123252 AR Literature Course - Literature 1/2 (MA) British/Irish/New English & Cultural Studies (2020W)

For the longest time, 'the masculine' was uncritically equated with 'the human in general', and to understand the effects of this androcentric universalism - among them the paradox of 'the masculine' being everywhere as an implied standard/norm/demand and, at the same time, invisible -, is among the first things we are going to explore in this course. Decades after women's studies embarked on discovering how 'the feminine' was constructed, the 'other side' (of what, all too often, remains a dichotomous understanding of gender) finally came under scrutiny with a vengeance, which turned the formerly 'unmarked gender' into a fruitful object of analysis.
This course is based on a few assumptions currently widely accepted within academic discourse: that gender is socially constructed; that it intersects and interacts with other social categories of difference, such as 'race', class, desire and age; that this allows for historical and cultural differences; and that, therefore, it is - strictly speaking - incorrect to speak of masculinity in the singular; that masculinities, just like other gender identities, are relational; that masculinities, just like other gender identities, don't only need to be thought of in relation to femininities and other gender identities, but that we also need to understand how different types of masculinity relate to each other; that gender, as long as it's thought of as a dichotomous system cannot help being a tool of heteronormativity; and that it is, therefore, part and parcel of critiquing this ideology (which props up patriarchy), to deconstruct and replace a dichotomous understanding of gender with one that thinks of gender as a spectrum on which more than two positions are possible.
Having said that, we are also going to spend a little time looking at a fundamentally different (namely an essentialist) notion of masculinity, in order to understand its ideological underpinnings, before we explore, in the bulk of the course, representations of different masculinities offered to us by contemporary literature and popular culture.

This AR pursues several goals: to teach you to see gender as an intersectional, socially constructed, relational category; to help you understand what the underlying logic of a dichotomously structured system is and what its implications are; to analyse representations of different types of masculinity in literary as well as critical texts, films, TV series and advertisements; to give you access to theory concepts that will enable you to engage productively with cultural objects of analysis of your own choice. The 'spark a discussion'-task (which every student in class undertakes once) is supposed to provide the basis and impulses for the group work (in which every student in class participates on a weekly basis).