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?

Most documentaries deal with men, but what do they actually say about masculinity? In this groundbreaking volume Sara Martín analyses more than forty 21st-century documentaries to explore how they represent American men and masculinity. From Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In to Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, this volume explores sixteen different faces of American masculinity: the good man, the activist, the politician, the whistleblower, the criminal, the sexual abuser, the wrongly accused, the dependent man, the soldier, the capitalist, the adventurer, the sportsman, the architect, the photographer, the musician, and the writer. The collective portrait drawn by the documentaries discloses a firm critical stance against the contradictions inherent in patriarchy, which makes American men promises of empowerment it cannot fulfill. The filmmakers’ view of American masculinity emphasizes the vulnerability of disempowered men before the abuses of the patriarchal system run by hegemonic men and a loss of bearings about how to be a man after the impact of feminism, accompanied nonetheless by a celebration of resilient masculinity and of the good American man. Firmly positioning documentaries as an immensely flexible, relevant tool to understand 21st-century American men and masculinity, their past, present, and future, this book will interest students and scholars of film studies, documentary film, American cultural studies, gender, and masculinity.

This book assesses the construction of masculinities in relation to appearance, embodiment and emotions by drawing on perspectives in psychology, sociology, gender studies and public health. Brendan Gough questions conventional assumptions about masculinity and men’s health and responds to recent trends in critical studies of masculinities which discuss ‘positive’ or ‘healthy’ masculine identities. The book showcases discursively inflected qualitative research using data sources where men’s own accounts are prioritised: in-depth interviews and online discussion forums. Chapters discuss men’s appearance concerns and activities and examine male mental health, focusing on vulnerability and its management. Current trends and key concepts, including intersectionality, inequalities and embodiment are also considered throughout. This book will appeal to students and academics within social sciences and humanities interested in gender issues in general and masculinity in particular.

Explaining gender as both an asymmetrical binary and a hierarchy, the book shows how masculinization works via 'nested hierarchies' of domination and subordination and explores masculinities within nation-state and power politics.

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of “terror-Others,” from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood’s attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

This book explores how political institutions can challenge dominant and normative masculinities, guiding thinking instead toward a transformation of gendered power structures and general equality. Representing a range of relevant areas, the expert chapter authors provide various methodological and theoretical approaches applied to shifting gender meanings in cultural, national, and social contexts. Authors also represent a variety of cultures, contributing to the multi-perspective debate about how best to achieve gender equality in the real world. Among the topics discussed: Reimagining masculinities, their everyday practice and practical interventions Towards a feminist theory of male rape Political implications of challenging men’s everyday practices through domestic violence primary prevention work Men as allies: a case study of White Ribbon Australia Masculine Power and Gender Equality: Masculinities as Change Agents provides valuable insight into strategies for re-imagining male-dominated power structures and promoting gender equality.

Masculinity, it seems, is in crisis, again. This edited volume critically interrogates the current situation facing contemporary young men. The contributors deconstruct and reject such crisis talk, with its chapters drawing on original research to present a more nuanced reality, whilst also developing a critical dialogue with one another.

This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of ‘non/conforming bodies’, ‘fashionable bodies’, ‘passing bodies’, and ‘pioneering bodies’ that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.

'War, Espionage, and Masculinity in British Fiction' explores the masculinities represented in British works spanning more than a century. Studies of Rudyard Kipling’s 'The Light That Failed' (1891) and Erskine Childer’s 'The Riddle of the Sands' (1903) investigate masculinities from before World War I, at the height of the British Empire. A discussion of R.C. Sherriff’s play 'Journey’s End' takes readers to the battlefields of World War I, where duty and the harsh realities of modern warfare require men to perform, perhaps to die, perhaps to be unmanned by shellshock. From there we see how Dorothy Sayers developed the character of Peter Wimsey as a model of masculinity, both strong and successful despite his own shellshock in the years between the world wars. Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The Quiet American (1955) show masculinities shaken and questioning their roles and their country’s after neither world war ended all wars and the Empire rapidly lost ground. Two chapters on 'The Innocent' (1990), Ian McEwan’s fictional account of a real collaboration between Great Britain and the United States to build a tunnel that would allow them to spy on the Soviet Union, dig deeply into the 1950’s Cold War to examine the fictional masculinity of the British protagonist and the real world and fictional masculinities projected by the countries involved. Explorations of Ian Fleming’s 'Casino Royale' (1953) and 'The Living Daylights' (1962) continue the Cold War theme. Discussion of the latter film shows a confident, infallible masculinity, optimistic at the prospect of glasnost and the potential end of Cold War hostilities. John le Carré’s 'The Night Manager' (1993) and its television adaptation take espionage past the Cold War. The final chapter on Ian McEwan’s 'Saturday' (2005) shows one man’s reaction to 9/11.

This book addresses Irish identity in Irish literature, especially masculinity in some of its forms through an interdisciplinary methodology. The study of language performance through literary analysis and corpus studies will enable readers to approach literary texts from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, to take advantage of the texts’ full potential as well as examining these same texts through the perspective of gender identity. This will be carried out through a specialised corpus composed of 18 novels written by twentieth- and twenty-first-century male Irish authors. Thus, the language and behaviour patterns of contemporary Irish masculinity can be found as part of these male characters’ performance of identity. This book is primarily aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who wish to introduce themselves in the study of gender and identity in an Irish context as well as researchers looking for interdisciplinary methodologies of study. What is more, it can present researchers with varied options of analysis that corpus studies have not yet touched upon so thoroughly such as masculinity and Irish literature. As a monograph meant to show analysts new fields of study in Irish literature, this book will sell to academic libraries and can be used in MA courses.