SESSIONS K Thursday 13:45–15:15 K1 Global cultures of masculinity Chair: Anna Hickey-Moody, Goldsmiths College, United Kingdom This panel brings together established and emerging scholars from a range of institutions that are renowned for their contributions to cultural studies in order to explore the politics of globalization through the lens of located studies of masculinity. Across lived and theoretical engagements with empirical, transnational business cultures, film, media, sport and philosophy, the scholars brought together here mediate lived practices and disciplines of thought located in very different cultures and contexts. Issues of identity politics such as disability, ethnicity, workplace culture and epistemic debates brought to the fore through philosophical investigations are explored side by side in this challenging and complimentary collection of works, to offer a global, practical and theoretical perspective on the lived experience of masculinity in contemporary cultural formations and practices. Masculinity Politics and the Jargon of Strategy Timothy Laurie, University of Melbourne, Australia It is a sociological commonplace to say that masculinity is articulated ?strategically? to achieve social or material rewards, and many critics have pointed to the impediments to social justice initiatives caused by the strategic possession of gendered social advantages. While valuing these insights, this paper interrogates the formula of MASCULINITY = STRATEGY as the sense making device through which masculinity is held ethically accountable. In particular, the paper questions the metaphors of positionality, military combat and patriarchal dividends that continue to inform many sociological explanations of gendered social relationships. By reading this scholarship alongside Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), the paper argues that social scientific figurations of strategic masculine identity formation still invoke an Oedipal economy of fixed gendered rewards, thus foreclosing more nuanced discussions of ambivalence within the social production of gendered desire. Carbon fiber masculinity: Homosociality, hegemony and late capitalism Anna Hickey-Moody, Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom Heterosexual economies of misogyny that articulate the socio-sexual dynamic that Judith Butler calls ’the heterosexual matrix’ articulate across surfaces of carbon fiber. Like the many other signifiers of the phallus and the successful realization of male sexual pleasure that occupy the global capitalist cultural imaginary and shape economies of relation in late capitalism, carbon fiber is the masculine prosthesis of the decade. Harder, faster, stronger, lighter, carbon fiber not only allows men to build more effective machines; it constitutes machines on which men can become faster and can dominate other men. Oscar Pistorius’ 136 biography extends the surface of carbon fiber masculinity as technology of homosociality and misogyny, not just hegemonic masculinity. The Pistorius-Carbon fiber assemblage overcame the feminizing position of being a ’disabled’ athlete. With carbon fiber, Pistorius was able to dominate non disabled male athletes and the murder of his then girlfriend, Reeva Rebecca Steenkamp, shows us that he is also keen to dominate, indeed to control and abuse, women. Carbon fiber is the technology that propelled Pistorius beyond the socio- cultural politics of disability, it is the surface that connects him to global assemblages of sporting masculinity. This paper explores affects, economies and surfaces of what I call ’carbon fiber masculinity’ and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fiber, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability. “I Just Don’t Know What Went Wrong” - The Brony Masculinity Mikko Hautakangas, University of Tampere, Finland The animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, originally targeted to little girls, has achieved an unexpected world-wide fan base among young adult men. These fans, referred to as “bronies”, form communities and share fan-produced material online, arrange conventions, and also interact with the show’s producers – just like most contemporary fandoms do. However, the brony phenomenon has stirred controversy and confusion because of its unconventional relation to masculinity: the male affection for a “girlish” fantasy world seems to require some kind of explanation (such as ironic or queer attitude), which bronies however refuse to provide. This paper focuses on the codes of mainstream masculinity that bronies appear to violate, and the significance of these violations to bronies themselves as a transgressive identity strategy. The empirical material consists of interviews, ethnographic observation and content analysis of internet discussions. K2 Multimodal narration Chair: Kati Kallio, Finnish Literature Society, Finland Djibril Diop Mambety’s film 'Hyenas' at the Crossroads between Life Experience, a Folk Tale, Short Story and Film Anny Wynchank, University of Cape Town, South Africa D.D. Mambety's film, Hyenas, originated from a life experience in Dakar. This paper analyses a crossroads, where a personal experience and moral tale evolved into a powerful African film. Mambety's experience was the regular visit of a prostitute to the Dakar docks, where she distributed money to the down-and-outs. She abruptly ceased these visits. Based on this experience, Mambety wrote a tale, Ramatou, which became the foundation of a film. A friend pointed out the similarity of his scenario to the Swiss dramatist Durrenmatts's play, The Visit. With Durrenmatt's enthusiastic encouragement, Mambety made Hyenas: Ramatou, now immensely wealthy, offers the villagers billions to kill her former lover, who had abandoned her thirty years before. Mambety intended this film to convey a strong political message, an indictment of some supranational organisations. Ramatou represents the IMF and the World Bank, who often dictate to African nations how to manage their economy. 137 Socio-cultural context in film adaptation Marjo Vallittu, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Narration is one of the most difficult things to adapt from novel to film due to the different means of expression in both media. Yet it is not the only reason for contentual differences, which cannot be analysed without knowledge of the work's socio-cultural context. A temporal distance between the works emphasizes this. Works may for example reveal changes in the notions on society and morality. A good example is Mika Waltari's novel, ”Inspector Palmu's mistake” (1940), the action of which takes place in the 1930s. Matti Kassila's film (1960) was also a period drama but contained different narrative elements. Kassila's screen play included for example Hitler's speech whereas it is mentioned neither in Waltari's novel nor in the film. One reason for this is the difference in socio-cultural contexts: 1940s was the time of war, and the 1960s marked the beginning of cultural liberation. Multimodal registers of Ingrian oral poetry Kati Kallio, Finnish Literature Society, Finland In Ingrian singing culture of the early 20th century, the ways of combining poetic, musical and vocal features were deeply context-dependent. When singing, various melodies, rhythms, tempos, movements and gestures, refrains, and tones of voices were used. Especially in certain ritual contexts, the poems and the ways of singing were rather fixed. When analysing this historical Finnic singing culture, the concepts of multimodality and register have proven fruitful. Multimodality means approaching local practices from various sensory levels: how do the meaning potentials of textual, musical, kinaesthetic and visual spheres influence each other? The concept of register helps to analyse the local genres in relation to group identities, public and private spheres, ritual and everyday uses. The registers and local genres are taken as frames of interpretation, which gain their meanings via different kinds of recurrent uses and associations within a speech community. K3 Cultural pedagogies Chair: Lari Aaltonen, University of Tampere, Finland 138 “Us and them in children’s culture” – (de)construction of differences in Finnish children’s literature Jaana Pesonen, University of Oulu, Finland Reading children’s literature should be seen as a transformative act, as cultural artefacts, such as children’s literature, can have an input in transforming people’s understanding of differences and of ‘us and them’. According to my analysis anti-racist morality can occur in literary texts for children as deconstructing of dominant discourses and questioning of representations related to dichotomy of ‘us and them’. In this paper differences are not examined only as representations of different ethnicities, but also as other social categorisations such as gender, class, age, dis/ability and nationality. The research data consists of analysis on texts and images of selected Finnish picturebooks and semi structured interviews done with the writers and illustrators of children’s literature. The focus is on the construction and deconstruction of differences in books for children, thought I examine also the authors and their intentions or indirect conceptions related to the topic. When you know just a bit too much...: Representation, stereotyping and ethics in applied culture work in Finland Lari Aaltonen, University of Tampere,