“What It Took and Took/To Be a Man”: Teaching Timothy Findley and the Construction of Masculinities

This essay explores some of the institutional and pedagogical implications of a female instructor teaching a course on the construction of masculinities in the fiction of Timothy Findley. It briefly explores some initial institutional resistance to the course, before focussing on pedagogical challenges: e.g., the impact of teaching a theory that holds that gender is performed rather than unproblematically determinate; student engagement with the tension in Findley’s works between essentialized gender characteristics and a performative understanding of gender identities; and the mutually interpretive role of fiction and theory on the course. The essay ends with a pedagogical, institutional meditation on student responses to the ideas presented.