CFP Deadline: 19 Oct 2012
This workshop will address issues of masculinity and men’s experiences in contexts of heterosexuality, migration, and transnationalism. Studies that theorize gender in transnational contexts have overwhelmingly focused on women’s experiences. These include the feminization of migration, foreign domestic workers, marriage migration, and transnational sex work among others. Men and masculinity often figure peripherally in such studies. Although attention to masculinity has increased substantially over the past decade, the marginalization of men in gender theory and related scholarship remains prevalent. Our objective is to place masculinity, and especially heterosexual masculinities, at the center of analysis.
The specific analytic for this workshop to address is the (re)ordering and (re)valuing of status hierarchies in relationship to heterosexual masculinities. Social status is of particular importance to men. Such hierarchies have to do not only with mere socioeconomic status, but are also ordered through ideas of race, nationality, citizenship, and other non-economic or not purely economic indexes. A second, and related focus of the workshop will be the ways in which men establish and sustain relationships with women and other men through family, kinship and other social institutions. We seek to understand how men become embedded and disembedded within social relationships.
Our workshop aims to build explicitly on the existing and emergent literature on masculinity, while at the same time going beyond existing contributions. The workshop will examine following questions:
• How masculinities are constructed under particular conditions, including particular contexts of migration and regimes of neoliberal commodification and value?
• How do heterosexual men live their lives in relation to women and other men?
• How are men’s experiences embedded or disembedded vis-a-vis traditional or newly emergent assemblages of gender, power, economics and cultural ideals.
• How do states or other institutions shape masculine ideals and practices?
SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS
Paper proposals should be submitted using the form that can be found on the event listing and include a title, abstract (500 words maximum) and a brief personal biography (150 words) by 19 October 2012. Please send the form in word document format to Drs Lee and Zhang at [email protected] and [email protected]
Successful applicants will be notified by 26 October 2012 and will be required to submit a draft paper (approximately 6,000-8,000 words) by 22 February 2013.