#CiC - what makes masculinity?

With Cradled in Caricature less than a month away, the drip feed of promotion is now beginning.
Next week postgraduate students at the University of Kent will find in their email inbox a copy of our programme. The team are very proud of the contributions we've managed to collect together, coming as they do from across the postgraduate community at UKC. We hope the community will respond with the same enthusiasm we have.
Part two of the promotion drive will see a collection of posters appear around campus highlighting the themes we intend to explore during the day. These are designed to be big, bold and provocative, but also to make serious points whilst provided discursive links with the contributions of specific speakers.

This poster plays on the themes Stelios Christodoulou, a PhD candidate in Film Studies at UKC, will explore in his paper '“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man: no time to talk”: 70s Masculinities in Saturday Night Fever (1977)'. His abstract reads thus:

If there is single image that encapsulates the 70s model of masculinity in popular culture, this is arguably John Travolta on the disco floor, in his white three-piece suit and black body shirt, right hand pointing upwards. Travolta’s performance as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977) elevated him to immediate stardom and now stands for all polyester fakery and excess tastelessness that allegedly was the 70s. What popular memory has obscured, however, is that Tony Manero’s masculinity is by no means an accurate reflection of the 70s, but a construct, an amalgam of often contradictory masculine styles and behaviours.
This paper explores the construction of Tony Manero’s masculinity, aiming to explain its cultural function and popularity, rather than to expose stereotypes. It also uses Saturday Night Fever as a historical case study of masculine identities in the late 70s. Underpinning the film are a number of historically specific discourses, including the association between disco and homosexuality, the male liberation movement, the style of the gay clone, Travolta’s star persona, and the revival of white ethnicity.
These discourses manifest in the film’s memorable grooming scene, which serves as the paper’s main textual example. The paper considers existing interpretations of this scene and attempts new interpretations based on literature on the representation of masculinity, including Richard Dyer’s discussion of the male pin-up. The scene, however, proves resistant to a theoretically consistent ‘reading’. Rather, it reveals that Tony Manero’s masculinity collapses together disparate signifiers of 70s liberated and homosexual masculinities with a nostalgic understanding of a unitary model of aggressively heterosexual machismo. The paper ends with the proposal that Tony’s identity as an Italian-American working class man renders his implausible masculine identity both appealing and believable.

Cradled in Caricature will take place on Monday 20 June, at Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury. For inquiries or further information please contact me at cradledincaricature@gmail.com or twitter.com/cincaricature.