Deleuze and the Pedagogy of Gender ― Masculinity and Methodology

This book uses Deleuze’s work to offer methods for understanding cultural pedagogies of gender. It analyses masculinity in terms of what it does, how it operates, and what its affects are. Adopting a pragmatic approach, it shapes chapters around key Deleuzian concepts that have proved generative in Masculinity Studies and subsequently presents case studies of themes and disciplines that have applied Deleuze’s work to the study of men’s lives. The book discusses how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to and transformed the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Examining the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the psychoanalytic boy as exemplified by their writing on Little Hans, it reconsiders the politics of their approaches to psychoanalytic models of young masculinity. In this context, the author examines contemporary lived performances of young masculinity, drawing on her own fieldwork.

The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a virtually unprecedented fashion. Accordingly, the book also explores the gendered nature of disability, and canvasses some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space, before introducing a case study on the work of the American photographer Michael Stokes and the popular Hollywood film Me Before You. The book provocatively concludes by challenging scholars to take up Deleuze’s thought in order to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination mediated through environmental exploitation.

Anna Hickey-Moody is a Professor of Media and Communications at RMIT University, Australia, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, 2017-2021. She holds visiting professor positions at Columbia University, USA, Goldsmiths College, London, and the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. From 2013 to 2016, she was the Head of the PhD in Arts and Learning and Director of the Centre for Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths College. She has also held teaching and research positions at the University of Sydney, Monash, and UniSA, Australia.