In Brutal, Brian Luke explores the gender divide over our treatment of animals, exposing the central role of masculinity in systems of animal exploitation. Employing philosophical analysis, reference to empirical research, and relevant personal experience, Luke develops a new theory of how exploitative institutions do not work to promote human flourishing but instead merely act as support for a particular construction of manhood. The resulting work is of significant interest both to animal advocates and opponents of sexism.
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 twentieth-century Kenya, age and gender were powerful cultural and political forces that animated household and generational relationships. They also shaped East Africans’ contact with and influence on emergent colonial and global ideas about age and masculinity. Kenyan men and boys came of age achieving their manhood through changing rites of passage and access to new outlets such as town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nationalism. And as they did, the colonial government appropriated masculinity and maturity as means of statecraft and control.
In An Uncertain Age, Paul Ocobock positions age and gender at the heart of everyday life and state building in Kenya. He excavates in unprecedented ways how the evolving concept of “youth” motivated and energized colonial power and the movements against it, exploring the masculinities boys and young men debated and performed as they crisscrossed the colony in search of wages or took the Mau Mau oath. Yet he also considers how British officials’ own ideas about masculinity shaped not only young African men’s ideas about manhood but the very nature of colonial rule.
An Uncertain Age joins a growing number of histories that have begun to break down monolithic male identities to push the historiographies of Kenya and empire into new territory.
Which is truly the weaker sex? Which has a harder time with its sexual and aggressive drives? The complicated business of being male is finally given its due in this book by John Munder Ross, a premier researcher and writer on the subject of masculinity. Distilling twenty years of study, he explores the male condition from infancy to manhood, exposing its complexity and fragility in the face of conflicting familial, social, and sexual impulses.
The author's psychoanalytic focus is anchored in clinical experience. But his interdisciplinary background leads him to draw on mythology, anthropology, sociology, history, and literature in formulating and illustrating his ideas about male identity and development. A boy's early identification with his mother, the evolution of his fatherly ambitions, the aggression and generational rivalry in father-son relationships, the developmental role of romantic, erotic passion: as Ross pursues these themes, he documents the ongoing changes in views of male psychology.
His book, then, is both a general intellectual history of the psychoanalytic study of male development and a lucid account of what that study has to tell us. Throughout, Ross emphasizes the feminine underside of a man's nature and the destructive potential inherent in asserting his virility, internal tensions that result in the complicated and often shaky sense of manhood so clearly described in this book. Compelling and insightful, What Men Want illuminates the concepts that figure most prominently in our understanding of the modern male condition: fatherhood, aggression, and heterosexual love. More than any other work to date, it solves the mystery of what it means to be male.
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