CFP: White Male Embodiment and Cultural Identity (4/27/03; collection)

We invite submissions for a collection tentatively entitled "White Male
Embodiment and Cultural Identity." In the last decade, scholars across
disciplines, and especially those in feminist and queer studies, have
introduced the field of masculinities and revived their interest in
corporeality. The male body has subsequently become a subject of much
attention. Important theorists of gender and sexuality such as Susan
Bordo, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Grosz, and Kaja Silverman have
addressed how men are historically disembodied as a result of western
metaphysics' reliance on the mind/body split, and have interrogated the
consequences of a male body that is culturally/publicly obfuscated.
Other, more historical, studies, such as those by Robyn Weigman, Dana
Nelson, and Lauren Berlant, have also documented and denaturalized the
historical opposition between white male disembodied citizens on the one
hand and female/racial bodies on the other. In American Anatomies:
Theorizing Race and Gender, Robyn Weigman records what she calls the
'universality' of white male disembodiment in contrast to the black
and female body. A more recent special issue of American Literature,
"Violence, the Body, and 'The South'," is evidence that scholars are
continuing to evoke the homogenous, bodiless, and unracialized position
of white male power in contrast to the embodied subjectivity of women
and men of color. If white men are embodied, these studies suggest, they
become instantly marked with connotations of femininity and blackness.

This collection hopes to complicate and extend notions about
embodiment/disembodiment, and to re-invigorate discussions of topics
such as race, class, and regionalism, as well as gender, by addressing
instances in which white men do not in fact occupy an unracialized,
disembodied position, instances in which white male bodies are in fact
very much publicly displayed. We are less interested in white males
manifested as female and/or black and therefore as embodied, and more
curious about corporeal sites that accentuate maleness and that
emphasize whiteness as a racial category. We hope that such a collection
will question what seem to have become scholarly assumptions about
embodiment and disembodiment, assumptions such as disembodiment always
equates to cultural power, an assumption which implies that subjects can
never be empowered at the site of the body. We are particularly
interested in the ways that white men are marked with racial, class, and
regional identities at the site of their excessive, hyper-visualized,
and spectacularized white male bodies. Proposals and papers might also
explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

The white male body and physical labor
                        and class riots
                        and civic identity
                        and architecture/space
The colonized white male body
The scarred and/or beaten white male body
The gang body

Please send completed papers (35 pages maximum) or proposals of
approximately 500 words by 4/27 to:

Caroline Miles and Penelope Ingram
Department of English, Box 5037
Auburn University
Auburn, Al 36849-5037

Or to one of the following:
milescs_at_auburn.edu
ingrape_at_auburn.edu
 

         ===============================================
         From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                      CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                       Full Information at
                http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
          or write Erika Lin: elin_at_english.upenn.edu
         ===============================================
Received on Tue Feb 25 2003 - 13:04:09 EST