PATRIARCHY MADE ME DO IT AND THE 24 GENDERS

This has turned out to be a weird week in terms of gender, particularly in Scotland and in Spain. I’m writing this specially for my international MA class in the subject ‘Body and Gender in Narrative’ as they might miss either one of the two events I wish to discuss here: the complete withdrawal from […]

KING SOLOMON’S MINES: “IT IS A QUEER BUSINESS”

Even though I have been teaching H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) for a few years now, it seems I have not written about this novel here. A bit odd. Since I am most likely saying goodbye to it, this is perhaps the right moment to discuss its racist, colonial content, the issue on […]

 THANK YOU, GOODNIGHT: THE BON JOVI DOCUMENTARY MINISERIES – REFLECTIONS ON THE AGEING MALE ROCK STAR

My post today is a sort of belated coda to the book I published last year, American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film: Up Close Behind the Mask (see my post on this book), whose Spanish self-translation Detrás de la máscara: masculinidades americanas en el documental contemporáneo, is now available in open access. In that book […]

DOING MASCULINITIES STUDIES AS A FEMINIST WOMAN: AIMS AND GAINS

On Friday I’ll be giving a lecture as the guest of ICGR’s 7th International Conference on Gender Research, to be celebrated at my own university, UAB. The title of my lecture is the one I’m using for this post: ‘Doing Masculinities Studies as a Feminist Woman: Aims and Gains.’ This invitation has reached me at […]

CHILDREN IN CINEMA:  A NEW SUBJECT

I started three weeks ago a new MA subject on children in Anglophone cinema, under the umbrella label Gender Studies. This is a continuation of a subject I taught three years ago, which resulted in the publication of the e-book by the students Gender in 21st Century Animated Children’s Cinema (check please my post on […]

THAT BAD WITCH: BELLATRIX BLACK LESTRANGE

Continuing with the topic of my previous post, and because I have been preparing a talk about her, I’d like to focus here on a truly bad witch: Bellatrix Black Lestrange. Bellatrix has been the object of a few scholarly publications, none devoted to her alone (all to be found on Google Scholar; the MLA […]

OF FAIRIES AND WITCHES: AN ACCIDENT OF HISTORY

My doctoral student Laura Luque is now giving the finishing touches to her excellent PhD dissertation on the positive representation of the witch as a figure of empowerment in contemporary YA fantasy literature. She has focused on Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, Rin Chupeco and Kelley Armstrong, which is certainly enough, although as the lists in […]

KEN LEARNS ABOUT THE PATRIARCHY: KENOUGH MIGHT NOT BE KENOUGH

[WARNING: This post discusses the movie Barbie with spoilers] It’s been a week since Greta Gerwig’s movie Barbie was released and the internet is abuzz with comments of all sizes and types. Surely, mine is not needed but, as happens, the more I think about the movie, the more restless I get. I was delighted […]