King, Neal, Dr.

By Malena Gustavson on 22 Aug | 0 comments

Dr. Neal King is an Associate Professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Tech, USA. He is also an Open Position Fellow at GEXcel.

GEXcel Project
"The Slackening Self: Concepts of agency in old manhood"
I will develop an ongoing project of mine on scholars' and ordinary men's constructions of */agency/*, as I look at men who feel  increasingly hampered by institutional positions as they age. Social theories that specify relations between the abstract concepts agency/determinism, domination/resistance, and consent/coercion tend to advocate on behalf of particular social groups whom they present as oppressed but having agency with which they resist their oppression. Ordinary people draw some of the same moral lines, between their senses of disempowerment and their acts of defiance, for instance. Under what conditions do people wield such moral logic, and with what consequence for constructions of manhood? I intend to look at the issue of sexuality of old men in particular as a venue in which  people work out their senses of personal and collective agency. Data for the larger study include professional discourses of refereed social science and social work journals, and personal/institutional discourses offered by interviews with men in the 40s and 50s about their experiences of their aging bodies.