Bart Eeckhout full professor

Research Bart Eeckhout

Research team

Expertise

1. Modern literatures in English (emphasis: American 20th-century literature). 2. Modernist poetry: Wallace Stevens. 3. LGBTIQ studies and queer theory, more particularly in the realm of interdisciplinary cultural studies (esp. contemporary literature in English and recent history) and with regard to the interactions between academic and activist work. 4. Multidisciplinary urban studies (as a member of the Urban Studies Institute) with emphasis on New York City and literary urban studies. 5. Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (as chair), with special attention to multidisciplinary research in music. 6. Literature and philosophy; literature and architecture; literature and music. For more details: see my personal webpage at UAntwerp.

The Biopolitics of the Dressed Male Body: Understanding Normative Embodied Masculinities in Everyday Life in Belgium and Italy 01/11/2023 - 31/10/2026

Abstract

The overall aim of this project is to explore the relationship between clothing and masculinity in non-conforming men's everyday life sartorial practices. Specifically, it will look at the impact of gendered norms on the articulation, policing, and experience of the dressed male body in public space in both Belgium and Italy. This research will consider the dressed male body as a pivotal element in the biopolitics of masculinity by examining the importance of dress practices in biopower's disciplinary and regulatory interventions on the body, a dimension which has been all too often overlooked. This will be done through an ethnographic wardrobe studies investigation. By bridging material culture and embodied research, the project will consider to which extent norms of masculinity restrict the self-expression of the dressed male body, and how this embodied knowledge affects the everyday act of getting dressed. As research on the relationship between men and fashion in everyday life is an area still in need of greater investigation and understanding, this project will extend and expand our understanding of the dressed male body, emphasizing the fundamental role of dress practices as identity-making practices in the biopolitics of masculinity. As such, it aligns with recent scholarly and mainstream concerns with the changing nature of masculinity and with the backlash towards more inclusive forms of male embodiment.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Happiness and Agency in Queer Young Adult Literature: An Exploration of Empowering Scenarios in Literary Emotionality 01/11/2023 - 31/10/2025

Abstract

Today, queer teenagers are still more likely than their peers to develop mental health issues. Recent endeavours to combat those issues have been trying to show them that 'it gets better'. However, it is not only important to see whether queer adolescents can imagine happiness as a possibility in the future, but also how they perceive their own agency over such happiness in the present. This project aims to examine the literary portrayal of happiness in queer YA literature with specific attention to the characters' agency in their pursuit and experience of happiness. Research has shown that novels can empower readers if they can identify with characters that establish agency. In order to examine this potential in literature, this study will use a corpus of influential contemporary queer YA novels and first analyse their portrayal of happiness as a literary emotionality. In the next stage, those portrayals of happiness will be analysed in terms of agency to examine how these stories represent potential for empowerment regarding happiness. A focus on temporality will be a central aspect in both part of the analysis. As a result, this research not only contributes to literary research, but also aims to develop a toolkit for organisations that use literature to empower queer youth.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Born in the Wrong Story: An Embodied Approach to Transgender Narratives in Dutch Fiction. 01/11/2020 - 31/10/2024

Abstract

In today's society, we can observe a gap between the complex gender identities, experiences and embodiments of transgender people and the dominant reductionist scenario of gender transition as a movement from a "wrong" body towards a "right" body. This project turns to fictional transgender narratives in Dutch literature, focusing on various narrative structures and their capacity to render visible a large range of transgender subjectivities. The literary imagination opens up possibilities for narrating the multidimensional embodied experience of transgender characters beyond the formal and social conventions of transgender autobiographies. The analysis of transgender narratives is based on a corpus consisting of fictional literary works published in the Netherlands since the mid-twentieth century, when the public discourse surrounding transgender people started to take shape. In that literary corpus, I will investigate how metaphors, storyworlds and specific modes of narration and focalization evoke complex subject positions. As a result, my research will not only contribute to the growing field of transgender studies, but also demonstrate the valuable role of narratological approaches in emancipatory projects.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Reshaping Masculinities: Dress, Body and Identity in the Antwerp Fashion Scene. 01/11/2019 - 31/10/2023

Abstract

This research project is the first ever to directly address the relationship between fashion, body and gender identity in the well-known Antwerp fashion scene. Specifically, it will focus on the creative practices of four designers from different generations (Raf Simons, Ann Demeulemeester, Bernhard Willhelm and Glenn Martens) and investigate how they all contributed to reshaping the idea of male aesthetics through a critical approach to menswear. The research is innovative for its multidisciplinary approach at the intersection of fashion studies, men's studies and queer studies. It will combine theories on the construction of masculinity with insights into the role of fashion in creating and questioning embodied gender norms. Methodologically, it will primarily draw on the analysis of visual and audio-visual materials (i.e. fashion show videos and images, catalogues, look books, magazine editorials, etc.) provided by the MoMu fashion museum and other archives, combined with interviews with the designers and relevant personalities from the Antwerp fashion scene. Because of its multidisciplinary character, this project will contribute to several fields: it will strengthen the existing literature on Belgian fashion by providing new insights from a masculinity perspective, put Belgium on the fashion studies map, and add a totally new angle to men's and queer studies in Belgian academia.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

100 year surrealism – In dialogue with surrealist creation methods. 08/10/2019 - 07/10/2023

Abstract

This doctoral project articulates how surrealist creation methods and thinking tools influence and are used by contemporary artists today. Therefor a surrealist toolbox will be created (a non-exhaustive description of surrealist methods and thoughts) that forms a base for dialogue, interviews and collaborations with contemporary artist and art students today. By means of workshops and surrealist 'sparkling water-salons', specific themes, methods and international legacies of the surrealist movement are treated by students, experts and artists. Through collaborations with contemporary artists, the surrealist methods are practiced and analysed from the inside. These dialogues and collaborations result in a toolbox, a constellation of collaborative artworks, and a thesis with findings.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Wallace Stevens in the World. 05/09/2016 - 30/06/2017

Abstract

During my stay as Fellow-in-Residence at NIAS in Amsterdam, I intend to deepen the critical understanding of the many ways in which Wallace Stevens' writings simultaneously relate to the world and may be considered relevant to world literature. I will do so by developing a variety of complementary angles that will be pursued over three interrelated book projects. My first and main goal is to write a book whose working title is "Wallace Stevens' World Wide Web." My second goal consists of a collection of essays on "Wallace Stevens and France" that I will be coediting for Editions Rue d'Ulm/Presses de l'Ecole normale supérieure. This will explore Stevens' uses of French, the influence of French poetry and painting on his writings, the reception of his work in France, French translations of his poetry, and the relevance of French theorists for reading his work. My third and final goal is to finish an annotated selection of 101 poems by Stevens that I have been translating into Dutch over the years.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Wallace Stevens as a World Poet. 01/10/2015 - 30/09/2019

Abstract

This research project is meant to contribute to the process of reading the canonical modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) as a transnational and global poet. It seeks to provide a more systematic focus to such readings, present a variety of relevant data not yet available to Stevens scholarship, evaluate what is critically at stake in transnationalizing the poet, and recalibrate current theories on world literature and ecocriticism by confronting them with Stevens' complex poetic thinking in this regard. The project will investigate Stevens as a "world poet" from a variety of complementary angles that may be organized into three main parts, consisting of two large case studies each: "Wallace Stevens in the World" (which is to be based on archival research into the poet's library and correspondence), "The World through Wallace Stevens" (which will draw on theories of world literature and ecocriticism), and "The World after Wallace Stevens" (which will involve case studies about Stevens' influence on a cluster of non-American poets, on the one hand, and the painter David Hockney, on the other).

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

E-identity: Social media and identity from the perspective of diasporic LGBTQs. 01/10/2015 - 31/08/2018

Abstract

The internet, and social media in particular, create new opportunities and pose new challenges for the ways people think about themselves as well as manage the expressions and performances of their identities. In this research project I aim to refine and extend the latest theories on social media and identity, especially about 1) fixating the fragmented self (van Zoonen 2013), 2) collapsed contexts (boyd 2011) and 3) the multiplication of contexts (Papacharissi 2011), by investigating those phenomena from the perspective of diasporic LGBTQs (Polish post-accession immigrants to the UK). I will examine what diasporic LGBTQs and their social media's uses can teach us about the relationship between the internet and identity, as well as what opportunities and difficulties social media create to a group that faces different challenges of exclusion and discrimination. I will first use a quantitative survey to map the diversity of social media used by Polish LGBTQs in the UK. However, because I am primarily interested in meanings of daily media practices, it is qualitative methods, and in-depth interviews in particular, which will form the core of my methodological toolkit. At the same time, to trigger more and better quality data I will combine traditional qualitative methods with such innovative approaches as think-aloud protocols (which require from participants to talk about the activity in which they are involved) and digital methods (the methods of the medium under scrutiny).

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Revising Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Correspondences in the Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara. 01/10/2014 - 30/09/2016

Abstract

My proposal stems from state-of-the-art criticism that attempts to bring Stevens and postwar American poetry together in order to uncover continuities and affinities that should help us move beyond the reductively applied and frequently unhelpful labels of high modernism, late modernism, and postmodernism.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Homonegativity and Gender Deviance: A Comparative Analysis of the Relationship between Ideas on Gender and Sexuality in Flanders, The Netherlands, and the United States. 01/10/2012 - 31/12/2015

Abstract

This project investigates to what extent and in what manner attitudes toward non-heteronormative sexualities can be explained by attitudes toward gender. The corpus of analyzed texts consists of book and film reviews from the period 1960 until today. For each compared region (Flanders, The Netherlands, the U.S.), two written media (a newspaper and a weekly) will be analyzed.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

The Planet on the Table: Wallace Stevens as a World Poet. 01/10/2012 - 30/09/2014

Abstract

This research project is meant to contribute to the process of reading the canonical modernist poet Wallace Stevens as a transnational and global poet. It seeks to provide a more systematic focus to such readings, present a variety of relevant data not yet available to Stevens criticism, evaluate what is critically at stake in transnationalizing this poet, and recalibrate current theories on world literature, ecocriticism, and cultural topography by confronting them with Stevens' complex poetic thinking in this regard. Borrowing its main title from the poem in which Stevens looked back on his own poetic career, "The Planet on the Table," the project will investigate Stevens as a "world poet" from a variety of complementary angles that may be organized into three main parts: "Wallace Stevens in the World" (which is to be based on archival research), "The World through Wallace Stevens" (which will draw on theories of world literature, ecocriticism, and a combination of rhetorical analysis and cultural topography), and "The World after Wallace Stevens" (which will involve case studies about translations, adaptations, and the poet's afterlife on the internet).

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Queer sounds: The function and meaning of music in the formation and evolution of an LGBT subculture in the city of Antwerp (1960-2010). 01/01/2012 - 31/12/2015

Abstract

This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the function of music in processes of subcultural identification, focusing on the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community in Antwerp. It is widely accepted that music plays an important role in the formation and self-definition of minorities and subcultures, but its function in the LGBT community has not been extensively investigated yet. Moreover, Flemish LGBT culture and its history have hardly come up for academic analysis to date. Our aim is, first, to find out what musical repertoire and which musical functions were shared within the LGBT scene, focusing on the largest Flemish urban centre Antwerp, between 1960 (the start of the LGBT movement in Antwerp) and 2010. Secondly, we will analyse how this repertoire and its uses operate as subcultural capital and contribute to the formation of one or more LGBT subcultures.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

The function and meaning of music in the formation and evolution of a LGB subculture in the city of Antwerp (1960-2010) 01/07/2011 - 30/06/2015

Abstract

This project aims to better understand the function of music in processes of subcultural identification, focusing on the LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) community in Antwerp. It is known that music plays an important role in the formation and self-definition of minorities and subcultures, but its function in the LGB community has not been extensively researched. Moreover, Flemish LGB culture and its history have hardly been academically researched to date. Our aim is to first find out which musical repertoire and which musical functions were shared within the LGB scene, focusing on the largest Flemish urban centre Antwerp, between 1960 (the start of the LGB movement in Antwerp) and 2010. Secondly, we will analyse how this repertoire and its uses operate as subcultural capital and contribute to the formation of one or more LGB subculture(s). A combination of qualitative methods (archive research, document analysis, in-depth interviews with informants and participants in LGB culture) is used to get a holistic view on historical processes and evolutions in these musical cultures. This project brings together insights from media studies, LGB/queer studies and history, aiming to bridge the distance between these disciplines in a specific case study.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project website

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Who's In? Who's Out? A comparative analysis of sexual and gender minority self-representations in cyberspace in Poland, Scotland and Turkey. 01/10/2010 - 30/09/2014

Abstract

This research project explores how members of sexual and gender minority communities (activists, editors and media users) represent themselves using online media. In particular, the project aims to explore representational practices among different sexual and gender minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and/or queer persons) and in different national, cultural and religious contexts (Poland, Scotland and Turkey).

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Positioning Rebecca Brown's work within contemporary English literature. 01/10/2009 - 30/09/2013

Abstract

The project focuses on the (hitherto largely unexamined) oeuvre of the American author Rebecca Brown. It comprises, firstly, an intertextual component centering on Brown's minimalism and positioning her work within contemporary English literature; and, secondly, a sociological study that will examine what makes her worldview such an unpopular one as well as track the influence of the current American literary market on the reception of Brown's work."

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

The Contemporary Historic Novel about New York City. 01/01/2008 - 31/12/2011

Abstract

The investigation seeks to provide answers to the following four main research questions: (1) The literary-historical question about specific shifts that allow us to situate the phenomenon of the contemporary historic novel on New York City within (American) literary history overall. (2) The genre-typological question about the role of quest and search plots in the corpus. (3) The documentary question about the ways in which writers use historic sources. (4) The political-ideological question about the possibly subversive or critical potential of the fictional worlds developed by writers.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

The Study and Dissemination of the Poetry of Wallace Stevens from a Text-Genetic Perspective. 01/01/2007 - 31/12/2008

Abstract

This project is intended to start up and develop a critically responsible investigation, based on an adequate knowledge of state-of-the-art evolutions in the field of textual genetics and entirely in line with the research profile of the University of Antwerp in the field of English and American literature, into the textual genesis of the poetry of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project