Uppsala University Centre for Gender Research

Time: January 18-20 2012
Venue: Uppsala University, Sweden
Deadline for abstracts: September 1 2011

In recent years critical gender studies have raised crucial issues concerning masculinities, and power. Research has repeatedly pointed out that masculinities can be understood in terms of, for example, positions, processes, and performances, and that masculinities are multiple across cultures, geographical space, and historical time. The intersections of masculinities with other dimensions of power have also been fruitfully explored and critiqued by scholars. Among masculinity studies scholars, relationality as a critical concept for understanding masculinity as social construction has been used variously. So far, the field has generated certain understandings of relationality– for example that masculinity is that which femininity is not, or that hegemonic masculinity is constructed in relation to nonhegemonic genders – but beyond emphasizing difference as central to constructions of (certain) masculinities, this usage tells us little about precisely how masculinities operate relationally as ideas and practices.

This conference wants to address questions about the usefulness and limitations of relationality for understanding masculinity or masculinities. It focuses particularly on masculinities and cultural representations and masculinities and social practice, but these need not be seen as mutually exclusive areas. We invite presentations that address masculinities and relation(s)/relationality from a critical gender perspective. Exactly which relations produce, construct, or maintain masculinities and certain gendered systems of power? How does relational masculinity/masculine relationality operate across historical times in practices in the work place, in policy making, in familial practices, in cultural representations, in fictional and non-fictional narratives? How does relationality as a concept contribute to theorizing masculinities?

We invite contributions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as from any other field where masculinity is researched from a critical gender perspective. Confirmed speakers are Stella Bruzzi, Chris Beasley, Michael Kimmel, James Messerschmidt, and Keith Pringle.

500 word abstracts should be sent to Anneli Häyrén Weinestål anneli.hayren@gender.uu.se.