Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US

Between Bodies and Systems

Stefan Horlacher, Kevin Floyd, Stefan Horlacher, Kevin Floyd

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319508191
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319508207
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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? 

Table of contents

• Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US
• Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the USA: Between Bodies and Systems
• Modern-Day Mercenaries? Cowboys, Grey Men, and the Emotional Habitus
• Rugged Individualists and Systemic Coups: Imagining Mercenary Masculinities in The Dogs of War (1974)
• Privileged Crises in the Wake of 9/11: Universalizing Masculinity in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center
• Does the Body Politic Have No Genitals? The Thick of It and the Phallic Nature of the Political Arena
• The Use of Celebrity Men in Anti-Trafficking and Ending Demand Interventions: Observations on the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” Public Service Campaign
• “Stand It Like a Man”: The Performance of Masculinities in Deadwood
• The Tragic “Complexity of Manhood”: Masculinity Formations and Performances in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
• “Guys Like Me Are a Dying Breed”: The Politics of Irish-American Masculinity in Recent Movies and TV Series
• White Supremacists, or the Emasculation of the American White Man
• Law, Language, and Post-Patriarchal Malaise in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own
• Wall Street and Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Film and Fiction
• Index