Man up! Free NYU colloquium on masculinity
Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:
Institution, Work and the Masculine Self.
On Thursday, 19 February 2009, 5-7 pm, in the Great Room, 1st Floor, 19 University Place, New York City
Free and open to the public
What role do work and institution play in the gendered construction of masculine self-consciousness and what are the effects of hegemonic masculinities as constructed through work? How have the changing concepts of “man’s work” or the “all-male sphere”, over the last century or so, operated upon male self awareness, representation and action, and what relationships may be perceived between the construction of masculinity through institution and work, and military interventionism? Centered around a discussion of these and related topics our panel features:
‘The Literary Study of Victorian Masculinities’ – Benedick Turner, PhD, Department of English, NYU
‘Keeping Workers Out of the Spineless Class: Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, and Masculinity in the Making of Labor’s Foreign Policy, 1895-1918’ – Justin Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Columbia University
Film screening: ‘Debating Masculinity’: A short film of interviews with five leading voices in masculinity studies – Introduced by Josep M. Armengol, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook
Moderator: Josep M. Armengol
It has been recently discovered that Komodo dragons can reproduce asexually. This happens through the process called parthenogenesis (Gr. virgin-creation), when an unfertilized egg develops to maturity by itself, and has been recorded in 70 species of vertebrates, mostly snakes and monitor lizards. In some species, like certain whiptail lizards, this has made the male superfluous, their asexual reproduction produces only female offspring. For most species with it, parthenogenesis is usually the only mode of reproduction, but the Komodo dragon can do both. London’s Chester Zoo’s dragon Flora recently had seven children by the process, which retroactively demystified the four mothered by Sungaï last year (some speculated that she stored sperm inside her, carrying it for over two years since she had last seen a male). Parthenogenesis, by the way, was how the dinosaurs multiplied in Jurassic Park. 
Curiously, the male may actually be unnecessary for mammal reproduction as well. In 2004, researchers lead by Tomohiro Kono at the Tokyo University of Agriculture created a living mouse by combining cells from two female mice. This is not parthenogenesis, since two parents are involved and the process does not yet have a name. But the mouse, Kaguya, named after a princess from Japanese folklore who was found as a baby inside a bamboo stalk, has since conventionally conceived and given birth to a nest of pinkies (baby mice). So the question in the shadows: are males gradually becoming obsolete, have they been peeing in the gene pool, soon to get kicked out? After all, life started out as and in most cases remains asexual (e.g. there are 10 times more viruses on the planet than organisms), the male arose as a sort of anomaly, an exception. Perhaps, the male could one day sink back into the sea of primordeal liquid life, the Lacanian lamella in which by perpetually reproducing itself, one lives forever. But then, considering that evolution tends towards diversity, maybe instead we will see a third sex, with a wonderous new anatomy. Anyway the wind blows, we can always try and make nature bend to technology, right Kaguya?