The Dylan Review spoke to Dylan scholars Erin Callahan and Anne Marie Mai during “Bob Dylan – Questions on Masculinity,” a conference hosted by Callahan and Mai at the University of Southern Denmark. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dylan Review: How did this conference come about?
Erin Callahan: Anne-Marie [Mai] and I met in 2018 at the Dylan in the 21st Century conference in Arras, France. And then I reached out to her when I was doing interviews for Jim Salvucci’s The Dylantantes. During the interview, we started talking about Dylan and gender, and I don’t know if you [Anne-Marie] said we should host a conference, or if I said it, but you said “We should do that.” And it really was just in the course of that conversation that we decided to do it. And when we got home, she came back here [to Odense, Denmark] and I went back to Houston, we followed up and that’s how it happened.
Anne-Marie Mai: I was lucky to get a research award, some money I could spend on interesting topics of my own choice, so I decided to spend part of it on this conference.
DR: The conference is called Bob Dylan: Questions on Masculinity. Why are questions on Bob Dylan and masculinity important?
EC: Gender is interesting in general. Identity studies are interesting. And part of my dissertation was focused on the voices or the different identities Dylan occupies. And so what Sean [Latham in his paper “The Cowboy Angel Rides”] was doing with the cowboy identity was central to my dissertation. But I think looking at the way Dylan shifts his identity performance throughout his career can tell us a lot and open the discussion on Dylan, as we saw throughout the two days. And I think that’s another piece of understanding Dylan and his art.
AM: I agree, but I was also interested in his fans’ and followers’ ideas of him and how they relate to masculinity. What are their images and ideas of him? Because I think it was important to the respondents of my questionnaire, who are elderly men, to be men in another way to their fathers. Of course, we used to talk about the youth rebellion, but perhaps we neglect how much it was a rebellion against a certain modern masculinity. We think of it as a rebellion towards the older generation, but it was definitely a rebellion against a certain modern masculinity, too.
EC: As I said when I was introducing Carsten [Lang-Jensen and his paper “Sitting on a Barbie-Wire Fence”], we have two different fields that converge. There’s the fanbase community in Dylan studies, who understand his masculinity in a very personal way, and I think your presentation [Dylan Review interviewer Paul Haney and his paper, “Queering Bob Dylan Through Creative Nonfiction”] spoke to that and merged the two fields: academic and fan culture. Because you intellectualize that process, almost like a hero’s journey. I think it gave us that real focus from both the fan perspective and the academic perspective to see how masculinity is at play in Dylan’s work throughout the trajectory of sixty-plus years.
AM: And then we also heard some wonderful presentations on Dylan and gender issues in Tulsa.
DR: Do any of those stand out? There was the Anne Powers’s keynote [“Bob Dylan’s Body” from World of Bob Dylan 2019]
AM: Yes. That was a great inspiration to me. And also there are essays on Dylan and gender in some of the anthologies on Dylan. But this topic develops slowly, and we decided we should try to go further into that.
DR: And so we’re here in Odense, in the Noble Woman’s Monastery.
AM: Perhaps you call it a convent, for noble women who decided not to marry. Some couldn’t find a husband, but there were some who definitely chose not to marry. And they came here instead of living in a terrible marriage.
DR: It’s a beautiful location, and you showed us around the various rooms and offices. Was it a deliberate choice to have this conference on masculinity here in a woman’s convent?
AM: Yes. It was thought provoking to have this discussion on modern masculinity in these surroundings where women for centuries have been studying, have been writing, have been discussing things. I figured it would be nice to continue that tradition with this study of masculinity.
DR: You’ve hosted other Dylan conferences before.
AM: We had two Dylan conferences – one in 2009 when we first started discussing his nomination for the Nobel Prize. We were so unhappy that a member of the Swedish Academy had declared that no American author could get the prize again, because artistically they were no good. That was what the secretary at that time had said of American literature: it is not qualified for the Nobel Prize. We decided this couldn’t be right. And I’m asked every year, as are several other literature professors all over the world, to nominate for the Nobel Prize. But you’re also asked not to tell who you nominate. But I decided I’d make it public because the Secretary made it public that American literature is no good. So we wanted to show that there were strong candidates.
DR: Allen Ginsberg had made it public that he was nominating Dylan for years, right?
AM: That’s right. There were some Norwegian professors who did it, perhaps influenced by Ginsberg. He asked them to nominate Dylan.
DR: He lobbied the nominators?
AM: Yes. Both for Dylan and himself.
DR: So that conference in 2009, you were discussing Bob Dylan
AM: We were discussing him as a poet, actually. That was a great conference, and then after he won the Nobel Prize, we had our conference in Odense.
EC: Is that when you [Anne-Marie Mai] published your book, Bob Dylan the Poet?
AM: That was after he won the Nobel Prize in 2016. On the day he won, I was actually not engaged in what was happening. I’d been waiting by the phone for a couple of years. The BBC had asked me to be ready to give an interview because they knew that I had done it publicly. So they wanted to have an interview. And I waited for two or three years and figured I wouldn’t wait any longer. Then on the day that he actually won the prize, I wasn’t prepared at all. I’d forgotten that this was the day. We had just opened a research project on the uses of literature, and when we finished our first meeting the phone began to ring. And it kept ringing. Lots of interviews, and my publisher asked me if I could write a book on Bob Dylan. I said “Yes, of course!”
DR: So here at the third Bob Dylan conference you’ve hosted, have you noticed certain themes or ideas about Dylan and masculinity that have come to the fore the last couple of days?
AM: I should say so. I think we have the impression of “I contain multitudes” also in regard to gender and masculinity. But I think, to me, it has become clearer that there are also contradictions. It’s not just multitudes, it’s also contradictions. And, of course, you might realize we are all full of contradictions.
EC: I think the theme of brotherhood, and then some of the archetypal masculine identities, we kept seeing. Like today, when Sean [Latham] presented and said to Court [Carney], “I thought you were gonna steal my thunder with the Gunslinger,” and so we were all converging on these similar themes. And it could be that maybe one of the benefits was that it was a small enough conference that we could engage in meaningful dialogue. Perhaps if we had a bigger conference, we would’ve seen more themes emerge. But I think the theme of fraternity, also contradictions, and the multitudes that he’s occupied or performed throughout his career, became apparent. His relationship to women, and I think that Rebecca [Slaman] did a nice job with that this morning [with her paper “When God and Her Were Born: Dylan and the Divine Feminine”], and how Sara [Dylan] fit into the framework of that identity.
AM: And I think Andrew [Fehribach, whose paper was titled “Another Side of Bob Dylan: Another Archetype for Generation Z”] made it clear how male dominated the folk revival actually was. We think of it as a more equal breakthrough of a musical trend, but it was very male dominated in his interpretation.
DR: Can you say, in brief, what each of your papers were about?
EC: My paper [“Mixing Up the Medicine: Bob Dylan’s Basement Carnival and Homosocial Masculinity”] was essentially looking at the space following the motorcycle accident, the hiatus he took from touring, as a Bakhtinian Carnival, but also as a family space that deviates from his previous life. But within that, recording The Basement Tapes creates even a deeper sense of carnival with the homosocial relationships he creates with the members of The Band. And that then allows him to go back to what I think is an industrial, patriarchal, capitalist masculinity as a wage earner. He’s a contracted wage earner as a recording artist.
AM: I just have finished the review [“Images of Bob Dylan”] that we did from 2020 to 2022. And I think it shows that our respondents, fans and followers, are mainly elderly men who grew up with a prevailing modern masculinity. They use Dylan’s songs to find ways to create other gender relations and to understand their masculinity in another way than their fathers did. We will always think of the youth rebellion as a rebellion of youth against an older generation, but to me, this review shows that it’s definitely also a rebellion against the modern, prevailing masculinity practiced by their fathers and grandfathers. So I think that’s interesting. And that music and song can have great power in this.
DR: Do you have a hope or an idea that the next generation can listen to Bob Dylan in order to evolve from the masculinity they’ve adopted from their own fathers? Does a conference like this help extend Bob Dylan to future generations?
AM: Hopefully, but it seems difficult. I have to say I’m a little disappointed with the Danish youth, how little they know of Dylan. There were some fans that were very eager at our last conference. We had some high school students who really wanted to attend and we had no room, so they offered to do the cleaning just to be there, serve coffee, and participate. So there are some, and perhaps more will come. But it needs communication and explanation.
EC: Timothée Chalamet is going to open Dylan up to a new generation in a way that we don’t expect. We don’t even know what the result of that will be. It will have an impact on the younger generation. But look at how Rebecca [Slaman] addresses masculinity, and even the way Andrew [Fehribach] did. Each generation brings a new perspective, especially as theory develops, and we see progress. Hopefully each generation will bring something new to Dylan. That will expand how we look at his identity performance, and the way that we see Dylan. What gives me hope for the future is that we’re not stuck with the first generation, as with any academic pursuit. We’ll keep pushing back or expanding what previous scholars have done. So I’m hopeful that conferences like this, especially those involving young people and people of different ages, will help us to broaden the conversation.
AM: It was interesting too that we had invited a young female musician [Alexandra Løvedal] to interpret Dylan’s songs because it was so obvious that her interpretation is different. And it still works, still has something to it. The sensibility of the songs are so special. She has also signaled that Dylan can be communicated to younger generations, and that they can pick it up and become as interested in it as she is.
DR: The younger generation’s out there, but it seems they need to communicate with each other because we can’t dictate to them how they’re going to talk about Bob Dylan. At the same time you [Erin Callahan] spoke about gatekeeping, right? How we need to keep the gates open so they can come through.
EC: Absolutely. They’re still on TikTok, Dylan Twitter, Instagram. We need to meet them on their platforms, so they can have exposure to what’s going on in Dylan World and share their ideas, which I think makes us better too as older scholars, older fans, that it opens up our understanding of Dylan when they share their ideas.
DR: In terms of Dylan and questions on masculinity, what questions remain to be asked?
EC: In two days, you can only scratch the surface of his gender performance and identity. And so many of us have been saying, “this is part of a larger piece.” Laura [Tenschert] spoke for 51 minutes today, and she cut her paper [“Before You Call Him a Man: Bob Dylan and the Crisis of Masculinity”]. There are still a lot of questions to look at more deeply in terms of other people who have performed Dylan, female covers of Dylan. Also the interplay between how the songs tend to occupy masculine space, and what happens when women perform them. And in terms of him being a father, there’s a lot out there to still cull and bring forward.
AM: I’d also like to include more on his artwork. Because there are so many interesting things going on there. To go deeper into an analysis of some of these paintings that have both male and female figures in them, that are similar and yet different. I’m also interested in Dylan and melancholy. I wrote an essay on his use of this feeling of melancholy, and perhaps this is also gendered in some way: is this male melancholy, or how does it relate to gender issues? I would like to study that further. And of course the artwork.
DR: What are each of you working on Dylan-wise at the moment?
AM: I’m writing a monograph. “The whole package,” as one of my respondents said. I actually have written a small book for a university publisher, only 32 pages. But they wanted so many anecdotes and stories of Dylan, all the usual stuff we’ve heard so many times, so I gave it up and decided to write a larger book, perhaps 150 pages. It’s on the whole package. And I want to do something about the artwork, and his advertising practice that is also so heavily debated and interesting.
DR: The whiskey bottles with those gates on them.
AM: The whiskey bottles, for instance. And why does he take this up? Is it because all other rock stars seem to be producing liquids? Or is there something else to it?
EC: Court Carney and I were asked to co-write a chapter by some scholars in France on Dylan and myth, and so we decided to focus on Together Through Life and border music, borderlands. And then we’re working on – with both of you [Anne-Marie Mai and Paul Haney] – a volume reconsidering Dylan in the 80s. And then the podcast. I started the podcast, Infinity Goes Up on Trial, and I put that out monthly.
DR: Can you give us an overview of the podcast?
EC: My idea is essentially from the lyric from “Visions of Johanna”: “Inside the museum infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while.” My first guest was a friend, Jason Nadler. He sent me a text in December, saying what I was thinking in the most beautifully articulate way, that in Dylan’s works there are ideas that are universal, and that’s what infinity is. We’re bringing scholars in that are Dylan focused or Dylan adjacent – my second guest was someone who’s a theologian and doesn’t really study Dylan – to talk about the ideas that are in Dylan, and how they approach ideas and how these ideas are universal. And what they see in Dylan. My third guest is a Dylan scholar. I don’t want to get in the same echo chamber of people that we talk to all the time. I want to talk to folks who are new to Dylan, or maybe new to the Dylan community, so we broaden the conversation, focusing on the ideas. Elizabeth Cantalamessa, I’m going to talk to her when I get home. And she’s going to talk about the Dylan community, the fan perspective, but also that convergence between the academic and the fan culture.
DR: Are there any other questions you feel like the Dylan Review should be asking?
AM: [At the conference] we touched upon The Philosophy of Modern Song several times. I opened th discussion last night with Sean [Latham] on that, and he is perhaps more skeptical than I am in regards to that book. But that might be because I’m European, and I don’t know so much about the American song tradition. I found [the book] so full of energy, and anger, and strong emotions, and I was impressed with it in that way. I would like to continue the discussion of this book. How should we approach it, understand it, and analyze it?
EC: I agree with that. I think we’re constantly catching up to Dylan. He’s so prolific, I don’t know what questions to ask because I’m still trying to catch up to what he’s done. And he keeps going. It’s hard to say what questions we should ask. Maybe what’s next from him?
