Pressly Forum: Brynne McBryde, “Good Clean Men: masculinity, bathing, and the power of belonging”
Pressly Forum: Brynne McBryde, “Good Clean Men: masculinity, bathing, and the power of belonging”
Please join us Wednesday, November 5th for a Pressly Forum featuring Dr. Brynne McBryde, Affiliate Faculty in the Department, who teaches as a Collegiate Fellow in the University Honors program.
Dr, McBryde will draw on her current book project, Embodied Medical Mythologies: Nineteenth-century bodies, medical imagery, and the construction of biological identity, for her talk, “Good Clean Men: masculinity, bathing, and the power of belonging.”
Here is a précis for her talk:
Pools, bathhouses, and swimming schools provided nineteenth-century French men an opportunity to bond with other men while asserting their health and physical superiority over all other bodies. This lecture considers images of male swimmers and bathers alongside medical rhetorics of hygienic bathing to understand how bathing became a site of social stratification in the nineteenth century. It uses medical theories that figure the adult white European male body as healthy and all others as pathologically flawed to explain how the act of bathing reinforced that physiological boundary and encouraged European men to observe, assess, and classify the bodies around them.
The Pressly Forum offers members of Department faculty and selected speakers to give a talk to members of the Department (faculty, staff, students) in an effort to create bonds of intellectual and collegial community. The forum is the brainchild of Professor Emeritus William L. Pressly, after whom the forum now is named. A light lunch will be served at 11:30.
Please join us Wednesday, November 5th for a Pressly Forum featuring Dr. Brynne McBryde, Affiliate Faculty in the Department, who teaches as a Collegiate Fellow in the University Honors program.
Dr, McBryde will draw on her current book project, Embodied Medical Mythologies: Nineteenth-century bodies, medical imagery, and the construction of biological identity, for her talk, “Good Clean Men: masculinity, bathing, and the power of belonging.”
Here is a précis for her talk:
Pools, bathhouses, and swimming schools provided nineteenth-century French men an opportunity to bond with other men while asserting their health and physical superiority over all other bodies. This lecture considers images of male swimmers and bathers alongside medical rhetorics of hygienic bathing to understand how bathing became a site of social stratification in the nineteenth century. It uses medical theories that figure the adult white European male body as healthy and all others as pathologically flawed to explain how the act of bathing reinforced that physiological boundary and encouraged European men to observe, assess, and classify the bodies around them.
The Pressly Forum offers members of Department faculty and selected speakers to give a talk to members of the Department (faculty, staff, students) in an effort to create bonds of intellectual and collegial community. The forum is the brainchild of Professor Emeritus William L. Pressly, after whom the forum now is named. A light lunch will be served at 11:30.