| Popis: |
'Boys in Love: Narrative, identity and the production of heterosexual masculinities' provides a sustained theorisation and exploration of the relationship between narrative genres, felt experience and the cultural production of lived identities. It pursues this through a worked example (the production of heterosexual masculinities), and a concrete case study (boys' use of and investments in the romance genre in the context of the school). In so doing, it draws on autobiography and qualitative interview data. Starting from approaches to the theorisation of narrative, identity and masculinity in literary studies, the thesis goes on to develop a cultural studies analysis, deploying insights and approaches from a range of disciplines and fields, including narratology, dialogics, feminism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis. and ethnographies of the school. The opening chapters explore the narrative construction of heterosexual masculinities at a theoretical level. These arguments are then applied to the case study of the romance genre, with the final chapters of the thesis exploring boys' investments in self-narrativisations as these are organised through the romance genre. In the process, the thesis asks the following key research questions. What is the relationship between the narrative and genre forms with which we are familiar from literary and other formal texts, and lived forms of identity, in particular heterosexual masculinities? In what ways can narrative be said to 'summon into place' heterosexual male subjects, and how are these subjectivities inhabited as lived identities? What investments (social and psychic) do narrativised subject positions mobilise? |
