Masculinities In Black And White

Inverting the traditional focus of ethnic studies on blackness as the object of scrutiny, this book explores dominant forms of white masculinity as seen by African American authors placed alongside certain white writers. Author analyzes texts by Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin.

The end of the Second World War saw a “crisis of white masculinity” brought on by social change. As a result, several prominent white male pop culture figures sought out and appropriated African American cultural trappings to benefit from what they believed were powerful black masculinities. In He Thinks He’s Down, Katharine Bausch draws on case studies from three genres – the writings of Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, advertising and aesthetics in Playboy magazine, and action narratives of Blaxploitation films – to illustrate how each one engaged with black tropes while simultaneously doing little to change the racial and gendered stereotypes that perpetuated the power of white male privilege.

This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Starting with such well-known caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity.

Inverting the traditional focus of ethnic studies on blackness as the object of scrutiny, this book explores dominant forms of white masculinity as seen by African American authors placed alongside certain white writers. Author analyzes texts by Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin.

Although in recent years scholars have explored the cultural construction of masculinity, they have largely ignored the ways in which masculinity intersects with other categories of identity, particularly those of race and ethnicity. The essays in Race and the Subject of Masculinities address this concern and focus on the social construction of masculinity--black, white, ethnic, gay, and straight--in terms of the often complex and dynamic relationships among these inseparable categories. Discussing a wide range of subjects including the inherent homoeroticism of martial-arts cinema, the relationship between working-class ideologies and Elvis impersonators, the emergence of a gay, black masculine aesthetic in the works of James Van der Zee and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the comedy of Richard Pryor, Race and the Subject of Masculinities provides a variety of opportunities for thinking about how race, sexuality, and "manhood" are reinforced and reconstituted in today's society. Editors Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel have gathered together essays that make clear how the formation of masculine identity is never as obvious as it might seem to be. Examining personas as varied as Eddie Murphy, Bruce Lee, Tarzan, Malcolm X, and Andre Gidé, these essays draw on feminist critique and queer theory to demonstrate how cross-identification through performance and spectatorship among men of different races and cultural backgrounds has served to redefine masculinity in contemporary culture. By taking seriously the role of race in the making of men, Race and the Subject of Masculinities offers an important challenge to the new studies of masculinity. Contributors. Herman Beavers, Jonathan Dollimore, Richard Dyer, Robin D. G. Kelly, Christopher Looby, Leerom Medovoi, Eric Lott, Deborah E. McDowell, José E. Muñoz, Harry Stecopoulos, Yvonne Tasker, Michael Uebel, Gayle Wald, Robyn Wiegman

This book consists of a range of essays written by historians and literary critics which examine the historical construction of Southern masculinities, rich and poor, white and black, in a variety of contexts, from slavery in the antebellum period, through the struggle for Civil Rights, right up to the recent South. Building on the rich historiography of gender and culture in the South undertaken in recent years, this volume aims to highlight the important role Southern conceptions of masculinity have played in the lives of Southern men, and to reflect on how masculinity has intersected with class, race and power to structure the social relationships between blacks and whites throughout the history of the South. The volume highlights the multifaceted nature of Southern masculinities, demonstrating the changing ways black and white masculinities have been both imagined and practised over the years, while also emphasizing that conceptions of black and white masculinity in the American South rarely seem to be divorced from wider questions of class, race and power.

Reimagining Black Masculinities: Race, Gender, and Public Space addresses how Black masculinities are created, negotiated, and contested in public spaces, focusing on how theory meets praxis when mobilizing for social change. Contributors disentangle complexities of the Black experience and reimagine the radical progressive work required for societal health and wellbeing, forming a mental picture of what the world has the potential to be without excluding current realities for Black boys and men, civic manhood, maleness, and the fluidity of masculinities. These realities are acknowledged and interrogated across private and public contexts, media, education, occupation, and theoretical perspectives. This book encourages readers to reenvision social identity as an ongoing phenomenon, asserting that collective vision informs action and collective action informs possibilities for peace and freedom in the world around us. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and race studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Progressive Black Masculinities brings together leading black cultural critics including Michael Eric Dyson, Mark Anthony Neal, and Patricia Hill Collins to examine an alternatively demonized and mythologized black masculinity.