ABSTRACT
This chapter offers one way of thinking through the zero-sum potential and brings to the Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) a theoretical development of hegemony and hegemonic masculinity that specifically engages postmarxist theory and particularly the later work of Ernesto Laclau with emphasis on the concept of the empty signifier. Much of the social sciences, from politics to economics and psychology to sociology, have been the product of modernity, a moment that is argued to mark the liberation of the individual from the bonds of tradition predominantly on the basis of reason as part of human nature. Aspiration had a long but somewhat patchy history in the humanities and social sciences. To explain the aspiration towards the unattainable requires the unpacking of the hegemonic empty signifier. Migration in particular is an important area in which the social operates and has become of great importance in a way that operates at the global level.
