230603 The Man Card: The Link between Power and Masculinity in the US (S) (SoSe 2026)

This seminar focuses on the role that gender has played with regard to positions of power in the US. Starting with the complex gender arrangements in the colonial period, where enslaved men and women held very different positions than the White population, we discuss the diverse and intersectional historical gender hierarchies. The seminar also addresses the impact of the Abolitionist (anti-slavery) and Women's Rights Movements of the 19th and 20th century that point to the complex interplay of gender and race in the US. Further looking into five decades of presidential campaigns in the 20th and 21st century, the seminar discusses how public perceptions of presidential leadership, and of the office of the presidency itself, have come to be linked in the American imagination with traditional ideas about manhood. The seminar also elaborates on how the Right has weaponized regressive ideas about manhood for decades to cast their opponents as “soft” and appeal to working-class white male voters at the level of identity rather than policy, a pattern that now resonates in recent masculinist practices such as the "Proud Boys" or the Incels and men's rights activists of the so-called Manosphere.

To trace the diverse formations of gender/masculinity and power, we will read and discuss literary texts, essays, films and documentaries, visuals and digital media examples as well as key theoretical concepts from gender and masculinity studies.

Bibliography

Documentary: "The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency" (D. Jason Katz, 2020)

R. Connell: Masculinities. 2020 (1995). Excerpt.