CFP: Male Beauty (4/15/07; collection)

full name / name of organization: 
Lubovich, Maglina
contact email: 

We invite abstracts for a collection of essays on male beauty to be
published by Cambridge Scholarly Publishing. Save for the Greeks, Romans and
the contemporary art historian, very little has been said about beauty and
its relationship to men and masculinities. To its credit, masculinity
studies itself has surely emerged as a field of study and has covered much
ground in the last thirty years: we have understood masculinity as a
category for analysis and, like femininity, as a social construction; we
have supported and also challenged the "crisis" in masculinity; we have
studied it both with and without "men"; we have considered masculinity's
intersection with and its divergence from other social and cultural fields
of inquiry, including feminist, queer and most recently, postcolonial
studies. According to Tim Edwards, we have arrived at the "third wave" of
masculinity studies with its "questions of normativity, performativity and
sexuality." Our collection of essays argues, however, that our work here is
far from over; more to the point, studies of masculine "beauty" continue to
be overlooked. In what ways does male beauty inform, shape, define and
redefine our definition of masculinity itself? What does the concept of male
beauty do to gender?

We are then interested in contemporary critical treatments of "masculine"
beauty (twentieth to twenty-first century) in literature, film, television,
advertising and art. Following Bryce Traister, we do not hope to return to
"heteromasculinity" or "representations of [white, heterosexual]
men-produced by men and analyzed for the most part by men-to the center of
academic cultural criticism." To this end, we invite essays that extend
beyond thinking of masculinities and its relationship to beauty in terms of
a white, middle-class, heterosexual paradigm only and will instead look to
feminist, queer, postcolonial, and/or multicultural critiques of the
category. Topics might include but are not limited to: women performing
masculinity, transvestitism, androgyny, racialized representations of male
beauty, etc.

We will accept one-page abstracts (and/or full-length essay, if available)
until April 15, 2007. Please direct submissions and/or questions to both
Steven Davis (Indiana University) at stevdavi_at_indiana.edu and Maglina
Lubovich (University of St. Thomas) at mlubovich_at_stthomas.edu.

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Received on Fri Feb 16 2007 - 21:49:07 EST