Economic crises and emotional fallout: Work, home and men’s senses of belonging in post-GFC Sydney

Feelings of belonging denote everyday emotional attachments to place. While gendered dimensions of belonging have received scholarly attention, this has concentrated on women’s experiences. This paper advances scholarship on gendered belonging by scrutinising men’s senses of belonging in inner Sydney in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Post-GFC Sydney is a productive time-space for investigating changes in men’s spaces and feelings of belonging. I combine concepts of gendered belonging with emotional geographies to interrogate, specifically, professional middle-class heterosexual men’s shifting attachments to ‘work’ and ‘home’. The GFC remodulated spatio-emotional belonging amongst this group, prompting less investment in work as a site of self-worth, and increased attachment to home as a place of emotional wellbeing. I examine these changes in home/work belonging through in-depth case studies of three men’s experiences – a business owner, a financial manager on fixed-term contracts, and a retrenched marketing manager – drawn from a project on the role of home in men’s work/life balance in inner Sydney. This approach enables nuanced insights into various changes in men’s emotional attachments in response to the GFC, and illustrates how individual men’s emotional lives are entwined with wider social and economic structures, interleaving the personal/private/local with the social/public/global.