Essay Collection Call for Papers: MALE BEAUTY

We invite abstracts for a proposed collection of essays on male beauty to be published by Cambridge Scholarly Publishing.

We are 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.

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 will accept one-page abstracts (and/or full-length essay, if available) until April 15, 2007. Please also include a copy of your CV.

Direct submissions and/or questions to both Steven Davis (Indiana University) at stevdavi@indiana.edu and Maglina Lubovich (University of St. Thomas) at mlubovich@stthomas.edu.