Exploring masculine identities

From Barbie dolls to Hillary Clinton's candidacy, representations of femininity have been widely debated across America. Not so for masculinity-even when so many crime headlines center on boys and men. Media scholar Sut Jhally wants to correct that. The director of the documentary Tough Guise: Media, Violence & Masculinity, he will give a free public lecture by the same name on Monday, April 11, at 6 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium on the Skidmore campus.

Jhally is professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he won UMass-Amherst's Distinguished Teacher Award and was named Best Professor by the student newspaper. He is also the founding director of the Media Education Foundation, which produces and distributes films and other resources exploring the cultural influence of advertising and other media, with the goal of inspiring more critical thinking about the "hyper-mediated world" around us today.

Along with authoring six books, including The Codes of Advertising (1990) and Enlightened Racism (1992), Jhally has directed several documentary videos. The 22-minute Tough Guise has been called the first educational video for college and high school students that systematically examines the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. With footage from the likes of Marlon Brando and James Caan to Dylan Klebold and Tupac Shakur, it shows how dominance and violence help define manhood and considers how males can live outside those definitions to become better men.

Born in Kenya, Jhally grew up in England and received a degree from the University of York. He moved to Canada to accept a scholarship to the University of Victoria, and he earned a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University.

His talk is hosted by Skidmore's Advisory Council on Sexual and Gender-Based Misconduct, with support from the offices of the President and of the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity.