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The Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University is pleased to co-host an international workshop titled “Forged in Steel?: New Understandings of 20th Century Masculinity and Labour” in collaboration with Birkbeck, University of London.
This workshop aims to explore how grassroots concepts of gender were shaped across various regions of the world during the 20th century—within the context of not only state-led social engineering efforts, cultural influences, labor but also non-labor environments, homosocial interactions, and heterosexual relationships. Key questions to be addressed include: how dominant norms and values of masculinity were formed and reinforced in everyday life; what roles social and physical environments, as well as the state, played in this process; and how these dynamics differed or converged across national and regional contexts.
By collecting firsthand accounts and narratives that illustrate how masculinity was understood, enacted, and reinforced at the grassroots level, this workshop seeks to broaden existing academic perspectives—often centered on femininity, women's literature, and state-level discourses—on gender in the 20th century.

◈ Date: Tuesday, June 3 – Wednesday, June 4, 2025
◈ Venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Birkbeck Central, Room BCB G09