The University of Kansas is offering a course called “Angry White Male Studies,” purporting to “chart the rise of the ‘angry white male’” in the US and UK - and angering a good portion of the white males within tweeting distance.
The class examines “manifestations of male anger” in the modern age, “exploring the deeper sources of this emotional state” (which could be said to include the existence of classes like “Angry White Male Studies”). Students will also learn about how “dominant and subordinate masculinities” are experienced in societies undergoing “rapid change connected to modernity” – as well as how those masculinities fare when encountering “rights-based movements of women, people of color, homosexuals and trans individuals.”
Spoiler alert: things don’t end so well for the white males, who were quick to “manifest their anger” on Twitter.
Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kansas) declared, “KU has decided to offer a class that divides the student population and could pose a Title IX violation by creating a hostile campus environment based on gender.”
But many Twitter users were caught between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to add to the phenomenon the course described by tweeting angrily about it.
Those who fell into the trap were ridiculed.
Satisfying requirements for both the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies department and the Humanities department, the class is taught by Christopher Forth, whose curriculum vitae includes co-editing “Fat: Culture and Materiality” and penning several other articles on corpulence for academic journals, as well as the book “Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body.” Forth, incidentally, is a white male.
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