Transforming Manhood

What does it mean to be a husband? What does it mean to be a trans man? What does it mean to be an American man, speaking up and speaking out in today's divisive climate? Ryan Sallans, transgender educator and lecturer, follows up his successful Second Son autobiography with this thought-provoking look at life in contemporary America. While the term "trans" has become much more visible, the undercurrents of what it actually means still rumbles beneath the surface. In this second searing memoir, Sallans leads his readers on a trip through domestic bliss and family fractures, speaking successes and online harassment, personal heights and dizzying falls. In Transforming Manhood, the author confides what it means to be a public personality, showcasing how his profile has earned him adulation, as well as accusations. This follow-up to Second Son will inspire anyone who has ever fought personal demons to become the best possible person they had imagined. Through eye-opening discussions on college campuses, heart-to-heart talks with worried parents in America's heartland, and scary real-life stalking experiences, Sallans has overcome much and has grown from these encounters. Transforming Manhood is a book that chronicles Sallans's everyday struggles to transition into being a better husband, son, and man. It's a book that pleads for the LGBTQ community to come together and place their differences aside. In today's political climate, it's a call for mutual understanding and for standing up for what you believe in. Transforming Manhood continues the story of Ryan Sallans's life, but more than that: it spotlights his hope and encouragement for a better, optimistic, unified future for everyone.

In Manhood Impossible, Scott Melzer argues that boys’ and men’s bodies and breadwinner status are the two primary sites for their expression of control. Controlling selves and others, and resisting being dominated and controlled is most connected to men’s bodies and work. However, no man can live up to these culturally ascendant ideals of manhood. The strategies men use to manage unmet expectations often prove toxic, not only for men themselves, but also for other men, women, and society. Melzer strategically explores the lives of four groups of adult men struggling with contemporary body and breadwinner ideals. These case studies uncover men’s struggles to achieve and maintain manhood, and redefine what it means to be a man.

In this illuminating look at gender and Scouting in the United States, Benjamin Rene Jordan examines how in its founding and early rise, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) integrated traditional Victorian manhood with modern, corporate-industrial values and skills. While showing how the BSA Americanized the original British Scouting program, Jordan finds that the organization's community-based activities signaled a shift in men's social norms, away from rugged agricultural individualism or martial primitivism and toward productive employment in offices and factories, stressing scientific cooperation and a pragmatic approach to the responsibilities of citizenship. By examining the BSA's national reach and influence, Jordan demonstrates surprising ethnic diversity and religious inclusiveness in the organization's founding decades. For example, Scouting officials' preferred urban Catholic and Jewish working-class immigrants and "modernizable" African Americans and Native Americans over rural whites and other traditional farmers, who were seen as too "backward" to lead an increasingly urban-industrial society. In looking at the revered organization's past, Jordan finds that Scouting helped to broaden mainstream American manhood by modernizing traditional Victorian values to better suit a changing nation.

From a troubled youth navigating the mean streets of the South Bronx to an inspiring educational activist who evokes praise from the likes of President Barack Obama, Geoffrey Canada has made a remarkable personal journey that cemented his dedication to underserved youth. His award-winning work was featured in Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for “Superman,” and he has been hailed by media, activists, teachers, and national leaders. Michelle Obama called him “one of my heroes,” and Oprah Winfrey refers to him as “an angel from God.” Here, Canada draws on his years of work with inner-city youth and on his own turbulent boyhood to offer a moving and revelatory look at the little-understood emotional lives of boys. And who better for this task than the man Elizabeth Mehren of the Los Angeles Times calls “one of this country’s leading advocates for youth.”

Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn’t own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field in new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

In this in-depth ethnography, Karin van Nieuwkerk takes the autobiographical narrative of Sayyid Henkish, a musician from a long family tradition of wedding performers in Cairo, as a lens through which to explore changing notions of masculinity in an Egyptian community over the course of a single lifetime. Central to Henkish’s story is his own conception of manhood, which is closely tied to the notion of ibn al-balad, the ‘authentically Egyptian’ lower-middle class male, with all its associated values of nobility, integrity, and toughness. How to embody these communal ideals while providing for his family in the face of economic hardship and the perceived moral ambiguities associated with his work in the entertainment trade are key themes in his narrative. Van Nieuwkerk situates his account within a growing body of literature on gender that sees masculinity as a lived experience that is constructed and embodied in specific social and historical contexts. In doing so, she shows that the challenges faced by Henkish are not limited to the world of entertainment and that his story offers profound insights into socioeconomic and political changes taking place in Egypt at large and the ways in which these transformations impact and unsettle received notions of masculinity.

This first history of American manhood offers a comprehensive account of our uunderstanding of what it's like to be a man, and how this perception has changed with time. Index.

Studies of gender in African Christianity have usually focused on women. This book draws attention to men and constructions of masculinity, particularly important in light of the HIV epidemic which has given rise to a critical investigation of dominant forms of masculinity. These are often associated with the spread of HIV, gender-based violence and oppression of women. Against this background Christian theologians and local churches in Africa seek to change men and transform masculinities. Exploring the complexity and ambiguity of religious gender discourses in contemporary African contexts, this book critically examines the ways in which some progressive African theologians, and a Catholic parish and a Pentecostal church in Zambia, work on a 'transformation of masculinities'.