This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of masculinities, focusing on the difficulty of disentangling the (social-) scientific questions of what men are (and how they come to be that way) from the interpretive question of what masculinity means. We will survey a range of perspectives from evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, social psychology, anthropology, feminist studies, and queer theory that describe and attempt to account for masculinities. In order to understand how these scholarly accounts might fit together to form a more comprehensive interpretive framework, we will also be engaging in critical analysis of examples from contemporary television and film that will help us to understand the role that representation plays in our cultural constructions of masculinity. |