Department of English, Payyanur College is very happy with its fifth faulty to have PhD. Dr A C Sreehari after Dr V V Balakrishanan, Dr K C Muraleedharan, Dr /V M Santhosh and Dr Premachandran Keezhoth has successfully defended his thesis on Masculinities (The Making of the Male: A Study of the Popular Art Films in Malayalam) in front of a quite scholarly audience. The defence was in the presence of the well-known scholar and bilingual writer Prof. P P Raveendran, Professor Emeritus of MG University and former Dean of School of Letters, MG University and his guide 'Prof Bhaskaran Nair, Pondichery University and Co-guide, Prof. T Pavithran, Calicut University. The session was intensely academic and the presentation was followed by a bouquet of questions raised by the Chairman himself on his own behalf and on behalf of other examiners. Sreehari maintained the stance he took in the thesis excellently well and then questions came from the audience as well in plenty which also were given proper responses. Spontaneity was the most apt word to describe the spirit of the situation. The defence which started at 10.50 went on upto 1.30 without a moment of low spirit. The following aspects of the thesis needs special mention:
1. A topic of current relevance
2. About an aspect of human (s)existence (masculinity) which creates its binary femininity and urges people to continuous performativity draining off their creative energy.
3. Deals with the subtle politics of films in gendering human realities and evoking a potential space for exploitation.
4. Highly commendable for its attempt at evolving a language to go beyond binaries of modernity and its epistemological base challenged since the time of Nietzsche through Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guttari and also more sharply by ideologues of feminism like Helen Cixous whose polemic writings (for instance, Laugh of Medusa) collapses borders and violates genre rules in the attempt of gong beyond restricting linguistic and epistemological framework.
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