Welcome to XY online

Call For Papers: Motherhood/Fatherhood and Popular Culture

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA)
National Conference: Seattle, WA March 21-25, 2016

I am looking for papers for multiple panels for the PCA/ACA Motherhood/Fatherhood Area on any aspect of motherhood and or fatherhood in popular culture.

Possible topics to consider include, but are not limited to, the following:
-TV shows, including talk shows, family dramas, sitcoms, and animation
-print and electronic journalism and gossip rags; magazines
-celebrity culture

“Gender,” in the environmental humanities and social sciences, has long been synonymous with “women.” Feminist and ecofeminist scholars have produced a great deal of work on the links between femininities and environments and on women’s involvement in environmental politics and practices. More recently, the emerging field of queer ecology has troubled the binary construction of gender that traditionally has informed (eco)feminist research. What remains under-addressed are the myriad ways in which masculinities and masculinized roles, identities, and practices shape human relationships with the more-than-human human world. Indeed, the few available scholarly articles that do interrogate masculinity and environment begin with the recognition (and a lament) that there is so little research available.

The social position of working-class men across the Western world has been transformed in recent decades. In material terms, the replacement of industrial sector jobs by unemployment and hyphenated forms of service work has all but removed old pathways into a respectable working-class masculinity for young men, while even those retaining a position in skilled manual labour find themselves worse off than their fathers had been relative to the rest of the workforce.