Wyse Prize for PhD Proposal Awarded
The William Wyse Professor Henrietta Moore and the Department of Social Anthropology are delighted to announce that the 2010-’11 Wyse Prize for the best PhD Proposal on the lines of the Department’s Research Themes goes to Paolo Heywood. Paolo’s research is about the ethical and political cultivation of masculinities in Bologna, Italy and builds upon the growing interest within the Department on the Anthropology of Intimacy and intimate change.
Paolo Heywood’s project is entitled “Ethics, Politics, and Masculinity in Northern Italy” and is described below.
Building on previous ethnographic and theoretical work on both Italy and love and intimacy this project will engage with the nature of transformations in the intimate sphere in Italy, their impact on masculinity as a process of ethical self-formation involving the cultivation of particular virtuous subjects on political structures and ideologies, on diverse understandings of what it means to be ‘mainstream’ or ‘alternative’ in one’s private life, and on the analytical categories of ‘masculinity’, ‘ethics, and ‘politics’ as they have been employed in anthropology, through a thirteen month period of in-depth fieldwork in the city of Bologna.
Its empirical focus will cover two core topics: firstly, sexual and bodily practices as ‘techniques of the self’, investigating what sort of factors structure the norms determining acceptable ‘aspirations’ in terms of sexual behaviours, identities, and partners and how such norms are actualised or problematised by Italian men in their everyday lives; it will also examine the kinds of somatic practices involved in gyms and other sporting contexts and ask how such techniques help to produce a diverse array of masculine subjects. Its second focus will be on sociality and intra- and intersexual friendships in sites such as bars, coffee houses, gyms, football games, political meetings, and demonstrations and on how particular masculinities are reinforced or subverted through such interactions.
Bologna is a uniquely suited context in which to investigate these questions in Italy. It possesses a singularly vibrant variety of intellectual and political subcultures, members of some of which devote themselves particularly to the issue of masculinity and its relation to politics. As the country as a whole asks itself serious questions about gender equality in political life in the wake of Silvio Berlusconi’s behaviour, these groups focus on trying to alter the aspirational trajectories of what they understand to be ‘mainstream’ masculinities, working against sexism and violence against women at home and in the workplace. Like them, this project understands masculinity as a process of ethical self-formation, but as well as engaging with individuals and institutions which possess explicitly politicised understandings of what the telos of that process ought to be, it will also seek to consider precisely what constitutes the ‘mainstream’.
This project questions the nature of intimate aspirations in contemporary Italy; it asks what underpins a diverse array of understandings surrounding what it means to be ‘a good man’ in Italy, asking what virtues need to be cultivated and relationships sustained and through what kinds of political interventions different expectations are created amongst diverse groups of men. It does so by means of the ‘long-term intensive ethnographic fieldwork’ which the research track’s description notes makes social anthropology uniquely suited to engage with these questions on an empirical level. However, it aims not only to add to a growing body of ethnographic literature but also ‘aspires’ to problematise and provoke reconsiderations of familiar analytical categories like ‘masculinity’, ‘ethics’, and ‘politics’ in line with the ethos of the research track and indeed of the Department as a whole.