Marginalized Masculinities and the Nation. Global Comparisons, 1800-1945

/ Termine

Marginalized Masculinities and the Nation. Global Comparisons, 1800-1945

Veranstalter
Simon Wendt, University of Frankfurt; Pablo Dominguez, Humboldt University Berlin
Veranstaltungsort
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Ort
Heidelberg
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
15.03.2012 - 17.03.2012
Website
Von
Pablo Dominguez

Historical scholarship has long established the inextricable interrelationship between gender and the nation. Feminist scholars in particular have demonstrated how male nationalists incorporated women as symbolic, cultural, and biological reproducers of the nation into their “imagined communities.” Most studies on the subject tend to focus on the tensions between women’s inclusion in nationalist discourse and their exclusion from political decision-making. Others have explored women’s active role in nation-building projects. Despite scholars’ insistence on the relational character of gender, however, masculinity continues to be neglected by scholars of gender and the nation. If masculinity is addressed, historians either overstate the cohesion of interests among men or focus exclusively on hegemonic models of manhood and the corresponding perpetuation of the nation-state and patriarchy.

This conference seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the interrelationship between gender and the nation by focusing on the role of marginalized masculinities in nation-building processes between 1800 and 1945. During that period, the emergence of particular forms of masculinity coincided with the founding of modern-nation states. Scientific racism, Imperialism, eugenics, and other forms of exclusion and subjugation became part and parcel of these gendered nation-building processes. Seeking to detect similarities/dissimilarities and continuities/discontinuities across space and time, the conference includes papers on North- and South America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, all of which shed light on the history of the interrelationship between marginalized masculinities and the nation in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century.

The conference organizers believe that the constructed character and function of manhood in people’s attempts to create “imagined communities” during that period cannot be fully comprehended if the exclusive focus of analysis is the subjugation of women or their resistance to and complicity in that subjugation. Concentrating exclusively on hegemonic masculinity in these processes seems similarly narrow. To understand hegemonic notions of masculinity and the nation, we need to explore the tensions and interrelationships between these dominant concepts and their margins. Studying the history of gender and the nation from the perspective of marginalized masculinities means focusing on the conflicts among competing concepts of manhood as well as on the differences between them. Far from being one ideologically monolithic bloc, men’s access to and interest in nation-building power varies considerably according to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, etc. The conference focuses on these various fragmentations and their role in the creation, expansion, consolidation, and decline of nations around the globe.

Programm

Thursday, March 15, 2012

10:00-10:30am Introduction

Studying Marginalized Masculinities and the Nation
Simon Wendt (University of Frankfurt)

10:30-12:30pm Keynote Address

Neo-Nazis, Masculinity, and the Nation in the United States, Germany, and Sweden
Michael Kimmel (SUNY at Stony Brook)

2:00-4:00 Panel 1: Martial Masculinities, War, and the Nation
Chair: Simon Wendt (University of Frankfurt)

Marginal Centers: Martial Masculinities in Late Meiji Japan
Denis Gainty (Georgia State University)

Martial Men in Virgin Lands: The U.S.-Filibuster Era of the 1850s as a Discursive Battleground between differing Forms of Masculinity
Andreas Beer (University of Rostock)

The Rise and Fall of Confederate Manhood: Marginalizing White Southern Men
Craig Thompson Friend (North Carolina State University)

4:30-6:30 Panel 2: Deviant Sexualities and Hegemonic Nationalism
Chair: Pablo Dominguez (Humboldt University Berlin)

Mormon Manhood and Its Critics: Outlawing Polygamy and Constructing a Hegemonic Masculinity in the United States, 1862-1890
Steve Estes (Sonoma State University)

Homosexuality, Masculinity and the French Nation in the Third Republic
Norbert Finzsch (University of Cologne)

The Masculinisation of German Politics before World War I
Norman Domeier (University of Stuttgart)

Friday, March 16, 2012

10:30-12:30 Panel 3: (Post)Colonial Perspectives on Margins and the Nation
Chair: Pablo Dominguez (Humboldt University Berlin)

De-Tropicalizing Trujillo and the Tiguere
Maja Horn (Barnard College)

Marginal, or Not so Much? Writing Post­Orientalist and Gendered Global Histories
Wilson Chacko Jacob (Concordia University)

“Behind the hat there are warships”: Nationalism, Colonialism and Masculinities in late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican Society and Politics
Katja Jana (University of Göttingen)

2:00-3:30 Panel 4: Marginalization and Nation-Building
Chair: Mathias Voigt (University of Frankfurt)

Controlling Los Hombres: American State Power and the Emasculation of the Mexican Community, 1850-1920
Brian D. Behnken (Iowa State University)

Early Twentieth Century Palestinian Hebrew Literature and The Recovery of Marginalized Zionist Masculinities
Philip Hollander (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

4:00-5:30 Panel 5: Fathers, Marginalized Masculinities, and the Nation
Chair: Johannes Steinl (University of Frankfurt)

“Failure to Provide”: Mexican Immigration, Americanization, and Marginalized Masculinities in Interwar California
Claudia Roesch (University of Münster)

Paternity at the Core, But Some Fathers at the Margins: Italy, 1922-1943
Martina Salvante (Trinity College Dublin)

Saturday, March 17, 2012

10:30-12:30 Panel 6: Family Planning, Eugenics, and Marginalized Men
Chair: Brian Behnken (Iowa State University)

From “Social Control” to “Family Planning”: American Social Experts and the Quest for “Healthy Manhood,” 1900-1945
Isabel Heinemann (University of Münster)

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Male Hysteric and Eugenicist Science in Britain and Germany, 1860-1930
Anna Loutfi (Central European University Budapest)

The Scary Politics of Fatherhood: Men, Medicine, and Disease Avoidance in Peru, 1890-1940
Raúl Necochea López (University of North Carolina)

2:00-3:00 Final Discussion
Chairs: Simon Wendt and Pablo Dominguez

Kontakt

Pablo Dominguez

pablodominguez@uni-heidelberg.de