Event: Theodore Koulouris -The Mangina does Critical Theory, in short a ball busting (sic) Communist lecture followed by Q&A | 19 November 2024 11am at Mithras House, G8
In response to International Men’s Day, Theodore Koulouris will be delivering a lecture followed by Q&A. He has described the event as follows:
The rather eccentric title is taken from a tweet directed at me by a far-right X (formerly Twitter) account following a public engagement/debate I had on ‘lad culture’ with the all-round bad boy of the extreme right, Milo Yiannopoulos. The specific tweet and countless others I received in the wake of said debate bespeak the elemental tendency of contemporary far-right masculinity: to attack a ‘fellow man’ one has to first feminise him (for those not familiar with the term, a mangina is a man who has, apparently, a vagina). However, it also reveals that the language of such attacks is not devoid of political inflection and that it is redolent of deeply fossilised expectations of ‘masculinity’. In this presentation, I reflect on the socio-political valences of my experience – as a man, as a male scholar who teaches feminism, and as a male scholar whose approach to cultural texts is haunted by the spirit of Marx (Derrida, Specters of Marx). I start with a short analysis of Kipling’s famous poem ‘If’; I then proceed to juxtapose Kipling’s poem with Wordsworth’s ‘She was a Phantom of Delight’ and selected stanzas from Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House; finally, I offer a critical analysis of some of the tweets I received.
NB1. Most of the tweets contain very offensive language.
NB2. Those interested may perhaps read my article on this experience: Koulouris, T (2018), Online Misogyny and the Alternative Right: Debating the Undebatable. Feminist Media Studies 18(4), pp. 750-761. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447428
Image – Theodore Koulouris