Masculinities Week and a Call for Papers

Upcoming excitement:

Occidental College is hosting Masculinities Week, kicking off this Thursday with a lecture by Michael Kimmel and continuing over the following eight days with talks by Jackson Katz, Byron Hurt, Robert Jensen, and Shira Tarrant. Events are open to the public; this is a chance to hear from the leading figures in American men’s studies. I count each of these folks as a hero, and urge all who live in the greater Los Angeles area to look at the schedule and attend one or more of the talks. (I note that I’ll be speaking on a panel about men and feminism with Shira Tarrant next month at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Atlanta.) I love Oxy, as it is known, and have many ties to the place I count as the alma mater of both my most recent ex-wife and of Robinson Jeffers, California’s greatest poet. Here’s hoping that more colleges and universities adopt the Oxy model, and sponsor their own “Masculinities Week”. (Your blogger may be available to speak at such events as well.)

And I’ve been asked to publicize the University of Central Oklahoma’s Women and Gender Studies Conference, to be held on February 27, 2010 in Edmond. The call for papers (for 15 minute presentations) is open until December 1, and the conference theme is “Progressions.”