Digital Masculinities

Catalog description

Masculinity has historically been associated with agency over objecthood. What happens, then, to masculinity’s strategies of survival within a context of perpetual digital representation? This course examines the ways male and masculine bodies – cis, trans, queer – perform themselves online, and how the digital may threaten masculinity’s undoing whilst revealing its modus operandi in unprecedented ways. Through digital media theories, queer theory and psychoanalytic concepts, we investigate the various virtual, fleshly and fantasmatic assemblages that prop up phallic power in late capitalism: from trolling and online misogyny to drone warfare, from racial and gender passing to digitally enabled terrorist networks.