Alican Şimşek is a PhD candidate in the DFG-funded Research Training Group 3113 “Aesthetics of Democracy” at Goethe University Frankfurt. He studied English and German Studies in an interdisciplinary Bachelor’s program at Leibniz University Hannover and subsequently completed Master’s degrees in Secondary School Teaching and North American Studies there. As part of his studies, he spent a semester at Angelo State University in Texas, focusing on American literature.
In his research project Ageless Youth: Male Rejuvenation in American Print Cultures, 1900–1945, he examines how print media fostered communities in which middle-aged and elderly men negotiated age-related anxieties, articulated hopes for revitalized bodies, and navigated biopolitical mechanisms that linked access to the public sphere to hegemonic bodily ideals. Thus, the project contributes to a broader critique of democracy and aesthetic judgement by showing how notions of visibility and participation were not universally granted but selectively conditioned.

Research Interests:
•   Transnational American Studies
•   Literary and Cultural Theory
•   Periodical Studies
•   Chicana/o Movement
•   U.S. Maritime History and Culture
•   Digital Humanities

Ageless Youth: Male Rejuvenation in American Print Cultures, 1900–1945

Building on the conceptualization of democracy as a mode of coexistence that can be perceived sensorially, Alican Şimşek’s dissertation interrogates this framework through male rejuvenation discourse in early- and mid-20th-century American print media. Specifically, it draws on two underlying but seemingly conflicting dynamics that shape male subjects’ sense of belonging: on the one hand, print media—periodicals in particular—have long been recognized as community-building cultural technologies that foster spaces of negotiation and meaning-making. Accordingly, men’s reliance on them to openly address and decry age-related “degeneration” is, to a certain extent, informed by democratic conditions. On the other hand, (mass) print media’s perpetuation of rejuvenation as a means to “undo” aging shows how biopolitical mechanisms discipline “older” men to conform to hegemonic bodily ideals. In this respect, social visibility and participation become contingent upon notions of vitality, health, virility, and attractiveness. The study thus takes this interplay of inclusion and exclusion as its point of departure.

Using historical newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, it analyzes ads, customer testimonials, and health and lifestyle articles that promote youth restoration. Although differing in communicative function, these distinct text genres nonetheless aim to disrupt life’s presumed linear temporality. This disruption most prominently introduces a backward gaze at idealized youth that, at first glance, seems to be at odds with modernity’s forward orientation. However, the resulting temporal sensations, combined with aestheticized body norms circulated across the US, have remarkable implications for male subjects, reader communities, and masculinities. Thus, the ramifications of heightened subjectivities afforded by modernization more broadly, and the complex, intercommunal negotiations of what it means to be young “again,” are at the core of this study. In approaching its subject matter, it employs both close and distant reading, placing particular emphasis on network analysis to trace actors, places, recurring age-related anxieties, and anti-aging strategies on a transregional scale.