First-Year Writing Seminar: Gender and Masculinities

Catalog description

This course gives students the vocabulary and analytical frameworks to write systematically and rigorously about how gender orders our everyday lives (e.g., our sense of self, our access to power and privilege, our friendships, romances, conversations, clothing, body image, entertainment, work, sexuality, and parenthood). It develops students’ understanding of how gender is constructed and reproduced by social factors and processes such as race and class, culture and socialization, institutions and structures, discourses and politics; that is, it does not assume gender is “natural.” Historically, men have been the overwhelming producers of knowledge, but they were by and large not studying themselves as gendered beings. This course takes masculinity as the critical subject of inquiry in order to explore masculinities across and within societies and historical eras. It pays particular attention to the ways masculinity is almost universally privileged and dominant, pitted in opposition to femininity, and—despite significant variation across social terrain—plays a part in the production of a system where men hold a disproportionate number of positions in the highest echelons of political, military, and corporate power hierarchies. Through theoretical readings from scholars such as R.W. Connell and bell hooks, empirical studies such as Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets and C.J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re a F**, relatable case studies from analyses of The Hunger Games franchise to underground hip hop, and interdisciplinary work from disability studies, queer studies, and feminist international relations, students of a wide variety of interests will gain insight into the complex terrain of multiple masculinities.