The Men and the Boys, Twenty Years On

It is twenty years since the publication of Raewyn Connell’s highly influential text The Men and the Boys. This book, building on feminist and pro-feminist perspectives of gender formation, was written over a ten-year period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. It was published five years after the release of the groundbreaking text Masculinities (1995) and tackled multiple issues concerning boys and men. While providing an important platform and summary of where the research from the social science and humanities on men and masculinities stood in the year 2000, the book also contained a theoretical framework for understanding men and masculinities as part of gender relations. Importantly, the future direction of the field was outlined, and suggestions were made as to likely future agendas. These subjects included investigating the implications of globalization and its different characteristics on gender formation, the role of men’s bodies, the impact of the media and culture in men’s lives, sexuality, education, health, politics, change, violence, and peace. In recent years, questions about the lives and experiences of men and boys continue to raise remarkable media interest, public concern, and controversy on a global scale. Global changes in practices of knowledge have ensured that across the humanities and social sciences, research in the field of masculinities (of all ages) has continued to flourish and expand.

Figuring the Angry Inch: Transnormativity, the black femme and the fraudulent phallus; or fleshly remainders of the ‘ungendered’ and the ‘unthought’

This article takes up Hortense Spillers’ conception of ‘ungendered’ flesh and Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the ‘position of the unthought’ occupied by the figure of the Black- qua-Slave in order to explore their resonance for considering the interrelations between anti-black racial antagonism, ontological positioning and hegemonic renderings of gender formation and sexual taxonomies. Examining the performance and reception of the recent Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch starring Taye Diggs as a case study, it asks what role race, and specifically (anti-)blackness, plays in the representation, recognition and intelligibility of proper, (non-)normative gendered corporealities within the dominant imaginary and collective unconscious.

Reconfiguring the Mermaid: H.D., Virginia Woolf, and the Radical Ethics of Writing as Marine Practice

Since its appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, the myth of the Sirens has been variously handled. Its treatment by modern writers including Kafka, Brecht, Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer, testifies to its still relevant import. Uncommonly, Virginia Woolf and H.D. consider the implications of the myth of sirens and mermaids not for men, traditionally cautioned against their lure, but for those women identified, or identifying themselves, with it. Taking into account Woolf’s and H.D.’s lifelong engagement with sea metaphors in their writings, and drawing also on later versions of the siren like Fouqué’s Undine and Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, this paper will analyse two interrelated aspects of crucial significance in H.D. and Woolf: their ingenious reconfiguration of the mermaid – instrumental in terms of gender formation, gender politics, notions of alterity and creativity – and their resultant conception of a marine writing as radical ethics. Set against the narcissistic notion of art propounded by masculinist modernism, this is a writing which follows instead the moral imperative of going toward the other, redefining the writer as messenger of hope and originator of alternative politics.

‘Cooking with Gordon’: Food, Health, and the Elasticity of Evangelical Gender Roles (and Belt Sizes) on The 700 Club

This article examines evangelical gender paradigms as expressed through a 700 Club cooking segment facilitated by Gordon Robertson, the son of Pat Robertson – founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), The 700 Club, Christian Coalition, and one-time presidential candidate. Several themes converge within this cooking show, including health and nutrition, family ritual, and gender roles. Using the cooking segment as data, I draw on scholarship on body, gender, family and ritual to argue that evangelical discourses are labile in their responses to recent socio-cultural shifts and suggest that ‘Sunday Dinners: Cooking with Gordon’ defies caricatures of evangelical gender formation and signals a shift to soft-patriarchy and quasi-egalitarianism, at least within public, visual discourse. ‘Sunday Dinners’ underscores the centrality of the family in evangelical discourse – even as conceptions of gender are in flux – as it seeks to facilitate everyday rituals via cooking and eating together.

Resisting Definition: Gendering through Interaction and Relational Selfhood

This paper argues that trans and genderqueer people affect the gender formation and identity of non-trans people. We explore three instances of this relationship between trans and non-trans genders: an allegiance to inadequate liberal-individualist models of selfhood; tropes through which trans people are made to stand as theoretical objects with which to think about gender broadly; and a narrow focus on gender and evasion of an intersectional understanding of gender formation.