving and transforming, it becomes clear that the possibility of relating religion to pop culture trends or performative developments of masculinities is quite feasible and can be observed as a central characteristic of religious Americanism. 

It should be added that the current globalisation of religious Americanism is linked to the historical roots of the United States, which have always been deeply religious. In 16^th-century Britain, the term ‘enthusiast’ was used to describe ‘a fanatic who claimed to receive divine communications through prayer’ (Dent, 2022, p. 103)¹. This Anglo-Saxon label characterised Enthusiasm as a reality full of religious motivations, when English settlers carried out the experience as experiment in the north of the American continent four hundred years ago. By the 18^th century, anti-nominal and anti-hierarchical religious pietism, the testimony of experience, emotional intensity, the figure of the evangelical mystic, and born-again conversions had all converged, and all these phenomena were also characterised as Enthusiasm (Lee, 1967; Lovejoy, 1985; Moyer, 2015). In the 19^th century, evangelical Christianity in the northeastern United States introduced significant modifications to church architecture (seats, stage, lights, arches, boxes) to shape and promote ‘a more theatrical and expressive liturgy’ (Stephenson, 2015, p. 151). And 21^st-century enthusiasts consume information, melodrama, and religion indiscriminately, thus expanding their possibilities for experiencing and exploring the city in infinitesimal ways. Some become Street Pastors, others combine the defence of the planetary ecosystem with religious sentiments, and there are also those who find in the omnipresent technological surveillance a way to feel more spirituality and solidarity.

Among the current phenomena linked to this enthusiasm, we can mention: Narco-Pentecostalism, a major force and true de facto power in Brazilian favelas (Phillips, 2022); the attacks—in the context of Love Jihad—inflicted on young Muslims by angry groups of Hindus, in order to curb interreligious affective relations (Ellis-Petersen and Khan, 2022); Big Data and the technological surveillance of Chinese everyday life as a preponderant and increasingly important actor in the last twenty years in ‘the moral reconstruction of society’ (France24, 2019, 1:00-1:02); or, data from a 2023 survey showing that ‘two-thirds [of] U.S. adults who regularly watch religious services online or on TV [s]ay they are extremely or very satisfied with [t]hose services’ (Faverio, et al., 2023).

Very recently, the actors and arenas of global politics have been characterized in increasingly religious, masculinist, and radical terms: Trumps Gotteskrieger: Wie Bibelfanatiker in die US-Regierung gelangten [Trump’s holy warriors: How Bible fanatics entered the US government] (Schlinder, 2025). But also and furthermore, like a fashionable confirmation, God is back.. and He’s trending (D’Ancona, 2025, pp. 12-13). From pop culture to sexuality, philosophy or digital spaces, the onto-theological or religious turn (Inverso, 2018, pp. 166-173, Garrocho, 2025) is omnipresent, with veiled or explicit phenomena, but incessant and multifaceted. That is why we constantly see new figures, styles, identities, phrases, and tactics: Holy Rosary Men’s Club, Religious Tattoos, Femcels, ‘Lux’ by Rosalía, femosphere, tradwife influencers, Cowboy Gospel (Coscarelli and Caramanica, 2025; Espinosa, 2025; Hermann, 2025), even phrases like a ‘on my knees’ and ‘King of kings or Lord of lords’.

A New Macho: Heroic, Godly, and Wilder 

Based on what has been presented so far, it is possible to characterize the new Macho, one that corresponds to current times, based on three predominant traits: heroic, godly, and wilder.

In 2006, Harvey C. Mansfield emphasized that with the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001: ‘Americans were sharply reminded that it is sometimes necessary to fight, and that in the business of government, fighting comes before caring [.] The heroes of that day were (apparently) exclusively male – as were the villains’ (Mansfield, 2006, p. 11). This trend of heroic masculinity is not new; in the 1980s, prominent figures in Poland’s Solidarity movement, such as its leader Lech Walesa, were also presented in the public sphere as brimming with heroism, a combination of cowboys and Christian men that ranged ‘[f]rom posters depict[ed] Wild West cowboys’ (de Verteuil, 2024, p. 62) to media representations of the movement’s leaders that portrayed them as ‘handsome men, at that, and groomed to appeal to the Western press: bearded, brawny, big-shouldered hunks with the defiant, charismatic stance of heroes’ (Penn, 2005, p. 5). Just a year ago, the hero was still the protagonist, when Peter Sloterdijk, with nostalgia and sexism, diagnosed the Western present as a de-heroized continent: ‘Male virility is no longer the epicenter of education. In other words, the cosmetic industry has discovered men as customers. Before, men liked to be awarded medals; today, they’re sold “Man” perfume’ (Neumann, 2024).

All these heroic references point in the same direction. From Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930) to El Fary’s hombre blandengue (Labari, 2022), the tendency to restore a diminished, threatened, and devalued masculinity has reaffirmed itself time and again over the past hundred years. Its true importance lies not in its novelty, but in the need to increasingly situate it on a stellar geopolitical plane, gaining ground at the heights of global power. This contrasts markedly with the era of the film Annie Hall (1977) or the women of the Black Panther party (O’Hagan, 2022). Today, when we already have historical accounts of feminism and the complex cultural relationship between men and women, in the manner of Gender Histories (Burton, 2024)—something that should in no way replace Gender Studies—, heroic masculinities are reinvented, mythically recycled and seek to be more prominent that ever, promoting, reproducing, spectacularizing and moving us by all possible means with narratives and events of insecurity, violence, barbarism and destruction.

And indeed, we all want to be heroes seems to be an omnipresent phrase in the analog and digital world, and in this field as well, cowboy performativity currently plays a prominent role. In inhuman, insecure, and violent times, the traits associated with the cowboy narrative are recurrently used in storytelling, documentaries, series, posts, digital interactions, and in the real world itself. An example of the functionality of the cowboy world’s expressiveness in confronting and processing multiple and accelerating contemporary catastrophes could well be this description: ‘In capturing space and battling for new homelands, the tale of the West is framed by the idea of (re)capturing the original pioneer spirit of the pilgrims and can thus be seen as a return’ (Wilkins, 2021, p. 199). Similarly, when describing the North American rodeo world of the 1990s, the phrase chosen was: ‘Violent but sweet’ (Parfit, 2025). The heroic and relentless violence as the original foundation of the settlers’ conquest, as well as the need to find firm ground in that same remote, almost immemorial origin, combine to shape the cowboy’s performative quest: a search for renewed certainties, ‘missions’ that combine spectacle and purpose, and, at the same time, clarity of boundaries—something that contemporary acceleration and uncertainty do not seem to offer.

There is no cowboy without a settler sentiment, and there is no settler sentiment without hybridity.² This seems to be the key to the cowboy’s permanence as the contemporary world’s favorite hero, because even with the apparent lack of interest in his figure in the cultural sphere in general at the end of the 20^th century, ‘the spirit of the cowboy and the West remained strong within countercultural politics, art, and scholarship’ (Jones, 2023, p. x). These could be some of the reasons why fashion and heroism can also have points in common, despite Sloterdijk’s observations on the de-heroization of men and the current preference for perfumes over battles (Neumann, 2024). This is something that can be observed in the digital space of social media, where performative behavior, heroism, and an individualism that relentlessly tramples on the Other are, if not exclusive, then sufficiently dominant and recurrent. Thus, the best example of the fusion between fashion and cowboy heroism can be found in the Cowboy Core trend, which even has its own fragrance: Eau d’Ombré Leather (Icon, 2024; Mora, 2025).

Regarding religious characteristics, so prevalent in current masculinities, the key doesn’t necessarily lie in conventional spaces or roles; what’s required is to explore the rituals and experimental behaviors often found at the interface between the digital and civic spheres. The  Davie’s vicarious religiosity³ is useful for this purpose. Various manifestations and phenomena directly and indirectly present a religious link, reflection, or characteristic. This phenomena fluctuates between hard, radical, and extreme tendencies, to mention just a few of them: Men Going Their Own Way (UNWomen, 2025), INCELs, Groypers, Christian Nationalism, Backlash against Gender (UNHRC, 2024), the nativist flags—such as ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ (Cummings, 2022)—, Crusader protests, or Wall Builders (Downen, 2023). In all cases, these manifestations share a connection through religion with characteristics such as increasingly digital performative authenticity, the prevalence of hate speech to the detriment of freedom of expression, the anxiety of not being dominated, the salvific rise of myth, the imminence of (environmental or apocalyptical) catastrophe, and the return of the Stoic creed already in vogue, with editions published between 1555 and 1640 in the European context of the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion (Ortiz García, 1993, pp. 36-41).  

If male heroism is fashionable and corresponds to an era of wars and conflicts, and religious fervor permeates all of society with its rituals and symbols, there is an additional characteristic that fully embraces ambivalence, contributing both balance and a sense of unbridled freedom, a fascination with the unusual, and a search for liberty, or also, a melancholy born from the immensity and vastness of nature. We are talking about the wilder side.

There are several sociocultural reasons for this current fascination and success with the countryside, the rural, and the natural. These include: a return to the fundamental values and convictions already pointed out by Bauman in his posthumous work Retrotopia (2017); a strategic shift on the part of elites, who more often find in the countryside than in cities the opportunity to reconfigure power relations, culture, and the accumulation of wealth; and a greater conviction and understanding of the relationship between health, nutrition and the ecosystem, with scientific evidence related to the links between the microbiome and microbiota or topics such as the ‘wood wide web’ (Amyes, 2022; Dervash et al., 2024). Likewise, we can refer to the historical demands and claims of Indigenous peoples linked to national origins such as those of North America and Canada, not without barbarism, fanaticism, and exploitation, which can be extrapolated to other colonial contexts of the last half millenium. These demands have been reflected in the audiovisual field and in documentaries, series, and melodramas about or set in nature, or in genres such as the so-called neo-Western (Honderich, 2021; Mangan, 2025; Untamed, 2025). This return to the countryside, both symbolic and real, presents very diverse, even unimaginable, possibilities. 

Once again, on the wilder side, we recognise hybridisation as a constant. From artists who, increasingly, ‘find in the rural world the place where they can live off their projects’ (Somavilla et al., 2025) to the racially exclusive settlement of the Woodlander Initiative (TWI) led by Simon Birket in Llanafan Fawr (mid-Wales), who, interviewed by The Guardian, responds: ‘We need our own land, we need our own buildings, we need our own conference centres, we need our own communities for our own culture, and it is up to us to start building it’⁴ (McKernan, 2025). This tendency can even be perceived in the unpredictable success of heavy metal in the rural scene, masterfully analyzed by Harmut Rosa (2023)⁵.

The phrase ‘Je vais m’enforester’ [I’ll go into the forest] (Morizot, 2018, p. 33), may well be a performative battle slogan, an effort at ecological composition and adjustment, or, a permanent and contradictory struggle of masculinities in an increasingly unstable and polarized world.

Hegemonic and Toxic Masculinity… and Now? 

In 1963, Ervin Goffman described in detail the list of ideal masculine attributes through his analysis of social stigma in American society at the time: ‘In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports’ (Goffman, 1963, p. 128). The field from which this description emerged was social psychology and clinical findings related to stigma in the 1950s. Over the next six decades, the influence of this definition, known as hegemonic masculinity, has been felt in approaches, policies, and interventions related to masculinity around the world. Similarly, the alpha macho of popular culture has become the colloquial and versatile expression of masculinity as understood in this sense.  

Subsequently, the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ has emerged, often defined as practices ‘and expectations of manhood that promote dominance, aggression and misogyny and devalue relationships and emotions [, i]t is similar to patriarchal masculinity which aims to maintain gender inequalities, with violence against women and girls being its most extreme expression’ (UNDP, 2025). Both in its origin—a traumatic relationship with the father figure, the transformative self-expression of ‘mythopoetic men,’ and the emphasis on healing toxicity—and in its contexts of application since the late 20^th century, this paradigm has focused its main efforts on ‘men from low-income communities with social programmes that engaged men in self-reflection about their subjective identification with toxically masculine ideals that harmed themselves and others’ (Harrington, 2022, p. 65).

If hegemonic masculinity was part of a masculine characterisation from which it was necessary to distance oneself in a deconstructive way, with the need to dismantle that sum of stereotypes in order to integrate masculine diversity, difference, and multiculturalism, toxic masculinity has meant an intensification of self-exploration as yet another expression of the therapeutic society of the 20^th century, which equated truth with healing. And, of course, the latter has also produced a specific type of macho, the macho melodramatic, which combines emotional instability and the postmodern fear of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and precarity, with a preeminence of the retrospective impulse and a tendency to dramatize and dramatically represent one’s own life. This is consistent with a diminished interest in therapeutic emotional inquiry and an active shift of the experience of emotions toward a social and cultural practice (Barboza and Montag, 2021). 

In (late) modernity, masculinity is more closely linked to traits such as heroism, godliness, and wilderness, as described in this article. These traits enhance experimentation but undermine therapy; they are closer to religious choreography than civic rituality, and therefore seem to increase visceral performativity and dependence on the digital corpus, contrasting freedom, urban experience, secularity, deliberation, and Welfare state with vassalage, rural gentrification, vicarious religiosity, ‘gameliterised’ choice (Troianovski et al., 2023; Booth, 2025; Otero, 2025)⁶, and charity, in inversely proportional terms. In such a scenario, masculinity embodies the contradictions and hybridisations characteristic of postcolonial societies and should therefore be called postcolonial masculinity. Ironically, male elites are no longer the main source of hegemonic stereotypes and now enthusiastically embody the anxieties and fervour of postcolonial societies. 

In summary, there are two predominant traits in contemporary man: his experience, increasingly associated with religious enthusiasm related to different areas of social life, from politics to community rituals. In each of these areas, religion is revalued and presented in a convincing and persuasive manner, considering it an essential attribute inherent to success, power, and social recognition (Gospel). Similarly, symbolic and real performativity in the quest to restore borders and certainties in predominantly rural or remote areas corresponds to a heroic and savage stamp, alternating between fascination and experimentation with the unusual and the unknown, and a tendency towards conquest and violent dispossession as a vivid reflection of the colonial shadow present in our societies (Cowboy). The combination of these words may shed light on a new characterisation: the Cowpel Macho.

Conclusion

With the shadow of colonialism looming over everything, today the sanctuary can be a safe place for migrants or a mechanism of oppression for women. With these new meanings becoming increasingly contradictory, conflictive, and constantly redefined, following Du Bois, we have moved from the line of colour as a definition of the world— something emblematic of the 20^th century—to the colour of the line, closer to ‘the hybridisation of the postcolonial world’ (Bhabba, cited in Thomä, 2025, p. 272). Warrior heroism and religiousness were already present in the score of King Arthur, a dramatic opera by British composer Henry Purcell performed in 1691: ‘Saint George, the Patron of our Isle! Saint George, a soldier and a Saint!’⁷, and in our contemporary world, sacred spaces and battlefields are endlessly replicated.

The Cowpel Macho, who is also pilgrim, nomad, vagabond, and tourist, populates the four corners of the world and challenges our understanding of contemporary masculinities. Even in this context, we can attempt to explain and recreate alternative forms of masculinity that are not those of the ‘demon or illegal alien hunter’ and ‘domination and servitude, divine or digital’ types. In the face of warmongering and intolerant impulses, we could always maintain a comprehensive and hopeful approach to contemporary masculinities, with a view to imagining and realising a world beyond domination and control.

ORCID iD 

Marco León Felipe Barboza Tello  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5983-3205

Marco León Felipe Barboza Tello is Coordinator of the Diploma Program on Masculinities and Gender Violence at Cayetano Heredia University in Peru. Doctoral Program in Philosophy at the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM). Member of the ‘Philosophy and Liberation’ Research Group at UNMSM – Lima. Visiting Researcher at the Wolfson Institute for Population Health – Queen Mary University of London (2021-2023). Visiting Professor and Researcher at the Institute for Latin American Studies Research at the University of Alcalá – Madrid (2018-2020). Researcher at the Center for Technological, Biomedical and Environmental Research – CITBM.

Funding

No financial support was received for the research, authorship, or publication of this article. 

Declaration of Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests. 

Statement on AI Use

The author declares that artificial intelligence (AI) tools Google Translate and DeepL Translate were used to assist in manuscript preparation. AI was used solely for translation, and all content, interpretation, and conclusions are the author’s own.