Masculinity and Power

Elleke Boehmer
MASCULINITY AND POWER

Why do men commit these crimes? “Because they can,” says Elleke Boehmer. “It’s still in some senses socially sanctioned. Male violence against women is triggered by feelings of defensiveness, threat and insecurity.” She links some of the phenomenon to men losing their position as breadwinner, or their sense of power. “So you lash out in the way you know best, that has been socially sanctioned in the past.” Deindustrialisation, change of political regime, conflict – “In the end, it leads to women’s bodies bearing the brunt of male violence.”

Moderation: Tessa Szyszkowitz, journalist and author

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English in the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and currently Director of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). She is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, and internationally known for her research in anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. She is an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, most recently of The Shouting in the Dark (2015).

Philoxenia is a new lecture series curated by the London based Austrian journalist and author Tessa Szyszkowitz. 2016 was the year when fear, xenophobia and right wing populism upstaged rationality. Donald Trump was elected to the White House and Britain voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. But counterforces are assembling to think about alternatives to fear and xenophobia as driving forces of political processes. Philoxenia wants to do just that: Welcome guests to exchange thoughts in order to find answers together to the challenges of the 21st century.