Masculinities In Contemporary American Culture

Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture offers readers a multidisciplinary, intersectional overview of masculinity studies that includes both theoretical and applied lenses. Keith combines current research with historical perspectives to demonstrate the contexts in which masculine identities have come evolved. With an emphasis on popular culture -- particularly film, TV, video games, and music -- this text invites students to examine their gendered sensibilities and discuss the ways in which different forms of media appeal to toxic masculinity.

Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture offers readers a multidisciplinary, intersectional overview of masculinity studies that includes both theoretical and applied lenses. Keith combines current research with historical perspectives to demonstrate the contexts in which masculine identities have come evolved. With an emphasis on popular culture -- particularly film, TV, video games, and music -- this text invites students to examine their gendered sensibilities and discuss the ways in which different forms of media appeal to toxic masculinity.

Contemporary Western societies are currently witness to a “crisis of masculinity” but also to an intriguing diversification of images of masculinity. Once relatively stable regimes of masculine gender representation appear to have been replaced by a wider spectrum of varieties of masculine “lifestyles” taken up by the media and the market, to produce new and immensely flexible forms consumerised gender hegemony. The essays in Subverting Masculinity concentrate on contemporary film, literature and diverse forms of popular culture. The essays show that the subversion of traditional images of masculinity is both a source of gender contestation, but may equally be susceptible to assimilation by new hegemonic configurations of masculinity. Subverting Masculinity maps out the ongoing relevance of gender politics in contemporary culture, but also raises the question of increasingly unclear distinctions between hegemonic and subversive versions of masculinity in contemporary cultural production. Subverting Masculinity will be of interest to students and teachers of gender, cultural, film and literary studies.

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

This book "combines cultural analysis with psychoanalysis to examine masochism and the production of masculinity in the postwar United States--a challenging and provocative strategy that yields exciting, insightful readings of a variety of materials" (Susan Jeffords, University of Washington).

Analyzing the meanings of masculinity in contemporary culture, this book examines specific cultural male icons like Mohammad Ali, Harvey Keitel, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dan Quayle, and Newt Gingrich and explodes the male stereotypes such as the cowboy, the father, the homosexual, and the Black terror. Written by cultural studies scholars from departments of film, media studies, English, women's studies, and sociology, the discussions touch on almost every conceivable issue concerning the complex meanings of masculinity and contemporary society. The contributors do not offer simple answers to the dilemmas they uncover; rather, they explore the ways different forms of masculinity cut through and invalidate generally accepted monoliths of masculinity. These writers argue that it is inappropriate to ask, "What is masculinity?" Instead, they focus on what masculinity isn't, demonstrating that there are only masculinities in the plural, defined by differences and contradictions. Boys reveals the depth and breadth of these complexities, offering readers a far more satisfying definition of what it means to be male in our current culture.

Part III. Novel and Transnational Masculinities -- 9. Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto -- 10. Materializing the Penis -- 11. Challenging Novel Masculinities -- Conclusion: Of Tropes and Men -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

This book is about ways to understand masculinity as systemic and corporeal, structural and performative all at once. It argues that the tension between an understanding of “masculinity” in the singular and “masculinities” in the plural poses a problem that can better be understood in relation to a concomitant tension: between systems on the one hand, and bodies on the other - between abstract structures such as patriarchy, kinship or even language, and the various concrete forms taken by gendered, individuated corporeality. The contributions collected here investigate how masculinities become apparent, how they take shape and what systemic functions they have. What, they ask, are the relations between the abstract and corporeal, metaphorical and metonymic manifestations of masculinity? How are we to understand masculinity as a simultaneously systemic and corporeal, performative concept?