Neutrality Narratives, Gender, and Fear of Cuckoldry in Public Administration

Summary

This note summarizes Sharon Mastracci and Arthur J. Sementelli’s 2022 article on the gendered foundations of administrative neutrality. The article argues that neutrality narratives in public administration are not politically innocent. They draw legitimacy from older systems in which authority, inheritance, and public order are organized around male generative power and anxieties about sexual disorder, including fear of cuckoldry.

Key Findings

• The paper treats administrative neutrality as a culturally loaded narrative rather than a purely technical governance norm.
• It argues that neutrality gains force in settings where legitimacy is tied to patrilineal order, male authority, and control over reproductive uncertainty.
• Fear of cuckoldry is used as an analytic bridge between intimate anxieties and public institutional design.
• The article suggests that supposedly impartial administrative ideals can carry gendered assumptions about authority, inheritance, and who counts as a legitimate public actor.
• Its broader claim is that public institutions often reproduce symbolic orders rooted in family and kinship logics even when speaking in abstract bureaucratic language.

Clinical Relevance

This is not a therapeutic source, but it is useful background for understanding how jealousy and cuckoldry can exceed the couple and become public metaphors. It helps explain why cuckoldry language often appears in discussions of legitimacy, sovereignty, competence, and institutional control rather than remaining confined to sexual behavior.

Interpretation

The article is most valuable when read as a theory of symbolic transfer. It shows how intimate fears can migrate into public-administration doctrine and present themselves as neutrality, rationality, or order. For this site, that matters because it expands cuckoldry from a private relational problem into a status script that institutions can inherit and amplify. The paper is interpretive rather than empirical, so it should be paired with more concrete historical or legal work when stronger evidentiary grounding is needed.

Related Topics

• Constitutional Limits on Curtailing Cuckolding
• Cuckoldry and Jealousy in Shakespeare’s Othello

Sources

1. Mastracci, S., & Sementelli, A. J. (2022). Neutrality narratives, gender, and fear of cuckoldry in public administration. Organization, 29(4), 770-780. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211015381