20th and 21st-Century Urban Masculinities: Representations, Practices, Performances

Cornelia Wächter Announcement
Location
Germany
Subject Fields
Literature, Popular Culture Studies, Sexuality Studies, Urban History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

Call for Contributions

Constructions of gender and space are interrelated and (re)produced within complex webs of socio-cultural and political power. Thus, for instance, processes of urbanization have often been characterized by the consolidation of patriarchal heteronormative white western middle-class hegemony. In the words of Raewyn Connell, “[t]he men of the metropolitan countries are, collectively, the main beneficiaries of the contemporary world order”[1]. At the same time, urban spaces have always also posed challenges to and enabled reconfigurations of the hegemonic order. Dominant, normative and complicit discourses of urban masculinities have clashed and interacted with non-normative, marginalized, or resistant varieties. The planned anthology, entitled 20th and 21st-Century Urban Masculinities: Representations, Practices, Performances, intends to take account of this heterogeneous and often conflicting plurality by exploring masculinities and urban spaces as they intersect with sexuality, race, class, ability, age, nationality and similar identity categories.

We invite contributions from the fields of cultural studies, gender studies, media studies, urban studies, literary studies, history, sociology, and related disciplines that examine the discourses of urban masculinities, particularly as (re)produced in literature, film, television, digital / social media, art, drama / theatre, journalism, and material culture (e.g., architecture). Papers should explore the ways in which particular urban spaces have shaped and have, in turn, been shaped by the production, representation and performance of specific masculinities. In particular, we encourage contributions that seek to explicitly redress the hegemonic status quo by placing emphasis on, e.g., non-white, working-class or queer masculinities in contemporary urban spaces.

Themes for papers may include, but are not limited to: 

  • Theorizations of urban masculinities
  • Urban masculinities and/in art, audio-visual media, digital media, music, literature, etc. 
  • Urban masculinities and intersections of race, class, ethnicity, (trans)nationality, religion, (dis)ability, age, etc.
  • Urban masculinities, sex and sexualities (e.g. queer / LGBTQIA, metrosexuality, prostitution, etc.) 
  • Feminist/queer engagements with urban masculinities 
  • Female masculinity and the city 
  • Masculinities and (the dissolution of) gayborhoods, cruising grounds, the gay underground 
  • Masculinities and gentrification, divide, homelessness, segregation, migration 
  • Masculinities and urban subcultures
  • Urban masculinities and leisure (e.g. gambling, drinking, amusement parks, parks, etc.)
  • Masculinities and urban space at night, urban noir, urban crime 
  • Masculinities and the symbolism of urban architecture 
  • Masculinities, bodies and/in urban space
  • Translations and transpositions between urban and rural space
  • Masculinities and modes of moving through urban space (flânerie, driving, riding, etc.) 
  • The metropolis as the new frontier
  • The emotional geographies of urban masculinities 

Please email 300-word abstracts for 6000-7000-word papers to Heike Steinhoff and Cornelia Wächter at heike.steinhoff@rub.de and cornelia.waechter@tu-dresden.de by June 30, 2022. Notifications of acceptance can be expected by the end of July. Final papers need to be submitted by Nov. 30, 2022.

 

[1] Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities. 2. ed., reprint, Polity Press, 2012. 201.

Contact Information
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Wächter Professor of British Cultural Studies Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies Technische Universität Dresden 01062 Dresden Germany
Contact Email
cornelia.waechter@tu-dresden.de