I have a new book out. It’s very small, only 84 pages, but it’s taken plenty of reading and plenty of thinking, so I thought I’d use this blog to publicise it a little bit. The volume is called Desafíos a la Heterosexualidad Obligatoria and it’s part of the enticing collection that Meri Torras is […]
I’ve been mulling this matter over since attending CIME 2011 last week. In that conference the expressions ‘domestic violence,’ ‘sexist violence,’ ‘gendered or gender-related violence’ and ‘male chauvinist violence’ were bandied about without much agreement on what this all-pervading type of violence should be called. I would certainly not call it a ‘phenomenon,’ as the […]
I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog entry for some time, as my expectations for CIME 2011, the Ibero-American Conference on Masculinities and Equity, were high. They have been fulfilled in that, to my great pleasure and relief, I’ve learned that there are many men fighting patriarchy with all their might (see www.homesigualitaris.cat for […]
David Gilmore is an American anthropologist who specialises in Spanish masculinism in recalcitrant local areas, which, I’m sure, is enough for several academic careers. Having puzzled over his volume Manhood in the Making (1991), which deals with the rites of passage devised by men around the world to access ‘proper’ masculinity, I embarked this summer […]
I attended a few weeks ago a very interesting interdisciplinary conference on gender, development and textuality at a university near Barcelona. As usual whenever gender is discussed, there were very few men, which is why that particular man soon caught my attention. Tall, wearing salwar kameez and cap, his face decorated with a longish beard […]
Happily for me, I’ve been commissioned a short book on heterosexuality for the collection ‘Los textos del cuerpo’ (EDIUOC) that the research group I belong to (‘Body and Textuality’, coordinated by Dr. Meri Torras) has been publishing since 2009. I’m now at the stage of putting together a bibliography… and making decisions about how much […]
I’m preparing my notes to teach Le Ly Hayslip’s memoirs, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) and Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993), and I realise that defining authorship in them is quite complicated. Hayslip, born in Vietnam in 1949, moved to the USA in 1970, when she married Ed Munro, a civilian […]
I’m teaching a course on the witness in Vietnam War books and films. This includes Coppola’s overblown Apocalypse Now! with Heart of Darkness, The Quiet American with its two film versions, Ron Kovic’s truly sad memoir Born on the 4th July with Oliver Stone’s memorable adaptation, and Le Ly Hayslip’s moving two-volume autobiography, filmed also […]
Many people assume that because a handful of writers make a spectacular living off their best-selling books, any writer makes money. So far, if I count what I have invested in my writing and what I have gained, I am awfully, appallingly in the red. I have the experience of earning nothing whatsoever from a […]
Let me return to the idea of how statistic impossibility undermines our common ground from another angle. This came up time ago in conversation with a colleague at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ángel Mateos (another SF fan!!). We were wondering one day about how many readers any of our publications actually get and how […]