Project Name: Charm School: Dating Experts, Abject Masculinity, and the Immaterial Labors of Seduction
Grantee: Anders Wallace
Discipline: Anthropology
Funding Cycle: 2015-2016
Project Status: Cycle Complete
Don Giovanni clearly did not require any training in charm skills, but many American men feel they need help. My dissertation research in cultural anthropology examines the phenomenon of “seduction communities,” communities of men including dating coaches and their followers who train each other in social skills to attract women. For this project, I am building an interactive website to house the results of my dissertation research by creating a critical, interdisciplinary and public-facing dialogue on the social production of inhibitions, dependencies, and inequalities in the lives of men who are trained in practices of seduction and masculine self-fashioning. What gender does standardized training in seducing women produce? This project hypothesizes that training in the arts of seduction to achieve the effect of gender naturalness both challenges and reproduces male domination.
This project uses virtual and non-virtual ethnographic methods to understand norms of cooperation, competition, and inequality in intimate labors of crafting desires for heterosexual masculine embodiment. By combining the results of digital ethnography (including natural language processing, data visualization, and multimedia storytelling) with ethnographic data from interviews and participant observation, this digital project has three aims. First, to establish relations in real-time between my ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical insights on changing cultural values of masculinity in the U.S. and globally. Second, to create an online space for community building around progressive and inclusive gender identities. Third, to offer new modes of access, participation, and critique on the production of knowledge in the social sciences. By following the efforts of men who feel unexpected needs to “pass” (Halberstam 1998) in their gender role by participating in heteronormative seduction communities, I aim to illuminate new, important, and little understood transformations in cultural values of maleness in the U.S. and globally.
