The Mythology of Manhood: Curriculum, Truth, Subjectivity, and Reparation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum, Identity, and Resistance: Navigating Gender in Archives and Classrooms

Abstract

This paper presents the findings from the author’s 2025 book on contemporary practices of manhood. While situated in the present, the paper genealogically provides a partial history of the present, which extends to the initial colonization of the Americas and is reflected specifically in the Frontier Myth’s commitment to regeneration through violence and its inherent gender, racial, sexual, and class tropes. This paper illuminates historical threads that have produced persistent beliefs about violent practices of manhood and have served the interests of imperialism and colonialism. The paper ends with the canonical curricular question of what knowledge is of most worth to suggest ethics of seeking truth, non-violence, and reparation conjoined with the embodiment of an ethos of exile.

Author

• James P. Burns, University of New Mexico