Monthly Archives: May 2010

Call for Submissions: Special Issue of the Journal "Men and Masculinities" http://jmm.sagepub.com/ The theme of this special issue is responsibility. The concept of individual and collective, personal and moral responsibility slips into a range of everyday languages, legislations, policies and practices with great ease. Yet its entanglement with individualist, colonialist and neo-liberal ideologies, epistemologies and metaphors suggest it is an important target for critical analysis. Crucially, given the idea and practice of responsibility is regularly anchored in ideas about free will, agency, subjectivity and morality, this significant philosophical concept and personal/collective practice has a distinctively masculinist veneer. At this juncture we invite abstracts for papers which critically address the theme of 'men, masculinity and responsibility'. We invite theoretical and empirical submissions; empirically we are especially interested in the following (1) the responsibility of men for global financial 'mis-management', and (2) the increasing belief that men need to be more responsible for the effective implementation of internationalized gender mainstreaming. (Other empirical themes will be given full consideration). "Global financial 'mis-management'" The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, is reported to have said to the UK's Prime Minister Gordon Brown that 'white men with blue eyes caused the financial crisis' at the G20 summit in London in 2009. Though media reports variously include the phrase 'white people' as opposed to 'white men'; that men overwhelmingly dominate the senior ranks of the global financial market and banking conglomerates is not in doubt. What is the relationship between responsibility, men, masculinity (ies) and global finance? In what ways do masculinist subjectivities intermingle with financial imaginations and neo-liberal capitalist practices? In what ways do colonial philosophical and legislative legacies re-constitute traditional inequalities and violences? How might we theorize the ('feminized') distancing from responsibility which marks much of contemporary political and corporate elite rhetoric? "Men, Masculinity and Gender Mainstreaming" In November 2009 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon marked the 10th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women by launching a Network of Men Leaders. This was introduced as a major new initiative bringing together current and former politicians, activists, religious and community figures to combat the global pandemic of violence against women. How might we theorize the call to be responsible for eliminating this 'global pandemic' given men are regularly deemed to be largely responsible for its perpetration? Further, how can the violent work of gender be ameliorated via recourse to traditional masculinist modes of responsibility and protection alongside equally traditional feminized modes of innocence and vulnerability? In this first call, we invite abstracts of 500 words to be submitted to Marysia Zalewski, m.zalewski@abdn.ac.uk by 30 September 2010; full papers to be submitted by 30 June 2011 with a view to publication in a special issue of 'Men and Masculinities' in 2012 (final date dependent on the publishing schedule of the journal). We invite inter-disciplinary contributions and encourage theoretically and methodologically eclectic and imaginative interpretations of the questions raised here about responsibility and the specific contexts. This includes (but is not limited to) contributions which draw on: philosophy, post-colonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, poetry, art, visual culture, popular culture, film theory, sociology, politics, international relations, economics and development studies. The overall intellectual aim is to keep critical questioning of the globalized complex web of masculinist subjectivities and performative practices alive and moving.