Masculinity in Transition
About this book
Locating the roots of toxic masculinity and finding its displacement in unruly culture
Masculinity in Transition analyzes shifting relationships to masculinity in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and film, as well as in twenty-first-century media, performance, and transgender poetics. Focusing on “toxic masculinity,” which has assumed new valence since 2016, K. Allison Hammer traces its roots to a complex set of ideologies embedded in the histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and political fraternity, and finds that while toxic strains of masculinity are mainly associated with straight, white men, trans and queer masculinities can be implicated in these systems of power.
Hammer argues, however, that these malignant forms of masculinity are not fixed and can be displaced by “unruly alliances”—texts and relationships that reject the nationalisms and gender politics of white male hegemony and perform an urgently needed reimagining of what it means to be masculine. Locating these unruly alliances in the writings, performances, and films of butch lesbians, gay men, cisgender femmes, and trans and nonbinary individuals, Masculinity in Transition works through an archive of works of performance art, trans poetics, Western films and streaming media, global creative responses to HIV/AIDS, and working-class and “white trash” fictions about labor and unionization.
Masculinity in Transition moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Introduction: Rejecting “American” Manhood
- Part I: Challenging Phallic Supremacy
- Chapter 1: “She’s a Pistol”: Female Phallicism
- Chapter 2: “When I Was a Boy”: Boi/Boyhood and the Unworking of Masculinity
- Part II: Challenging Conceptions of the Nation
- Chapter 3: The “Not (Quite) Yet” of a New Collectivity: Feminist Masculinity and the American Western
- Chapter 4: Virtue Is Divided: Unruly Alliances in Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein
- Part III: Challenging Masculine Impenetrability
- Chapter 5: “Skin of His Hand against the Skin of My Back”: HIV/AIDS Self-Writing and Film of the 1980s and ’90s
- Chapter 6: “A Man Is a Worker”: Economic Penetrability, Labor Abuses, and Landlessness
- Conclusion: Toward the Future of Masculinity and Relationality
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index