International Conference, TU Dresden, Germany, 13-15/06/2012

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher (TU Dresden), Prof. Kevin Floyd (Kent State University)

This conference is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Kent State University. Partial subsidies for participants will be available.

Masculinities are routinely studied in one of two potentially incompatible ways: as exemplifying abstract systems such as patriarchy or kinship; or as concrete, corporeal phenomena. The very term masculinity has hitherto been examined in such a broad range of contexts that it can sometimes appear as a pure abstract form, some kind of con guration or ‘relation‘ practically devoid of any concrete, de ning content.

We might say the same thing about crisis, a term that seems as persistent as it is exhausted. And even concepts that have become staples of masculinity studies, like hegemony or performativity, seem to be wavering between concrete speci city and theoretical abstraction. This conference will explore masculinity as an idea or a concept that operates across, or at least in relation to, a distance/di erence that may or may not be bridgeable: between the systemic and the corporeal, the abstract and the concrete.

Thus, this conference will not only encourage scholarly movement in a direction that both builds on recent work in the  eld of masculinity studies and moves past it toward more comparative kinds of analysis, but it will also explore the relations between di erent abstract and corporeal, metaphorical and metonymical manifestations of masculinity. With these dilemmas in mind, we invite theoretical, cultural, or literary analyses of masculinities in the US and/or the UK since World War II – a period in which di erentiated masculinities proliferate for speci cally national and transnational reasons, including global waves of decolonization, changing patterns of migration, the emergence of ‘new‘ subaltern subjects demanding social, cultural, and political recognition, as well as conservative reactions against these developments.

We especially encourage papers with comparative and/or transnational emphases. Possible topics might involve (but need not be limited to) any of the following:

• Masculinities and/as Systems (which systems – military, symbolic, technological, post- or neocolonial, liberal or neoliberal, political or bio-political – can masculinity embody, exemplify, or perform?)

• Masculinities as Bodies – Bodies as Systems – Systems as Bodies

• Masculinities and/as Structures (structures of feeling, experience, possibility)

• Masculinities and/as Concepts (textual/narrative/discursive, historical/temporal, ethnic/social)

• Masculinities and/as Power (hegemony/kinship/relation to the symbolic order)

• Masculinities and/as ‘Crises‘ (an exhausted abstraction?)

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words by February 15th, 2012 to both Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher (stefan.horlacher@mailbox.tu-dresden.de) and Prof. Kevin Floyd (kfloyd@kent.edu). 

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