Masculinity Studies – serie

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.

The objective of Hispanic (LGT) Masculinities in Transition is to investigate the cultural representations/intersections of masculinity and sexual minorities (lesbians, gays, and transgenders) in Spain between the passing of the Law of Social Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation (1970) and the reform of the Penal Code in 1995. In order to meet this aim, this volume analyzes the artistic production of a number of Spanish and Latin American male and female individuals who, first, were able to question the structures of control and domination in Spain in the last years of Franco’s dictatorship; second, were able to open up new horizons of freedom in the context of the criminalization of the previous decades; and, third, were able to bring about new models of masculinity that were more egalitarian during the first years of the new democracy.More specifically, Hispanic (LGT) Masculinities in Transition will interlink the fields of political and historical change and artistic production in order to assess whether cultural representations can be understood as mere reflections of social and political change. In terms of the materials being examined, these are, in the first instance, literary, although other narratives are also addressed (filmic production and plastic arts). This volume is essential reading for professors and students of contemporary Spanish history and culture, as well as for those interested in lesbian, gay, transgender, and masculinity issues.

The Male Body as Advertisement: Masculinities in Hispanic Media offers a multidisciplinary view of the body of men, of its practices and attributes, of its features, and, most importantly, of its use as a persuasive and expressive resource. Just as it occurred with the female body, the male body has become an object of desire in some instances and an object of expression in others.This collection of essays represents several developments in the field of communication studies. It is the first time that a study on the body of men in the Hispanic media has been carried out using film, television, internet, billboards, and so forth. This book also equates men to women in the media world. Lacking its own tradition, the male body has followed in the footsteps of the female body. It has been objectified, stylized, and transformed into a weapon of persuasion to reach the modern man.The Male Body as Advertisement can be useful for students of communication, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and cultural studies. It will serve graduate students as a bibliographic reference for research on the male body as well as undergraduate students whose programs address issues related to gender studies. This work is also written to reach a wider audience beyond the university.

Post-9/11 Representations of Arab Men by Arab American Women Writers: Affirmation and Resistance examines the portrayals of Arab masculinities in novels published after September 11, 2001, by women of Arab descent in the United States. The book provides a historical account of the mainstream representations of Arab masculinities in the United States, using them as a contrast to the realities experienced by Arab men in the American diaspora. Considering the construction of male and female Arab American identities, this book illustrates the role of feminism in Arab American literature written by women and its influence on women’s depictions of Arab men. Through an analysis of representative works by Diana Abu-Jaber, Laila Halaby, and Randa Jarrar, among others, this volume demonstrates how Arab American women’s anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles inform their nuanced portrayals of Arab men. This book will be essential for professors and students of ethnic American literatures in general and Arab American studies in particular, as well as for those interested in women’s studies and masculinity studies.

This book addresses the representation of masculinities in the work of J. M. Coetzee, with a particular focus on the writer’s trilogy: Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009). Provocatively dealing with questions of autobiography, Coetzee’s trilogy provides a panoramic view of a man’s development through various stages of life and, equally, different geographical locations, such as apartheid South Africa, sixties London and South Africa in the throes of democratic revolution.Attentive to the masculine formations that the trilogy represents, this work draws on conceptual frameworks and methodologies provided by the joint critique of gender and postcolonial studies, and is particularly animated by the discussions raised by men’s studies, a field that is nowadays patently interested in postcolonial / transnational masculinities. In this vein, the work discusses not only aspects related to violence and gendered formations as they occur and manifest themselves in the intersections of the local and global, but also the possibilities of refashioning identities increasingly attentive to an ethics of Otherness, one of the staples of Coetzee’s writing.

Pedro Almodóvar is an internationally acclaimed Spanish director. The national and international fascination over Almodóvar’s cinema lies in his ability to reflect the problems of contemporary society, his lucidity in combining the urban and the rural, his ability to express the frustrations of modern man, as well as his freshness and spontaneity. Although the vast majority of studies on this Spanish director have focused on women and the gay world, his films are crowded with many types and archetypes of heterosexual men. This groundbreaking edited volume studies the men in the cinema of Almodóvar from a broad yet comprehensive and complementary perspective. Each chapter of All About Almodóvar’s Men methodically dissects these male characters—their misery and their greatness, their frustrations and their desires—offering a kaleidoscopic view of man that goes beyond the narrow framework in which many studies have locked the rich cinema of Almodóvar.

Cinema, whether it is understood as entertainment, business, criticism, or art, is always a reflection of the society in which it is born. Men on the Screen is a review of masculinity in cinema made in Spain by Spanish directors from 1939 to the present. The objective of this volume is, then, to observe the different types of masculinities, whose classification gives rise to a chronology that goes from the man who embodies the dream dreamt by the dictator Franco to the modern man, who is lost in his labyrinth, while also examining the repressed men, those men who have strayed and who live in the city, the rascals and braggarts, those who fight every day just to survive, the petty criminals, those men who divest themselves of the rancid national-Catholicism in order to be themselves, those who are caring, those who harass and kill their prey, the heroes, those who seduce women with their gab, corrupt politicians, those who sell their bodies, grandparents, violent and chauvinistic men, those who live in anguish for the passage of time, and even those immured by repressing and hypocritical morality. All of the masculine categories delineated above indicate that cinema is a reflection of the great changes experienced by Spanish society during these years. During this long period, Spain has gone from being a poor, isolated, dark, sad, politically and religiously depressed country to becoming a dynamic, modern country, one of the great countries of the West. And these transformations, these men, who are diverse, who are in conflict at times, and who are depressed, hopeful, hungry, consumerist, and dreamers—they are what cinema gathers. What follows next is a catalog of men who have wandered and roamed the Spanish screens.

This book investigates anxieties over the role of white masculinity in American society after World War Two articulated in post-apocalyptic film. Using an interdisciplinary approach that employs methods of cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, it argues that masculinity acts as a technology for being-in-the-world that can be used by subjects with bodies coded male or female, employing it as a vehicle for agency. The Mad Max films denaturalize white masculinity by revealing the ways in which it defines the roles of men in a violent hypermasculine masquerade that harms everyone. The films trace Max’s disenfranchisement as he embraces a fugitive masculinity, fleeing social relation and responsibility, finding human connection once more in Miller’s most recent addition to the franchise. This work is useful for anyone teaching masculinity studies as well as those whom wish to better understand the phenomenon of angry white manhood and why masculinity often assumes a life-or-death apocalyptic position in postmodern America.