Consideration for Conference

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For 30 April 2010:

Masculinity, long a topic of interest for psychoanalytic and new historicist critics, has become central to recent work by feminists, cultural materialists, queer theorists, and social historians, with contemporary studies often complicating long-held notions of monolithic patriarchal culture. This conference aims to engage and interrogate variant notions of the early modern man as he manifests in literature, art, theater, culture, music, science and philosophy. Through what representational strategies (sartorial, gestural, vocal, rhetorical, erotic) is manhood staged in early modern theater and culture? How is masculine identity inflected by distinctions of social status, age, wealth, profession, sexuality, nationhood, or race? How did early modern men negotiate the variant, and sometimes contradictory, prescriptive masculinities? What was women's role in shaping notions of masculinity?

Topics for papers or panels might include, but are not limited to:

* masculine bodies
* rhetorics of masculinity
* patriarchal privilege
* homosocial networks and spaces
* authority and authorship
* friendship
* masculine women
* hetero- and/or homoerotic relationships
* prescriptive masculinities
* hunting, hawking and "manly sport"
* fathers, sons and familial relationships
* men's attire and accoutrement
* kingship
* masculine anxiety
* men of science, letters and divinity
* male rivalry
* effeminacy
* military service

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