Steel as the Answer?: Viking Bodies, Power, and Masculinity in Anglophone Fantasy Literature

About the seminar: In the popular imagination and popular culture, the Viking connotate a specific image of white, muscular, brutal hypermasculinity. This image has quite a life of its own, often going against historical and archaeological facts of the Viking Age, and has seemingly become a fruitful space for all manners of reactionary political and affective investments. In this seminar, Anna Bark Persson presents her thesis work on the popular Viking in Anglophone fantasy literature, which explores the masculinity of the fantasy Viking in relation to questions of power, sexuality, and embodiment, emerging from a queer engagement with the Viking.

The Thursday seminar are run by the Centre for Gender Research and are open for all. The seminars aim to create cross-disciplinary meetings between researchers, between disciplines, and between researchers and students.
Information about the other seminars in our Thursday seminar series can be found here.