The starting point for this course is the belief that gender in society is socially constructed-that identities like "femininity" and "masculinity" are less the innate (or biological) characteristics of women and men than they are products of social, economic, political, and cultural forces in any given time and place. Borrowing from the work of scholars in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, feminist theory, history, literature, and sociology, this course will consider a number of masculine identities that have emerged in Britain (and its colonies) and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will be an interdisciplinary enterprise that will focus on various representations of masculinity and on the ever-changing historical and social categories of masculinity; moreover, it will explore the ways in which masculinity is always a "relational" construct, suggesting that white, normative, heterosexual, masculinity cannot be understood without reference to its non-white, colonial, and deviant counterparts. Topics to be addressed include the shaping of bourgeois masculinities in Victorian Britain and the United States, the impact of race and empire on masculinity in the years leading up to World War I, the role of Oscar Wilde in subverting heterosexual masculinity in the 1890s, female masculinity in the 1930s, normative masculinity and its discontents in the 1950s, and contemporary debates about the nature of masculinity. In short, from eminent Victorians to Lawrence of Arabia, from James Dean to Iron John, the course will explore the shifting meanings of manhood in British and American society. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two 5-page "position statements" on the readings, and a 15- to 20-page research paper. There will be no final exam. Groups A and B