University of Cambridge Senior Research Seminar

Description

Real men Don’t Cry? masculinity and ‘Born-Again’ Testimony in A Scottish Fishing Village Drawing on fieldwork among Scottish fishermen, this article examines the performance of ‘giving testimony’ (the story of becoming a ‘born-again’ Christian) as a confessional act that is itself predicated upon a conflation of the category of conversion with that of ‘born-again’ personhood. For deep sea fishermen, key to communicating the sincerity of this performance is the public expression of gendered emotion as a way of unmaking and remaking masculinity. Crucially, conversion narratives are not just directed toward the speaking self but are also explicitly concerned with the listening other. ‘Giving testimony’, then, is also about ‘bearing witness’; it is part of a larger programme of evangelism that seeks to challenge and thereby transform both speaker and hearer through a religious narrative of gendered embodiment.

Period	2012
Event type	Seminar
Location	Cambridge, United KingdomShow on map