Seven students completed the seminar during Fall 2012. Much of the work of the class involved curating on online exhibition (see "Snapshot" below for more information). The students' final presentations were delivered in a mini-conference setting, giving each student the opportunity to explore a topic in depth and present it to an audience at Duke and at the University of Bamberg. The students also participated in an international scholarly conference hosted at Duke September 20-21, 2013 “New Directions in the Study of Medieval Masculinities.”

 

he five students in the Fall 2013 seminar began from the work of their earlier counterparts to develop the physical exhibition, entitled “Masculinities: Mainstream to Margins,” which ran at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from January 11 to July 6, 2014. The students led a wonderful gallery opening, which was excellently attended.

The co-conveners believe that curating an exhibition focusing on the male body was an ideal way to achieve the intellectual goals of teaching undergraduates that masculinity, like femininity, is a social and cultural construction of gender; that constructions of masculinity change over time; and that different forms of masculinity co-exist, often in sharp competition with one another, no less so in the past than today.  The students discovered through this learning experience that representations of the body and gender intersect with political, racial, and religious discourses that have changed in salient ways over time. They also discovered that in these images the body has become a site of identity, a place where struggles for power and control play out.