Professor Anne McClintock
Paranoid Empire: Masculinities and Other War Zones

(English 737: Feminist Theory and Criticism)
Spring 2004
M 1-3.30
7105 H.C. White
Tel: 2381165
Email: amcclin@sbcglobal.net

Paranoid Empire. Masculinities and Other War Zones is a new, interdisciplinary, graduate seminar organized through the Borders Research Circle and coordinated by Professor Anne McClintock. Although the course is listed under the English Department, the seminar is interdisciplinary and will include graduate students and faculty from a number of departments. Professor Guillermina De Ferrari, Professor Rob Nixon, Professor Tejumola Olaniyan , Professor Michael Peterson and Professor Sean Teuton will be guest lecturers. Graduate students from humanities and social sciences departments are invited to register. Permission of instructor only. Please contact Anne McClintock.

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Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, has warned: ?We have entered the 21st Century through a gate of fire.? Can the surge in violence and the world?s increasing militarization be understood, in part, as a crisis of masculinities emerging within globalization and the new United States imperialism?

Paranoid Empire offers a rubric for investigating the relationship between masculinities, imperialism and globalization. Reading feminist, psychoanalytic and cultural theories, as well as novels and films, the course explores masculinity not as a single (implicitly universal) identity position, but rather as masculinities -- that is, as constellations of historically changing social practices and identity formations, unequally situated with respect to power. A central interest of the course is to explore how masculinities can be understood only in articulated relation to other social categories: among them, race, class, nationalism, ethnicity and sexualities, if in contradictory, and often violent, ways.

Some of the following themes will circulate throughout the course:

–paranoid masculinity and imperialism;
–militarized masculinity and war trauma;
–regimes of discipline and the right to punish;
–race, prisons and masculinity;
–white masculinity, performance and the body;
–the male privilege of pleasure;
–marriage, monogamy and the sex industry;
–fetishism and race;
–working-class and racially subordinated masculinities;
–queer sexuality, cross-dressing and female masculinities;
–sexual violence and resistance;
–nationalism, fetishism and gender;

Guest lectures include: Professor Guillermina De Ferrari on 'embargoed masculinities': homosexuality and nationalism in Cuba; Professor Rob Nixon on Pat Barker and male war trauma; Professor Tejumola Olaniyan on Fela, masculinity and nationalism in Nigeria; Professor Michael Peterson on white masculinity and performance and Professor Sean Teuton on prisons and Native masculinity.

A recurring question of the course is violence and resistance: we will explore in a variety of contexts how power is constituted, transgressed, and subverted. The course engages not only dominant masculinities and the uneven subordination of women, but also taboo, transgressive and abjected masculinities. These include queer, transgender, racially subjected masculinities, working-class, and female masculinities. Throughout the readings, we will elaborate and historically situate three notions of masculinity in particular: paranoid masculinity, militarized masculinity, and wounded masculinity.

Resisting the theoretical separation of psychoanalysis and social history, the course engages the concepts of abjection, fetishism and paranoia, and undertakes the challenge of exploring these concepts historically, in the context of globalization and the new United States imperialism. Throughout the course, the question will recur: what does it mean to say, again, that the body is constructed?

Readings will include selections from the writings of R. W. Connell, Pat Barker, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Judith Halberstam, Michael Kimmel, Dave Grossman, James Gilligan, Julia Kristeva, William Pietz, Gayle Rubin and Mary Shelley, among others.

Film screenings include "Robocop," "The Smell of Burning Ants," "Full Metal Jacket," "Ma Vie en Rose," "Before the Night Falls."

Selected writings will be put on e-reserve in the Spring. Primary texts will be ordered through
A Room of One's Own.

Professor Anne McClintock
Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women's Studies
Department of English
7195D H.C White Hall
600 North Park Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison
WI 53706