I will propose the following special session for SAMLA, November 4-6,
1999 in Atlanta:
The Male Body in American Literature
Recent scholarship in American Studies has focused on, among other things,
questions of masculinity. Dana Nelson's _National Manhood_ and Robyn
Weigman's _American Anatomies_ are among the latest scholarly texts
exploring the construction of manhood within the American literary/cultural
tradition. But as Susan Bordo notes in her forthcoming book _The Male Body
in Public and Private_, gender studies have, with few exceptions, not
focused sufficiently on the male body as a key site of masculine identity.
This panel seeks to redress this lack by exploring representations of the
male body within U.S. literature.
Among other questions that might be addressed, the following may be of
interest:
* How is the male body represented within literary or other cultural texts?
* How does the male body serve as a tabula rasa upon which to write
masculinity? In what ways does it determine masculinity?
* How does femininity interact with masculinity in terms of the body,
either physically or figurally?
* How do other identity markers, such as race, class, or sexuality, alter
the male body in these texts?
* How does the male body become a marker of national identity?
* What anxieties of masculine and feminine identity get registered through
the male body?
* How do biology and culture combine to define masculine identity? How do
writers represent this combination?
* How do these writers envision masculinity as either culturally or
biologically determined?
Please send 250-word abstracts by March 26 to:
David Magill
1215 Patterson Office Tower
Department of English
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
or by e-mail to
I will inform all submitters as to their status by March 31, the due date
for submission to SAMLA.
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