Symposium: Men in (E)Motion: Gendering Affect in Times of Distress

Venue: Seminaris Conference Center, Takustr. 39, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem

Organized by:
Hansjörg Dilger
Birgit Rötter-Rössler
Hanspeter Reihling

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Freie Universität Berlin

Conference abstract:
The symposium “Men in (E)Motion” invites scholars from different disciplines to explore men’s changing social trajectories in an interconnected world by linking shifts within material and imagined gender regimes to questions pertaining to health, sickness, affect, and emotions. For a long time gender regimes have marked not only differentiations between men and women, but also among men, thus leading to the inclusion of some and the marginalization of others in hegemonically constructed relations of masculinity and femininity.

While the image of the ‘reasonable man’ has largely been deconstructed by various disciplines, few empirical studies trace the connections between men’s gendered subjectivity, the experience of emotions, and health cross-culturally. Furthermore, the effects of these connections on relations between men and women, as well as among different groups of men, in times of distress have seldom been explored.

With this symposium we encourage explorations of how different groups of men experience and act upon situations of physical and mental distress through a wide range of emotions (i.e. anger, fear, pride or shame) as well as how these experiences and acts may become part of performing and transforming gender regimes. Contributions comprise but are not limited to the following questions: How does men’s experience of affect accelerate or inhibit the change of gender regimes in times of crisis caused by illness, violence, and poverty? What established and new cultural meanings do men assign to emotions in the wake of profound technological transformations in biomedicine and public health on different continents? How do social connections and disconnections emerge through such meanings in relation to their families, friends, and (sexual) partners? In how far are normative rules for the expression of emotions part of old and new forms of governmentality with what effects for the well-being of both men and women?

Building on existing scholarship in medical anthropology, the history of medicine, cultural psychiatry, medical sociology, cultural geography, and public health this interdisciplinary symposium will focus on the multiple ways in which bodily, cultural, political, and economic processes relate to individual as well as collective forms of reflexivity and selftransformation.

It will unpack social differentiations (i.e. gender, ethnicity, class, religion) in order to follow men’s embodied experience of health related emotions to particular historical moments and geographical places. Furthermore, the symposium’s aim is to stimulate discussion between more established and younger scholars from different disciplines to ground ways forward in the translation of languages of emotion, gender, and health.