As mentioned in a previous post, I made a half-serious suggestion that I would participate in the #UnionCollegeChallenge promoted by our new president by going to some seminars well outside my home in the sciences. There was a big email announcement the other day about a Women and Gender Studies lunch talk yesterday, and I didn’t have anything else scheduled for yesterday afternoon, so I dropped in to see that.

The speaker was one of our Modern Languages faculty, Prof. Stephanie Mueller, on the topic of “Boys Become Men: Masculinity in Post-ETA Basque Cinema,” and really, you don’t get a lot farther from my comfort zone than that. Between Sesame Street and a couple of trips to Mexico, I can comfortably order up to ten beers in Spanish, and that’s about the extent of my knowledge.

Happily, she opened with a nice recap of the political and economic history of the Basque region, very little of which I knew previously. I’m sufficiently clueless that while I was aware of ETA as a terrorist organization and dimly aware that they had made a cease-fire agreement a few years back, I didn’t know that they officially dissolved earlier this year.

Her thesis is that there’s been a change in the portrayal of Basque characters in film since the cease-fire agreement. While ETA was more violently active, Basque characters in film tended to be exclusively terrorists, but in more recent years, they’ve been at the center of lightweight romantic comedies. Along with the humor, these movies also reflect a warmer view of the Basque region as a part of a unified Spain.

The gender-studies gloss on this is that the new films present a different model of masculinity, where the Basque characters aren’t expected to live up to some soldier ideal, but are rewarded for being more traditional breadwinner types. She leaned particularly on a movie called Fe de Etarras, which was apparently retitled as Bomb Scared for English-language distribution. In this, an ETA terrorist cell hides in Madrid by pretending to be contractors repairing stuff in an apartment complex, and eventually become successful enough that they decide they prefer being contractors.

I thought the basic pattern she described sounded interesting, though it might’ve been nice to see movie clips, rather than just a verbal description. That might be an impossible ask, though, given possible rights issues, definite language issues, and the need to explain the historical context to start the talk, without which none of the rest would’ve made any sense.

The uncomfortable part of this, as is usually the case when I see work from the more literary side of academia, is that I’m never entirely convinced that what’s being presented is the right way to look at the works in question. That is, based on what I heard, the gender-studies gloss of this certainly seems like a reasonable reading of the situation, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the best way to read it.

But that’s a hard thing to judge from a 45-minute presentation (with a lot of context-setting) of something that’s a journal article presumably running to several tens of pages (it was mentioned at the start that this is a journal article, but it wasn’t clear to me whether this is published or in progress; a tiny bit of Google searching didn’t turn up anything that looked like what I heard, but then, there’s no film-studies category in the arxiv, so I don’t know that I should expect it to be findable). It’s also maybe not the best way to think about this stuff in the first place, but it’s my ingrained habit as a scientist to always look for the explanation that best fits the observations, so “That’s interesting, and I guess it’s plausible” isn’t a very satisfying end point.

The Q&A portion did afford me an opportunity to feel smart, though. Being congenitally incapable of sitting in a room for an hour without talking, I asked a question, which was “Do you see any similar pattern in works from other regions of the world where long-running bloody conflicts have de-escalated?” I felt a little bad asking that, because it was obviously beyond the scope of the specific project being discussed, but everybody was very polite and said that it was a good question, and something to definitely look at in the future. There’s apparently a professor in English who might have some related ideas regarding Irish literature, but she wasn’t able to make it to the talk yesterday; something to talk about next time I see her, I suppose.

Anyway, that’s my take on yesterday’s visit to the Gender Studies lounge. It was a pleasant enough way to pass the lunch hour, if not completely satisfying. Their next speaker isn’t for a few weeks, and is an economist, which might be cheating challenge-wise, but I may well go back.

And I’ll close by once again noting that I’d be happy to see somebody else take this up in the other direction, and have some literary faculty come to a Physics and Astronomy colloquium. I’ll be happy to look over our list of upcoming talks and make a specific recommendation if anyone’s up for it…