Program Unit In-person November Annual Meeting 2025

Men, Masculinities, and Religions Unit

Call for Proposals

The Men, Masculinities, and Religion seeks panel proposals and experimental panels that use short, or creative presentation formats. We are particularly interested in roundtables, and brief remarks and provocations that open up conversation between panelists and audience members, and/or presentations that creatively use and present objects, media, art, music, sounds etc. We encourage proposals of full panels/roundtables and paper proposals on the following topics:

  • “Masculinity and Neo-Traditionalism” – how are masculinities shaped by the pursuit and production of “tradition”?  
    • (co-sponsorship with Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit)
  • Death, dying, & masculinities: Destruction. Decay. Grief. Mourning. Death-drive. How can we think about the affects, spaces, and temporalities of masculinities in relation to endings and futures? 
  • Ingestibles and Consumption: PrEP and gender affirming hormones, anabolic steroids and testosterone supplements, performance enhancing honey packets and ED drugs, protein and creatine, nicotine pouches, gums that shape jawlines and improve “facial fitness,” male contraceptives in human trials and post-Roe vasectomy trends, condom use and pulling out, How do substances and practices of ingestion shape masculine embodiment and reveal its porosity and flexibility? This panel asks us to turn our attention to the stuff put into masc and male bodies, and what comes out of it.
    • (for possible co-sponsorship with the Religion and Food Unit)
  • Masculinity and Religious Aesthetics (how do religious representatives signal and symbolize their masculinity through their clothing, manner, and behavior? How can we theorize these mediations of masculinities?)
  • Masculinities and Project 2025–how does Project 2025 envision gendered futures? 
  • Masculinities and disability
  • Non-Christian American masculinities
  • Video games and virtual worlds

 

Statement of Purpose

This Unit provides a forum within which scholars study the phenomenon of masculine gender – as identity, practice, discourse, and structure – building on scholarship in masculinity, gender, and queer studies, and using the range of methodologies found in the broad field of religious studies. This Unit engages in the critical study of men and the performance of masculinities in culturally and religiously specific settings and traditions.

Steering Member Mail Dates
Cole Cloyd colecloyd7@gmail.com - View
J Selke, University of California, Riverside jselk001@ucr.edu - View
Linda G. Jones linda.jones@upf.edu - View
Samah Choudhury, Ithaca College schoudhury@ithaca.edu - View
Review Process: Participant names are visible to chairs but anonymous to steering committee members until after final acceptance/rejection