Writing
Erick DuPree’s blog explores the intersections of anthropology, literature, and material culture, illuminating how identity, ritual, and meaning take shape across time and tradition. Blending scholarship with storytelling, these essays invite readers to think critically and imaginatively about the cultural forces that shape both personal lives and collective experience.
Social Satire to Sentimental Myth: How the Romance Genre Distorted Jane Austen
Modern romance has rewritten Jane Austen, trading social critique for fantasy. Learn how Austen’s sharp insights on power, gender, and survival were lost in the myth of “happily ever after.”
Jane Austen’s Gentlemen: Masculinity and the Marriage Market in Regency England
Explore how Jane Austen's novels reveal the hidden politics of masculinity and marriage. Far from fairy tales, her stories expose the economic and social pressures shaping gender and courtship in Regency England.
What Exactly Does It Mean To Be “Man Enough?”
A personal essay exploring fatherlessness, gender norms, and queer identity—unpacking what it means to be “man enough” in a world that punishes softness and fetishizes masculinity.
Caged Beasts and Broken Gods: The Byronic Hero and the Erotics of Gothic Masculinity
Explore the Byronic hero of Gothic fiction—tortured, magnetic, and dangerously masculine. This essay unpacks how stoicism, pain, and emotional repression became eroticized traits, revealing the dark roots of masculine fantasy, dominance, and the myth of redemptive love.
Herman Melville’s Longing: Queer Desire and the Love That Dare Not Speak
Explore the queer undertones in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and his passionate bond with Nathaniel Hawthorne. This essay unpacks homoerotic longing, emotional repression, and how Melville’s fiction encodes same-sex desire in the language of obsession and the sublime.
Heathcliff: On Sadism, Consent, and the Gothic Male in Wuthering Heights
Explore the dark psychology of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights through the lens of masculinity, sadism, and BDSM. This essay unpacks why cruelty is mistaken for love—and how the Gothic bad boy became an enduring, dangerous erotic fantasy.
Masc for Masc? Desire, Discipline, and the Market of Queer Manhood
Commodifying masculinity- how dating apps reinforce norms, and shape desire in queer culture—unpacking the phrase “masc for masc” through an anthropological and critical lens.