{"id":1304,"date":"2012-03-28T10:35:31","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T14:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/fyi\/?p=1304"},"modified":"2012-03-28T10:35:31","modified_gmt":"2012-03-28T14:35:31","slug":"lewis-writes-about-what-guys-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2012\/03\/28\/lewis-writes-about-what-guys-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Lewis Writes About What Guys Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

We frequently use this blog to share the success and achievement of Wabash alums and students. But nothing speaks louder than a Wabash man. Wyatt Lewis is joining fellow student Reed Hepburn and professors Warren Rosenberg and Eric Freeze at a weekend national conference on mens’ studies<\/a>. The topic is “Guys Read.” The Wabash men hope to dispel some stereotypes. Here is Wyatt’s take on what he hopes to accomplish.
\nWyatt Lewis ’13 <\/em>– Well we\u2019re working together with students and faculty from Hampton-Sidney, one of the other all-male colleges in the nation. So both Wabash and Hampton-Sidney are bringing two professors and two students each, and our presentation is divided into two talks. The first talk will be given by the four professors on Saturday morning, and the students will speak on Sunday morning.<\/p>\n

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Wyatt Lewis '13<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The conference is really open-ended. Basically, we\u2019re responding to the website \u201cGuys Read,\u201d which is concerned with the growing male illiteracy rate. The website lists several titles and ideas to get guys engaged in reading, but it does this by suggesting very stereotypically male texts. The website seems to be targeting adolescents, but it\u2019s sort of symptomatic of a larger cultural perception of how to teach men and what books men should be reading\/enjoying. So, our talks have been titled \u201cGuys Read: The Collegiate Edition.\u201d Basically, we\u2019re using the website as a framework for our discussion.
\nSo while the professors (Eric Freeze and Rosenberg are the two going from Wabash) talk about their pedagogical experiences, Reed Hepburn, the two students from Hampton-Sidney, and I will talk about our experiences as readers and students. As I mentioned earlier, the talk should be very open-ended, and hopefully more of a discussion than a presentation. So each of us should be talking about our perception of whether or not there is a male literacy crisis on our campuses, the texts which we have responded well to and those we haven\u2019t, and how our masculinity factors into our reading experiences\u2014and also particularly how our conception of masculinity has changed.
\nSo while I can\u2019t speak for the others, I hope to focus my talk on ways in which readers \u201cresist\u201d texts that they are uncomfortable with and my experiences in the classroom. One of the statements that Guys Read makes is that students should avoid texts that explore emotions; in other words, men to read \u201cmanly\u201d texts. But in my experience and from what I\u2019ve witnessed in class, thinking about gender (and by gender I don\u2019t mean biological sex) as a construct proves to be really liberating for students, especially if they can discuss their masculinity in what they feel is a \u201csafe\u201d environment.\u00a0 Many students (and I was one of these students), walk on to campus for the first time with lots of preconceived notions about feminism\u2014that feminists are somehow only concerned with guilt-tripping men for past patriarchal oppression. So of course, this perception poses a few problems\u2014the most notable being that \u201cpatriarchal oppression,\u201d though perhaps less severe, is by no means gone.
\nIn the Gender Criticism seminar last semester, we read a passage from Rita Felski\u2019s book Literature after Feminism, which I really resonated with; it was something to the effect that even though collectively men\u00a0 have held the power throughout history, individually men don\u2019t feel like they have some more power, and this explains male antagonism to feminism. I think Felski\u2019s insight explains a lot about male resistance to feminist texts\u2014men feel attacked by feminists and feminist literature, but if they can find ways of embracing it and applying the same ideas and concepts to their own masculinity, then they can find some degree of \u201cownership.\u201d
\nThis feeling of \u201cownership,\u201d or realizing that gender studies is just as much about masculinity as femininity (and that men have their own distinct experience that\u2019s worth talking about and studying) usually excites and engages men, and that\u2019s what I hope to talk about at the conference. Reading experiences that explore emotions, gender, and sexuality may be uncomfortable for men at first, but in the end, rather than causing divisions, they create a unifying experience as students gradually realize that all of us, both male and female, are to some degree \u201ctrapped\u201d by our gender. And in particular, that being male carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We frequently use this blog to share the success and achievement of Wabash alums and students. But nothing speaks louder than a Wabash man. Wyatt Lewis is joining fellow student Reed Hepburn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2012\/03\/Lewis1001.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}