Interrogating Masculinities
An international conference under the aegis of Centre for Gender, Culture and Social Processes
St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, India
6th, 7th and 8th April, 2015
Concept Note:
Interrogating Masculinities is a three-day conference that seeks to open up discussions around gender and sexualities through the prism of masculinity. 'Men's studies' emerged in the 1970s, with 'masculinity studies' following about a decade later, in USA, as much in response as in reaction to feminism, and especially feminist work on gender. Nevertheless, work on men and masculinities continues to be perceived – and to a large extent practiced – as relatively niche work, striving to evolve a conceptual and analytical discourse of its own, but still drawing substantially on feminist theoretical frames. One fundamental problematic in this project is that work on men and masculinities is unable to create a political and/or theoretical 'ism' around itself – i.e., unable to evolve into a discourse in its own right, unlike work on women and femininity, which evolved into the discourse of 'feminism'. Where feminism emerged out of a political engagement with women and femininity as an ideological stance, as much as a set of conceptual and philosophical discourses, work on men and masculinity resists being located under a singular rubric like, say 'masculinism', because of the ideological and political baggage that the term – and perhaps indeed the terms 'men' and 'masculinities' too – carry historically. It is significant that a lot of the work on men and masculinities continues to take place in anthropology, sociology and/or ethnography, focusing therefore on behavioural practices, attributions of meanings and values to roles and functions, homosocial relations, sexual predilections and practices, and so on. Thus, there is a growing literature on men and masculinities that focuses on their relations to violence, sexual violence, male homosexuality, fatherhood, organizational cultures (bureaucracies, armies, police forces but also corporate and managerial cultures, trade union cultures in the working classes, schoolboy relations), sports, the state, nationalism, etc., – but often as if these existed as epiphenomenal attributes, and in particular, as if independent of women – or at least, as if women and femininity matter but marginally. As such, much of what passes for masculinity studies tends to simply be a reiteration of attention to and on men.
The conference aims to move beyond these tendencies, to engage with men and masculinities not just in terms of the attributes that characterize them but also in terms of the historical, structural and discursive conditions and relations that determine their formation, formulations and reproductions. We hope to open out the terrain of these explorations to focus not just on specific themes and issues, such as those noted above – violence, sexuality, organizations, nationalism, etc., – but on the conceptual, analytical and theoretical relations that obtain between 'men' and 'masculinities', and (a) feminist theoretical frameworks and interventions on gender and patriarchy, on the one hand; and (b) the intersectional dynamics that structure other social affiliations like caste, class, race, sexuality, religion, etc. Taking 'interrogation' as referring not just to a challenge or questioning, but to an iteration of accountability, integrally located in an investigation of that which is interrogated, as well as with the institutional expectation of producing a discourse on it, 'Interrogating Masculinities' invites papers that will participate in the generation of such a discourse. A diverse range of issues is available for such interrogation: for instance, the discourses and ideologies that shape the relations of men and masculinities to the body, desire and sexuality; masculinity as a contradictory category, where collective masculinity has power but individually, men are subjected to normative notions of masculinity mediated through the notions of caste, class, race, etc.; masculinities in 'postmodern', 'posthuman' societies as produced performatively, but also in virtual and in cyborg technological terms; the commercialization and commodification of masculinities; the potential for generating a discourse of resistance to gender oppression from within masculinity studies; etc.
We invite papers from academic and independent scholars as well as artists and activists from all fields.
Suggested topics include but are not limited to:
'Men in feminism', men and feminism, feminists theorizing masculinities
Patriarchy/ies
Masculinities, femininities and institutions
Structures of Representations and Structures of Gender, masculinity
Dressing and Resistance/conformity
Men, Masculinities and Violence,
Manliness and Crime
The Body and Desire
Superheroes and Hyper masculinity
Masculinity Coloniality and Postcoloniality
Homosociality
Gender Borders and Transgressions
Masculinity at the Margins – Caste, Class, Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality, Nationality and Age.
Sports and Masculinity
Nations and Masculinities
Feminist Epistemologies of Masculinity
Please send an abstract along with a brief biographical note to cgcspstephens@gmail.com by 10 February 2015. The abstract should be titled and not exceed 500 words. Enclose also a short bio note of not more than 100 words. Kindly specify the details of any audio or visual requirements that you may need for your presentation. The presentation itself should not exceed 20 minutes. Acceptance will be notified by 16 February 2015. Those willing to submit their paper for publication should send in their complete paper along with 5 key words by 15 March 2015.
Conference Convener: Dr. Karen Gabriel
Associate Professor, Department of English
Director, Centre for Gender, Culture, and Social Processes
St Stephen's College
University of Delhi -110007
Please feel free to contact the conference coordinators in case of any query on cgcspstephens@gmail.com, wafahamid14@gmail.com (Wafa Hamid, Dept of English, St Stephen's College) or binoyagarwal89@gmail.com (Binoy Bhushan Agarwal, Department of English, St. Stephen's College). You can also reach us at our facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/events/1559798494264213/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
Mobile: +91 94 94 24 26 45
No comments:
Post a Comment