ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the public discourse than on informal economies that might have produced different logics for masculine behavior. It examines the neoliberal rhetorics that predominate in the public space in Lithuania and their intersection with normative masculinity. The chapter analyses unemployed Lithuanian men's understanding of masculinity and failure. In the Lithuanian public discourse, neoliberal ideology, based on the advocacy of individual rationality, competition, and economic growth, is naturalised and regarded as a core of the capitalist economy. The chapter shows how men conceptualise their individual failures and construct their masculinity against the background of the described neoliberal discourse. The gendering of failure and success is particularly relevant in postsocialist contexts marked by interlocking logics of historically inherited optimism and capitalist precarity. The schizophrenic neoliberal discourse and the "capitalism adapted for postsocialist states" that serve the interests of capital are unashamedly gendered, although gender is often omitted in economic discussions.
