The book explores hegemonic masculinity and its portrayal in literature, culture, and film, highlighting the paradox of white heterosexual masculinity's dominance yet invisibility in gender discussions. The initial chapters provide theoretical insights into white masculinities, while subsequent chapters apply masculinity theory to examine social constructions and cultural representations. Key themes include men's emotions, new models of fatherhood, male friendships, and the impact of gender-based violence, offering a comprehensive analysis of contemporary masculinity.
The body remains the most visibly gendered social and cultural construction. Not only does it classify individuals into two different sexes from the very start of their lives, but some of the most obvious social divisions - such as race and nationality, age and physical appearance, religion, or class - are also written on the body. Although most studies have focused on women's bodies, the present volume seeks to explore both the construction and deconstruction of the male body in and through U.S. culture and literature from the early twentieth century up to the present. In so doing, this book illustrates not only the changing nature of the male body but also its recurrent use as a political weapon throughout U.S. cultural and literary history. Embodying Masculinities sketches the first history of the male body in modern U.S. culture and literature. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of gender and masculinity studies as well as those in American studies.
Questioning the traditional association between machismo and Hispanic culture, this collection of essays focuses on revisiting archetypes of masculinity from medieval Iberia to the present by placing them in the context of the divergent counter-images that have always existed below the radar. The essays in this volume investigate both the construction and de-construction of masculinity in Iberian cultures and literatures from different genres and historical periods and from different disciplines (literary studies, film studies, art, religion, visual culture, etc.) and methodological perspectives (masculinity studies, feminist theory, queer studies, cultural studies, etc.). Queering Iberia is particularly concerned with exploring alternative models that examine or challenge canonical models of manhood, placing special emphasis upon re-visions of Iberian masculinities, especially as they are manifested in Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia, and the Americas. This book starts off from the critical assumption that rethinking masculinities from these counterpoints will contribute different perspectives on the topic, and that by exploring Iberian cultures through masculinities new aspects of the relationships among these cultures can be understood. Queering Iberia will be of interest to courses on queer, gender, and masculinity studies as well as Hispanic cultures and literatures.
Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities demonstrates how contemporary U.S. novelist Richard Ford, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, rewrites gender, and in particular masculinity, from highly subversive and innovative perspectives. Josep M. Armengol analyzes the construction, as well as the de-construction, of masculinity in all of Ford's major fictional texts to date, ranging from A Piece of My Heart to The Sportswriter to The Lay of the Land. Given its simultaneous critique of traditional masculinity and its depiction of alternative models of being a man, Ford's fiction is shown to be particularly interesting from a men's studies perspective, which aims not only to undermine patriarchal masculinity but also to look for new, non-hierarchical, and more egalitarian models of being a man in contemporary U.S. culture and literature. By framing Ford's contemporary representations of masculinity within a more general context of American literature, this book reveals how his texts continue along a trajectory of earlier American fiction while they also re-examine masculinity in new, more complex ways. Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities contributes to the much-needed revision of men and masculinities in U. S. literature, and especially Richard Ford's fiction, where constructions of gender and masculinity remain, paradoxically enough, largely unexplored.
