Graduation Semester and Year

2013

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Stacy Alaimo

Abstract

This project interrogates the possibilities of material gender theory as an interdisciplinary bridge between critical theory—like gender studies and eco–criticism—and soft–scientific men's studies. The primary theoretical argument of Mapping Men is for a re–theorizing of men's studies' social-constructionist models of masculinity in light of more contemporary critical queer and feminist theories of materiality. I assert that 19th, 20th, and 21st century American literature about rurality and masculinity highlights the unmapped, material middle–spaces (what post-structural feminist Rosi Braidotti calls the "in betweens") between socially–constructed theories of gender and the subjective, embodied experience of being male in rural places. Using an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, I illustrate how the historical literary cartography of American rural masculinity highlights the gender dichotomies and social injustices that arise from a retrograde reliance on socially–constructed models of hegemonic masculinity; and I argue for a material gender re–theorization.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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