Men and Masculinities

Catalog description

This course asks what it means to be a man and/or masculine in the particular context of Euro-American societies. Moving away from the notion of sex and/or gender as reducible to, or primarily determined through biology, we will critically evaluate and analyze how men and masculinities are socially and historically contingent, relationally constructed, diverse, and changing over time periods and in changing contexts. We will focus on how notions and ideas, norms and practices related to what it means to be a man emerge at the intersections of various and dynamic positionalities that individuals may occupy such as age, race, sexuality, health status, and life course, and how these in turn represent men and masculinities in ways that affect individual and group experiences. Thus, men are as much gendered beings as are women. The overall aims of this course are to a. engage with material that directs our attention to the precarity of masculinity i.e., how masculinity is not fixed in its definitions or practices; b. highlight how masculinities derive meaning in relation to (other masculinities/women); and c. how structures (policies, law, representations in scientific literature, medicine and technology) play a key role in reproducing as well as shifting dominant notions of masculinities.