Dany Nobus: Arresting Masculinity: Anger, Hybridity and the Persistence of Patriarchy in the 21st Century – SCCP – Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy

Within the context of Cooper Gallery’s current exhibition “Ambiguous Becoming: Artists’ Moving Image from Canada”, we are delighted to host a talk by Professor Dany Nobus on “Arresting Masculinity: Anger, Hybridity and the Persistence of Patriarchy in the 21st Century”.

The event will take place on the Wednesday 12 February 2020, at Cooper Gallery, from 5:30 to 7pm.

In this talk professor Nobus will examine how the signifier of ‘toxic masculinity’ operates in the contemporary psycho-social landscape of embodied power relations. He will argue that toxic masculinity is a symbolic response to the deep sense of anger people experience as a result of the ubiquitous disturbance of reason that characterizes the radically incongruous Thirdspace in which we live. To those who feel disoriented and lost, toxic masculinity is both the imagined cause and the projected solution to the endemic sense of dislocation. As an index of repressive power, self-serving discipline and ruthless narcissistic ambition, toxic masculinity is held fully responsible by angry ‘outsiders’ for the ongoing disturbance of reason, whilst the very attribution of the cause of this disturbance to a gendered position of traditional embodied authority also serves the purpose of changing the hybridity of Thirdspace into more conventional figurations of social imbalance. This explanatory model, which draws both on Edward W. Soja’s theory of Thirdspace and Henri Lefebvre’s reflections on the (re-)production of (phallic) space, will be further employed to address the questions as to why patriarchy persists, whether alternative constellations of governance are feasible, and how the prevailing paradigm of modern masculinity affects the lives of young men.

Professor Dany Nobus is a Clinical Psychologist, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Chair of the Freud Museum London. Main research interests include the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, and the intersections between psychoanalysis, philosophy and Tthe arts. In 2017, Nobus was awarded the Sarton medal of the University of Ghent for his outstanding contributions to the history of psychoanalysis.