For twenty years, Steve Biddulph’s groundbreaking book Manhood and the revised edition, The New Manhood, have had a remarkable impact around the world. Thousands of men have reconciled with their fathers, become more involved with their children, rejuvenated their marriages and made sweeping changes to their lives. Steve explores every aspect of a man’s life in an honest and uplifting way: love, friendship, sex, marriage, raising children, spirituality and finding your true work – all in plain language and illustrated by powerful, real-life stories. This is a handbook for men of all ages, and for the women who love them. ‘Read this book and you’ll make the world a better place, by making yourself a better man.’ – Richard Glover, ABC broadcaster and author of The Mud House ‘This book . . . reveals important truths about our culture and our world, and how they shape . . . who we are and what we become.’ – Richard Eckersley, researcher and writer on progress and wellbeing, author of Well & Good: Morality, Meaning and Happiness ‘This landmark work is for those who truly want to understand and nurture the men and boys in their lives, and for men who want to understand themselves better.’ – Maggie Hamilton, writer, social researcher, publisher and author of many books including What Men Don’t Talk About

Wisdom and guidance for African American men in search of a full and empowered life. "From Brotherhood to Manhood explores-with rich clinical wisdom-the unique burdens of being black and male in America. A.J. Franklin offers insightful advice to inspire men from any background. This forthright book should be read by everyone interested in understanding the obstacles along the journey toward manhood."-Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School "Dr. Anderson Franklin travels to the core of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and reinterprets how this idea plays itself out today. For those African Americans who live with 'Invisibility syndrome' daily and are in need of relief, he offers solutions. For a nation still oblivious to the ways it tears out he heart of our democratic republic, he offers a wake-up call."-Bakari Kitwana, author of the Hip Hop Generation: Young Black and the Crisis in African American Culture "I believe this can be an extraordinarily useful tool not only for black males, but for all of those who will be interacting with black males in American society."-Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., M.D., Professor of Neurological Surgery, Oncology, Plastic Surgery, and Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions "Invisible brothers become visible men on the pages of this book. Dr. Franklin exposes the problem, unburdens the reader, gives hop for healing, [and] designs and forges new paths to visibility What a debriefing!"-Dr. Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant, psychologist, advice columnist, Essence magazine, and author of the Best Kind of Loving "Not since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has any author captured so powerfully and authentically the essence of what life is like in America for African American men."-Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Senior Pastor, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois "This warm, real, and often heartbreaking book gives us an insider's view of what it is like to be black and male in this works. Dr. Franklin offers practical strategies for the affirmations needed and the celebrations required if we have men in our lives. If you know and care about a black man, you ought to read this book."-Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, author of Stolen Women, and coauthor of No More Clueless Sex

Each of these essays illuminates an important dimension of the complex array of Black male experiences as workers, artists, warriors, and leaders. The essays describe the expectations and demands to struggle, to resist, and facilitate the survival of African American culture and community. Black manhood was shaped not only in relation to Black womanhood, but was variously nurtured and challenged, honed and transformed against a backdrop of white male power and domination, and the relentless expectations and demands on them to struggle, resist, and to facilitate the survival of African-American culture and community.

"When John J. Winkler died in 1990, he left a substantially complete manuscript containing the final version of the project he had undertaken in the last decade of his life: an original interpretation of the development and meaning of ancient Greek drama. That manuscript was based on The Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College, which Winkler delivered in September of 1988. The present text has been edited and updated by classicists David Halperin, Winkler's literary executor, and Kirk Ormand, Winkler's student and an expert on Greek drama. Rehearsals of Manhood, the final work of a widely recognized and celebrated classical scholar, proposes an entirely new account of Greek drama providing an explanation of the social place of Greek drama and its relation to the gendered organization of Athenian social life. Winkler interprets drama as a secular manhood ritual, a public aesthetic undertaking focused on the initiation of boys into manhood and, specifically, on the training, the display, and the representation of young male warriors. According to Winkler, the chorus of both tragedy and comedy was composed of young Athenian men of citizen status, about eighteen to twenty years of age, who were undergoing military training in order to prepare themselves for the task of warfare; they danced on a rectangular dance floor in a rectangular formation that recalled the arrangement of the infantry phalanx; they accompanied plays that often highlighted scenarios of risk faced by young men on the verge of adulthood; and they performed in a theater whose seating was arranged to display the corporate body of the male citizenry as a whole, both its democratic equality and its hierarchical ranking according to degrees of excellence. Winkler does not offer new interpretations of the texts of Greek plays but a new account of how the very practice of dramatic performance fit into the social life and gender politics of the Athenian state"--

This book charts the journey, in terms of both stasis and change, that masculinities and manhood have made in Irish drama, and by extension in the broader culture and society, from the 1960s to the present. Examining a diverse corpus of drama and theatre events, both mainstream and on the fringe, this study critically elaborates a seismic shift in Irish masculinities. This book argues, then, that Irish manhood has shifted from embodying and enacting post-colonial concerns of nationalism and national identity, to performing models of masculinity that are driven and moulded by the political and cultural practices of neoliberal capitalism. Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama charts this shift through chapters on performing masculinity in plays set in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, and through several chapters that focus on Women’s and Queer drama. It thus takes its readers on a journey: a journey that begins with an overtly patriarchal, nationalist manhood that often made direct comment on the state of the nation, and ultimately arrives at several arguably regressive forms of globalised masculinity, which are couched in misaligned notions of individualism and free-choice and that frequently perceive themselves as being in crisis.

A struggle between narcissistic and masochistic modes of manhood defined Hollywood masculinity in the period between the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. David Greven's contention is that a profound shift in representation occurred during the early 1990s when Hollywood was transformed by an explosion of films that foregrounded non-normative gendered identity and sexualities. In the years that have followed, popular cinema has either emulated or evaded the representational strategies of this era, especially in terms of gender and sexuality. One major focus of this study is that, in a great deal of the criticism in both the fields of film theory and queer theory, masochism has been positively cast as a form of male sexuality that resists the structures of normative power, while narcissism has been negatively cast as either a regressive sexuality or the bastion of white male privilege. Greven argues that narcissism is a potentially radical mode of male sexuality that can defy normative codes and categories of gender, whereas masochism, far from being radical, has emerged as the default mode of a traditional normative masculinity. This study combines approaches from a variety of disciplines—psychoanalysis, queer theory, American studies, men's studies, and film theory—as it offers fresh readings of several important films of the past twenty years, including Casualties of War, The Silence of the Lambs, Fight Club, The Passion of the Christ, Auto Focus, and Brokeback Mountain.

In a 1907 lecture to Harvard undergraduates, Theodore Roosevelt claimed that colleges should never "turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men," warning that "the weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community." A paradigm of ineffectuality and weakness, the mollycoddle was "all inner life," whereas his opposite, the "red blood," was a man of action. Kevin P. Murphy reveals how the popular ideals of American masculinity coalesced around these two distinct categories. Because of its similarity to the emergent "homosexual" type, the mollycoddle became a powerful rhetorical figure, often used to marginalize and stigmatize certain political actors. Murphy's history follows the redefinition of manhood across a variety of classes, especially in the work of late nineteenth-century reformers who trumpeted the virility of the laboring classes. Challenging the characterization of the relationship between political "machines" and social and municipal reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, he revolutionizes our understanding of the gendered and sexual meanings attached to political and ideological positions of the Progressive Era.

"During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, thousands upon thousands of American men devoted their time and money to the creation of an unsought - and in some quarters unwelcome - revived state militia. In this book, Eleanor L. Hannah studies the social history of the National Guard, focusing on issues of manhood and citizenship as they relate to the rise of the state militias." "The implications of this book are far-reaching, for it offers historians a fresh look at a long-ignored group of men and unites social and cultural history to explore changing notions of manhood and citizenship during years of frenetic change in the American landscape."--BOOK JACKET.

American men began an earnest search for the meaning of manhood in the latter half of the 20th century and enlisted in such groups as Promise Keepers, Million Man March, National Congress of Men, and fathers' rights groups. This study chronicles those movements, as well as the more visible male activism of today in such groups as Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers. The book explores the misogyny and militancy embodied in these new quests for manhood. The first section covers pop culture influences on conceptions of masculinity and moves from celebrity iconography to the institutional and organizational influences that men have relied on in the effort to make themselves masculine. The second section describes masculinity and men's movements in the 20th century, and the third section covers the 21st. The final chapters analyze the contrast between the more thoughtful men's movements before the turn of the century and the more militant and physical movements after 2000, posing and addressing critical questions about the relationship between prevailing ideals of masculinity and events like the January 6th insurrection.