TITLE:

GENDER, RACE AND CLASS: ETHNIC MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE WRITTEN BY WOMEN (I) (mesa redonda)

Participants:

Àngels Carabí (Chair) - Josep M. Armengol - Cristina Alsina - Isabel Seguro

Institution:

Universitat de Barcelona

E-mail:

acarabi@ub.edu

Since the 1980s, the study of masculinity -namely, the cultural prescriptions that each society attaches to one's biological sex at a particular time (MacIntosh)- has increasingly become an academic object of analysis. Along with feminist and gay studies, masculinity studies has thus explored the meanings of "being a man" from multiple and innovative methodological and disciplinary perspectives. As more and more work is being done in the name of masculinity studies, increasing attention is being paid to the intersections between different factors such as masculinity, race, and class. In line with the latest trends of masculinity studies, then, the members of the research project "Construyendo nuevas masculinidades"  (Instituto de la Mujer, Exp. Nº 62/03), as a result of their three-year research work, propose two round tables on the analysis of how gender, race and class combine in the construction of ethnic masculinities. While most studies of literary masculinities have focused on the analysis of male-authored texts, the tables that we propose will explore a plurality of representations of ethnic men from women whose work challenges hegemonic patriarchal values.

Round Table I

Although ethnic studies have traditionally focused on the analysis of non-white cultures and races, Josep M. Armengol will explore whiteness as an ethnic construct. Borrowing from the latest work of whiteness studies, Armengol will analyze the “white race” as a social, historical, and political invention. Armengol will point as well to the intersections between whiteness studies, which focuses on the cultural construction of whiteness, and masculinity studies, which approaches masculinity as a specific gendered construct.

The hegemonic definition of masculinity underwent a serious process of revision during the 60s and 70s. The Vietnam War had emasculating effects both on those who fought it and came out of the experience having suffered extreme changes in their bodies and their psyche, and on those who didn’t fight it and were, thus, deprived of one of the most generally accepted rites of passage to mature masculinity: soldiering. This crisis of masculinity is also marked by a growing consciousness of how issues of class bear on one’s perception of what “being a man” means. Cristina Alsina will analyze how women writers -writing in the 80s- represent these changes in their work of fiction.

Isabel Seguro will explore Asian American masculinities and other ethnic masculinities from the viewpoint of Asian women immigrants in the United States, particularly those who entered the country as "war brides" after the Second World War. Most of them, being women married to American military men, had to deal with issues of racism as well as with different notions of manhood and gender relations in their new lives in the United States.