*Apologies for cross-posting*
Book launch: ‘Work that Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture' – Jamie Hakim
Friday, 5th December, 6pm, C309, Tait Building, City University, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
Work That Body (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) explores how male bodies have been represented by, constructed in, and experienced through digital media during the age of austerity. Analysing examples including muscular bodies on social media, the mediation of chemsex and celebrity nudity, it finds that on the one hand digital media has enabled men to transform their bodies into tools of value-creation in an historical context in which their traditional breadwinning capacities have been diminished. On the other, it has allowed them to use their bodies to form intimate collective bonds during a moment when competitive individualism continues to be insisted on as the privileged mode of being in the world. More information here.
Join the author Jamie Hakim and respondents Helen Wood (Lancaster), Stephen Maddison (Brighton) and Catherine Rottenberg (Nottingham) as they discuss masculinity and digital media in the age of austerity.
About the speakers:
Jamie Hakim worked at Attitude magazine from 2003 before becoming an academic, and is now Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project 'Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy' which is partnered with the Terrance Higgins Trust. Work That Body is his first book.
Catherine Rottenberg is Associate Professor in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her book The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Stephen Maddison is Professor and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton and the author of Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture (Macmillan).
Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University. Her work on gender, class and inequality includes the book Talking with Television (Illinois) and the recent article ‘The Malaguf Girl: a public sex scandal and the digital class relations of social contagion’.
