128 books match the query 'Men' and 34 start with m

cover of MEN AND VIOLENCE: GENDER, HONOR, AND RITUALS IN MODERN EUROPE AND AMERICA

MEN AND VIOLENCE

GENDER, HONOR, AND RITUALS IN MODERN EUROPE AND AMERICA

Pieter Spierenburg

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

There is growing interest in the history of masculinity and male culture, including violence, as an integral part of a proper understanding of gender. In almost every historical setting, masculinity and violence are closely linked; certainly, violent crime has been overwhelmingly a male enterprise. But violence is not always criminal: in many cultural contexts violence is linked instead to honor and encoded in rituals. We possess only an imperfect understanding of the ways in which aggressive behavior, or the abstention from aggressive behavior, contributes to the construction of masculinity and male honor. In this collection, internationally renowned expert Pieter Spierenburg brings together eight scholars to explore the fascinating interrelationship of masculinity, honor, and the body.
            The essays focus on the United States and western Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The contributors are Ute Frevert, Steven Hughes, Robert Nye, Daniele Boschi, Amy Sophia Greenberg, Martin J. Wiener, Stephen Kantrowitz, and Terence Finnegan. Men and Violence will be welcomed and widely used by a broad range of scholars and students.
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cover of Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth Century British Novel

Making a Man

Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth Century British Novel

Gwen Hyman

Ohio University Press, 2009

Gruel and truffles, wine and gin, opium and cocaine. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel addresses consumption of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what, in fact, makes a man in novels of the period. Gwen Hyman analyzes the rituals of dining room, drawing room, opium den, and cocaine lab, and the ways in which these alimentary behaviors make, unmake, and remake the gentlemanly body.

The gentleman, Making a Man argues, is a dangerous alimental force. Threatened with placelessness, he seeks to locate and mark himself through his feasting and fasting. But in doing so, he inevitably threatens to starve, to subsume, to swallow the community around him. The gentleman is at once fundamental and fundamentally threatening to the health of the nation: his alimental monstrousness constitutes the nightmare of the period’s striving, anxious, alimentally fraught middle class.

Making a Man makes use of food history and theory, literary criticism, anthropology, gender theory, economics, and social criticism to read gentlemanly consumers from Mr. Woodhouse, the gruel-eater in Jane Austen’s Emma, through the vampire and the men who hunt him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hyman argues that appetite is a crucial means of casting light on the elusive identity of the gentleman, a figure who is the embodiment of power and yet is hardly embodied in Victorian literature.
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cover of Manhood Impossible: Men's Struggles to Control and Transform Their Bodies and Work

Manhood Impossible

Men's Struggles to Control and Transform Their Bodies and Work

Melzer, Scott

Rutgers University Press, 2018

In Manhood Impossible, Scott Melzer argues that boys’ and men’s bodies and breadwinner status are the two primary sites for their expression of control. Controlling selves and others, and resisting being dominated and controlled is most connected to men’s bodies and work. However, no man can live up to these culturally ascendant ideals of manhood. The strategies men use to manage unmet expectations often prove toxic, not only for men themselves, but also for other men, women, and society. Melzer strategically explores the lives of four groups of adult men struggling with contemporary body and breadwinner ideals. These case studies uncover men’s struggles to achieve and maintain manhood, and redefine what it means to be a man.  
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cover of Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric and the Rise of Compostion

Manly Writing

Gender, Rhetoric and the Rise of Compostion

Miriam Brody

Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

In this critical history of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the rise of composition, Miriam Brody argues that nothing about words or their arrangement is innately gendered. Yet since the English Enlightenment, teachers have encouraged their students to admire and imitate "manly" writing, writing that is plain, forceful, cogent, and true. Similarly, students have been enjoined to avoid so-called effeminate or feminine writing—writing characterized as vague, unorganized, ornate, and deceitful.

Such advice, part of what Brody terms the hidden curriculum, has served the interests of discourse communities as various as the early Enlightenment Royal Society in seventeenth-century London (by urging a clear and masculine style for the work of science) and the land-grant universities of nineteenth-century America (by claiming that the work of writing was similar to clearing the land and pushing back the frontier). Brody’s discussion in fact becomes a social history of canonical rhetorical essays and important late Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and early modern school texts. She points out that in their advice to writers even the Strunks and Whites and Peter Elbows of more recent times have extolled masculine virtues and urged control over invasive and problematic feminine qualities.

Brody’s book not only clarifies rhetoric’s inheritance and transformation of the classical ideal of manliness, it also is the first critical work to explore the ideological significance of gendered imagery and to interpret in light of this imagery rhetorical essays and hard-to-locate early composition texts against a background of previously unpublished archival materials.

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cover of Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience

Manthology

Poems on the Male Experience

Craig Crist-Evans

University of Iowa Press, 2006

Why focus an anthology of poems on the male experience when, for centuries, men have pretty much dominated everything from politics to the literary canon? Hasn't everything that can be said about the male experience already been said? This collection proves that the answer is a resounding no.Each of the anthology's ninety-three poems spotlights an individual experience that nonetheless becomes universal. Together poems from ninety-three poets---twenty-six of them female---take on self-doubt, fatherhood, sex, death, relationships, work, war, peace, and a diversity of other topics to form a perceptive and insightful collection. “The idea isn't so much that the poems celebrate men as that they challenge the reader to discover for him or herself what is male about the poem,” says Billy Collins about the collection. Humorous, sad, celebratory, and thoughtful, Manthology gathers a surprising group of poems focused on the almost poignant intensity of the male experience, with its attendant urgencies, confusions, and hilarities.Contributors includeMarvin Bell, Robert Bly, Christopher Buckley, David Clewell, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Stuart Dybek, Lynn Emanuel, Dana Gioia, Ray González, Tony Hoagland, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Bret Lott, Campbell McGrath, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maureen Seaton, Betsy Sholl, David St. John, Charles Harper Webb, David Wojahn, and many more
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cover of Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood

Masculindians

Conversations about Indigenous Manhood

Sam McKegney

Michigan State University Press, 2014

Between October 2010 and August 2013, Sam McKegney conducted interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists, and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood. In offices, kitchens, and coffee shops, and once in a car driving down the 401, McKegney and his participants tackled crucial questions about masculine self-worth and how to foster balanced and empowered gender relations. Masculindians captures twenty-two of these conversations in a volume that is intensely personal, yet speaks across generations, geography, and gender boundaries. As varied as their speakers, the discussions range from culture, history, and world view to gender theory, artistic representations, and activist interventions. They speak of possibility and strength, of beauty and vulnerability. They speak of sensuality, eroticism, and warriorhood, and of the corrosive influence of shame, racism, and violence. Firmly grounding Indigenous continuance in sacred landscapes, interpersonal reciprocity, and relations with other-than-human kin, these conversations honor and embolden the generative potential of healthy Indigenous masculinities.

Contributors: Taiaiake Alfred, Kim Anderson, Joanne Arnott, Joseph Boyden, Alison Calder, Warren Cariou, Jessica Danforth, Louise Halfe, Tomson Highway, Daniel Heath Justice, Janice C. Hill Kanonhsyonni, Lee Maracle, Neal McLeod, Daniel David Moses, Gregory Scofield, Thomas Kimeksum Thrasher, and Richard Van Camp.
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cover of Masculine Figures: Fashioning Men and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Masculine Figures

Fashioning Men and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Nicholas Wolters

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and it is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men’s tailoring journals).

Fictional masculinity performs a symbolic role in representing and negotiating the contradictions male novelists often encountered in their attempts to professionalize not only as writers, but also as businessmen, professors, lawyers, and politicians. Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists portray and represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality.
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cover of Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity

Masculinist Impulses

Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity

Nathan Grant

University of Missouri Press, 2004

In Masculinist Impulses, Nathan Grant begins his analysis of African American texts by focusing on the fragmentation of values of black masculinity—free labor, self-reliance, and responsibility to family and community—as a result of slavery, postbellum disfranchisement, and the ensuing necessity to migrate from the agrarian South to the industrialized North. Through examinations of novels that deal with black male selfhood, Grant demonstrates the ways in which efforts to alleviate the most destructive aspects of racism ultimately reproduced them in the context of the industrialized city.

Grant’s book provides close readings of Jean Toomer (Cane and Natalie Mann) and Zora Neale Hurston (Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph of the Suwanee, and Their Eyes Were Watching God), for whom the American South was a crucial locus of the African American experience. Toomer and Hurston were virtually alone among the Harlem Renaissance writers of prose who returned to the South for their literary materials. That return, however, allowed their rediscovery of key black masculine values and charted the northern route of those values in the twentieth century to their compromise and destruction.

Grant then moves on to three more recent writers—John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison—who expanded upon and transformed the themes of Toomer and Hurston. Like Toomer and Hurston, these later authors recognized the need for the political union of black men and women in the effort to realize the goals of equity and justice.

Masculinist Impulses discusses nineteenth- and twentieth-century black masculinity as both a feature and a casualty of modernism. Scholars and students of African American literature will find Grant’s nuanced and creative readings of these key literary texts invaluable.
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cover of Masculinity in Transition

Masculinity in Transition

K. Allison Hammer

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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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cover of Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined

Mask Off

Masculinity Redefined

JJ Bola

Pluto Press, 2019

"A vital addition to books on masculinity. It is opening up conversations, whilst offering guidance towards joyful, emotional, non-violent masculinities"—Bad Form
 
From Blurred Lines to gang signs, how does society cause toxic masculinity? How do we define masculinity today? Dominating the world around us, seen in deadly gun violence, higher male suicide rates, and the incels on Reddit, masculinity is perceived to be “toxic,” “fragile,” and “in crisis.” What does that mean for society, and how can we understand it?
 
In Mask Off, JJ Bola exposes masculinity as a performance that men are socially conditioned into. Using examples of non-Western cultural traditions, music, and sport, he shines light on historical narratives around manhood, debunking popular myths along the way. He explores how LGBTQ men, men of color, and male refugees experience masculinity in diverse ways, revealing its fluidity, how it's strengthened and weakened by different political contexts, such as the patriarchy or the far-right, and perceived differently by those around them. Chapters include:
 
*Real men: Myths of masculinity
*What’s love got to do with it? Love, sex and consent
*This is a man’s world: The politics of masculinity, the masculinity of politics
*If I were a boy: Gender equality and feminism
*Slamdunk at the funk: masculinity and sport
 
At the heart of love and sex, the political stage, competitive sports, gang culture, and mental health issues, lies masculinity: Mask Off is an urgent call to unravel masculinity and redefine it. "What do our own perceptions of masculinity and the wider cultural norms around it mean for young boys growing up into manhood? What do they mean for young men and older men grappling with a society that encourages them to hold on to the anger that destroys the lives of women as well as the lives of many men?" Those questions and more offer food for thought for every man.       
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cover of Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet

Mass Destruction

The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet

Timothy J. LeCain

Rutgers University Press, 2009

The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the twentieth century. The man: Daniel Jackling, a young metallurgical engineer. The goal: A bold new technology that could provide billions of pounds of cheap copper for a rapidly electrifying America. The result: Bingham's enormous "Glory Hole," the first large-scale open-pit copper mine, an enormous chasm in the earth and one of the largest humanmade artifacts on the planet. Mass Destruction is the compelling story of Jackling and the development of open-pit hard rock mining, its role in the wiring of an electrified America, as well its devastating environmental consequences.

Mass destruction mining soon spread around the nation and the globe, providing raw materials essential to the mass production and mass consumption that increasingly defined the emerging "American way of life." At the dawn of the last century, Jackling's open pit replaced immense but constricted underground mines that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth, to become the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. A new culture of mass destruction emerged that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources.

But, what were the consequences? Timothy J. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to affect the environment in its ongoing devastation of nature and commodification of the physical world. The nation's largest toxic Superfund site would be one effect, as well as other types of environmental dead zones around the globe. Yet today, as the world's population races toward American levels of resource consumption, truly viable alternatives to the technology of mass destruction have not yet emerged.

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cover of Mavericks, Money, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football

Mavericks, Money, and Men

The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football

Charles Ross

Temple University Press, 2016

The American Football League, established in 1960, was innovative both in its commitment to finding talented, overlooked players—particularly those who played for historically black colleges and universities—and in the decision by team owners to share television revenues. 

In Mavericks, Money and Men, football historian Charles Ross chronicles the AFL’s key events,  including Buck Buchanan becoming the first overall draft pick in 1963, and the 1965 boycott led by black players who refused to play in the AFL-All Star game after experiencing blatant racism. He also recounts how the success of the AFL forced a merger with the NFL in 1969, which arguably facilitated the evolution of modern professional football.

Ross shows how the league, originally created as a challenge to the dominance of the NFL, pressured for and ultimately accelerated the racial integration of pro football and also allowed the sport to adapt to how African Americans were themselves changing the game.

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cover of Meanings for Manhood

Meanings for Manhood

Edited by Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen

University of Chicago Press, 1990

The stereotype of the Victorian man as a flinty, sexually repressed patriarch belies the remarkably wide variety of male behaviors and conceptions of manhood during the mid- to late- nineteenth century. A complex pattern of alternative and even competing behaviors and attitudes emerges in this important collection of essays that points toward a "gendered history" of men.
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cover of Medicalized Masculinities

Medicalized Masculinities

edited by Dana Rosenfeld and Christopher A. Faircloth

Temple University Press, 2006

When medicalization—the characterization of human traits in terms of disease and ailment—first appeared as a concept in the 1970s, most social science gender scholarship focused on female or genderless bodies. The work on men, health, and medicine was scant and tended to depict masculinity as intrinsically damaging to men's health.

Medicalized Masculinities considers how these threads in scholarship failed to consider the male body adequately and presents cutting-edge research into the definition and regulation of masculinity by medicine. Renowned health and gender studies experts examine medicalized conditions such as balding, aging, and other dimensions of the life cycle in the tradition of the sociology of health and gender.
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cover of Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays

Men I Hate

A Memoir in Essays

Lynette D'Amico

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

A rare spouse's perspective on a partner's transition that asks what happens to us when the people we are closest to change.

Can a lesbian who loves a trans man still call herself a lesbian? Against the backdrop of a traditional Sicilian American upbringing, Lynette D’Amico identified as a lesbian despite the expectation that her future hinged on the man she married. As a teenager, she fled her St. Louis home in the dark of night to escape her fate. No boys allowed, until one day D’Amico’s life was completely upended when her lover and spouse of twenty years—P. Carl, the acclaimed author of Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition—told her he was a man.

Seemingly overnight, D’Amico no longer recognized her spouse in photos of past vacations or of the couple celebrating their legal gay marriage. In Men I Hate, she asks: What happens when the people we are closest to change? As D’Amico tries to engage more deeply with the man she is married to, she looks at all the men—historical figures, politicians, men in her family—in search of clear dividing lines between good men and bad, between the men she loves and the men she hates. These lines dissolve as she writes her way toward an understanding of the words marriage,husband, and home—and how we reconcile who we are with who we become.
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cover of Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis

Men Without Work

America's Invisible Crisis

Nicholas Eberstadt

Templeton Press, 2016

By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: the country is richer than ever before and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession—lower today, in fact, than for most of the postwar era. 

But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work—most especially among America’s men. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, shows that while “unemployment” has gone down, America’s work rate is also lower today than a generation ago—and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged twenty-five to fifty-four—or “men of prime working age”—was actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940: before the War, and at the tail end of the Great Depression.

Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at all—and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of “men without work,” argues Eberstadt, is “America’s invisible crisis.”

So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society?

Nicholas Eberstadt lays out the issue and Jared Bernstein from the left and Henry Olsen from the right offer their responses to this national crisis.

For more information, please visit http://menwithoutwork.com.

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cover of Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of Raï

Men and Popular Music in Algeria

The Social Significance of Raï

By Marc Schade-Poulsen

University of Texas Press, 1999

Raï music is often called the voice of the voiceless in Algeria, a society currently swept by tragic conflict. Raï is the voice of Algerian men, young men caught between generations and classes, in political strife, and in economic inequality. In a ground-breaking study, anthropologist Marc Schade-Poulsen uses this popular music genre as a lens through which he views Algerian society, particularly male society. He situates raï within Algerian family life, moral codes, and broader power relations.

Schade-Poulsen did his research in the 1990s, in clubs, recording studios, at weddings, and with street musicians. He describes the history of raï, which emerged in the late 1970s and spread throughout North Africa at the same time the Islamist movement was growing to become the most potent socio-political movement in Algeria.

Outsiders consider raï to be Western in origin, but Schade-Poulsen shows its Islamic roots as well. The musicians do use Western instruments, but the music itself mixes Algerian popular songs and rhythms with the beat of American disco, Egyptian modalities, Moroccan wedding tunes, and the songs of Julio Iglesias. The lyrics deal with male-female relationships but also with generational relationships and the problems of youth, as they struggle to find a place in a conflicted society.

The study, in its innovative approach to music as a template of society, helps the reader understand the two major movements among today's Algerian youth: one toward the mosque and the other toward the West.

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cover of Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures

Men as Women, Women as Men

Changing Gender in Native American Cultures

By Sabine Lang

University of Texas Press, 1998

As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures. Yet attempts to find current role models in these historical figures sometimes distort and oversimplify the historical realities.

This book provides an objective, comprehensive study of Native American women-men and men-women across many tribal cultures and an extended time span. Sabine Lang explores such topics as their religious and secular roles; the relation of the roles of women-men and men-women to the roles of women and men in their respective societies; the ways in which gender-role change was carried out, legitimized, and explained in Native American cultures; the widely differing attitudes toward women-men and men-women in tribal cultures; and the role of these figures in Native mythology. Lang's findings challenge the apparent gender equality of the "berdache" institution, as well as the supposed universality of concepts such as homosexuality.

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cover of Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Men at Home

Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Gyanendra Pandey

Duke University Press, 2025

In Men at Home, Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men’s comportment and conduct in the home and the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. The author draws on a wealth of archival materials—autobiographies, memoirs, fiction, and ethnographies—to situate Indian men firmly in the domestic world, underlining their dependence on the family and home. He investigates how men negotiate marriage, intimacy, and conjugality and focuses the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender, caste, and class power in familial interactions. To uncover the nuances of these relationships, Pandey attends to the domestic commitments of upper-, middle-, and lower-class men across religion and caste. He considers issues of honor and shame, rights and responsibilities, citizenship and belonging through this exploration of how men across the subcontinent understand themselves in and beyond their domestic relationships. As much as it is a book about masculinity and conjugality, this is a book about Indian modernity, nationalism, and society as seen from the location of men in the home.
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cover of Men in Black

Men in Black

John Harvey

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Mr. Pink:
"Why can't we pick out our own color?"

Joe:
"I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black."

—Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs

Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power, that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral. The answer is in this history of the color black. Over the last 1000 years there have been successive expansions in the wearing of black—from the Church to the Court, from the Court to the merchant class. Though black as fashion was often smart and elegant, its growth as a cultural marker was fed by several currents in Europe's history—in politics, asceticism, religious warfare. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did black fully come into its own as fashion, the most telling witnesses constantly saw connections between the taste for black and the forms of constraint with which European society regimented itself.

Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around 1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy in the 15th century, through 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Spain and the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling study of the meaning of color and clothes.

Although in the twentieth century tastes have moved toward new colors, black has retained its authority as well as its associations with strength and cruelty. At the same time black is still smart, and fashion keeps returning to black. It is, perhaps, the color that has come to acquire the greatest, most significant range of meaning in history.
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cover of Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America

Men in Place

Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America

Miriam J. Abelson

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Daring new theories of masculinity, built from a large and geographically diverse interview study of transgender men
 

American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fundamental to their experiences of race, sexuality, and gender.

Men in Place explores the shifting meanings of being a man across cities and in rural areas. Here Abelson develops the insight that individual men do not have one way to be masculine—rather, their ways of being men shift between different spaces and places. She reveals a widespread version of masculinity that might be summed up as “strong when I need to be, soft when I need to be,” using the experiences of trans men to highlight the fundamental construction of manhood for all men.

With an eye to how societal institutions promote homophobia, transphobia, and racism, Men in Place argues that race and sexuality fundamentally shape safety for men, particularly in rural spaces, and helps us to better understand the ways that gender is created and enforced.

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cover of Men in a Developing Society: Geographic and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico

Men in a Developing Society

Geographic and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico

By Jorge Balán, Harley L. Browning, and Elizabeth Jelin

University of Texas Press, 1973

The central objective of Men in a Developing Society is to show, as concretely as possible, how men experience a period of rapid economic development, particularly in the areas of migration, occupational mobility, and status attainment. It is based mainly on a sample of 1,640 men in Monterrey, Mexico, a large and rapidly growing manufacturing metropolis in northern Mexico with much in-migration, and a sample of 380 men in Cedral, San Luis Potosí, a small, economically depressed community with high rates of out-migration, much of it to Monterrey.

The study of men in Monterrey is perhaps the most thorough one yet conducted of geographic and social mobility in a Latin American city. In part, this was possible because of the innovation of collecting complete life histories that record what each man was doing for any given year in the lay areas of residence, education, family formation, and work. These data permit the effective use of the concepts of life cycle and cohort analysis in the interpretation of the men's geographic and occupational mobility.

The experience of the Monterrey men in adapting to the varied changes required by their mobility was not found to be as difficult as is often indicated in the social science literature on the consequences of economic development. In part this may be because Monterrey, in comparison with most other Latin American cities, has been unusually successful in its economic growth. The impact of migration also was lessened because most of the men had visited the city prior to moving there and many had friends or relatives in the city.

The age of the migrants upon arrival in Monterrey made a significant difference in subsequent occupational mobility; those of nonfarm background who arrived before age 25 fared better than natives of the city. Although it appears that status inheritance in Monterrey is somewhat higher than in industrialized countries, a considerable proportion of men do move up the occupational ladder. And perhaps as important, the Monterrey men, whether or not they themselves are moving up, perceive the society as an open one.

The very success of Monterrey's development created conditions that would bring about changes in the educational, economic, and cultural expectations of its inhabitants. Thus, paradoxically, the general satisfaction and the lack of group and class conflict in Monterrey over the previous decades may well have given rise to future dissatisfaction and conflict.

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cover of Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s

Men in the Middle

Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s

James Gilbert

University of Chicago Press, 2005

While the 1950s have been popularly portrayed-on television and in the movies and literature-as a conformist and conservative age, the decade is better understood as a revolutionary time for politics, economy, mass media, and family life. Magazines, films, newspapers, and television of the day scrutinized every aspect of this changing society, paying special attention to the lifestyles of the middle-class men and their families who were moving to the suburbs newly springing up outside American cities. Much of this attention focused on issues of masculinity, both to enforce accepted ideas and to understand serious departures from the norm. Neither a period of "male crisis" nor yet a time of free experimentation, the decade was marked by contradiction and a wide spectrum of role models. This was, in short, the age of Tennessee Williams as well as John Wayne.

In Men in the Middle, James Gilbert uncovers a fascinating and extensive body of literature that confronts the problems and possibilities of expressing masculinity in the 1950s. Drawing on the biographies of men who explored manhood either in their writings or in their public personas, Gilbert examines the stories of several of the most important figures of the day-revivalist Billy Graham, playwright Tennessee Williams, sociologist David Riesman, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Playboy literary editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky, and TV-sitcom dad Ozzie Nelson-and allows us to see beyond the inherited stereotypes of the time. Each of these stories, in Gilbert's hands, adds crucial dimensions to our understanding of masculinity the 1950s. No longer will this era be seen solely in terms of the conformist man in the gray flannel suit or the Marlboro Man.
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cover of Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America

Men of No Reputation

Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America

Kimberly Harper

University of Arkansas Press, 2024

Winner, 2025 Missouri Conference on History Book Award


Swindler. Murderer. Scoundrel.

Robert Boatright was one of Middle America’s greatest confidence men. Although little remembered today, his story provides a rare glimpse into America’s criminal past. Working in concert with a local bank and an influential Democratic boss, “this dean of modern confidence men” and his colorful confederacy of con men known as the Buckfoot Gang seemed untouchable. A series of missteps, however, led to a string of court cases across the country that brought Boatright’s own criminal enterprise to an end. And yet, the con continued: Boatright’s successor, John C. Mabray, and his cronies, many of whom had been in the Buckfoot Gang, preyed upon victims across North America in one of the largest midwestern criminal syndicates in history before they were brought to heel.

Like the works of Sinclair Lewis, Boatright’s story exposes a rift in the wholesome midwestern stereotype and furthers our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society.

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cover of Men of Steel, Women of Wonder: Modern American Superheroes in Contemporary Art

Men of Steel, Women of Wonder

Modern American Superheroes in Contemporary Art

Alejo Benedetti

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Saturated in patriotic colors, Superman and Wonder Woman are about as American as baseball and apple pie. Superman, created in 1938, materialized as the brawny answer to the Great Depression, and when Wonder Woman arrived three years later, she supported her adopted country by fighting alongside Allied troops in World War II. As the proverbial mother and father of the superhero genre, these icons appeared to a society in crisis as unwavering beacons of national morality, a quality that lent them success on the battlefield—and on the newsstand.

As new crises arise our comic-book champions continue to be called into action. They adapt and evolve but remain the same potent, if flawed, symbols of the American way. The artists in Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, an exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, wrestle with Wonder Woman’s standing as a feminist icon, position Superman as a Soviet-era weapon, and question the immigration status of both characters. Featuring more than seventy artworks that range from loving endorsements to brutal critiques of American culture, this exhibition catalog reveals the enduring presence of these characters and the diverse ways artists employ them.

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cover of Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat

Men of Terror

A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat

William R. Short and Reynir A. Óskarson

Westholme Publishing, 2027

An Interdisciplinary Study of Viking Martial Culture that Dispels Myths and Expands Our Understanding of the Medieval Norse World
Sometime near the end of the tenth century, a man named Fraði died in Sweden. His kinsmen raised a granite runestone to his memory in Denmark. The carved message appears to tell us that Fraði was “first among all Vikings” and that he was the “terror of men.” Known sources about the Vikings revolve around the constant threat of violence: literary and artistic sources from both inside and outside Viking lands, including poetry, myths, stories, and artwork; law codes; burial practices; weapons; even their ship and house architecture. 
    Based on nearly two decades of research, Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat is a richly illustrated interdisciplinary study of the heart of Viking society: weapons and combat. Relying on a vast array of sources from a wide range of fields, research scientist William R. Short and independent scholar and martial arts instructor Reynir A. Óskarson dig deep into the culture of men like Fraði to better understand the mindset and performance of Viking warriors that led them to venerate and praise acts of violence and aggression. In the process they have painstakingly reverse-engineered Viking combat to account for the archaeology we have. Along the way, they answer questions such as: Were there women warriors? Why were acts such as raiding held in such high esteem? What mundane object was the king of Viking weapons and how was it used? Could bowstrings of human hair really work? Through their comprehensive research, the authors present a holistic picture of this society from what previously had only been disparate and intriguing parts. By the end of the book, the reader will understand the importance of combat to Viking society, the nature of that combat, and the code of these “men of terror.”
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cover of Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories

Men on the Moon

Collected Short Stories

Simon J. Ortiz

University of Arizona Press, 1999

When Faustin, the old Acoma, is given his first television set, he considers it a technical wonder, a box full of mystery. What he sees on its screen that first day, however, is even more startling than the television itself: men have landed on the moon. Can this be real? For Simon Ortiz, Faustin's reaction proves that tales of ordinary occurrences can truly touch the heart. "For me," he observes, "there's never been a conscious moment without story."

Best known for his poetry, Ortiz also has authored 26 short stories that have won the hearts of readers through the years. Men on the Moon brings these stories together—stories filled with memorable characters, written with love by a keen observer and interpreter of his people's community and culture. True to Native American tradition, these tales possess the immediacy—and intimacy—of stories conveyed orally. They are drawn from Ortiz's Acoma Pueblo experience but focus on situations common to Native people, whether living on the land or in cities, and on the issues that affect their lives. We meet Jimmo, a young boy learning that his father is being hunted for murder, and Kaiser, the draft refuser who always wears the suit he was given when he left prison. We also meet some curious Anglos: radicals supporting Indian causes, scholars studying Indian ways, and San Francisco hippies who want to become Indians too.

Whether telling of migrants working potato fields in Idaho and pining for their Arizona home or of a father teaching his son to fly a kite, Ortiz takes readers to the heart of storytelling. Men on the Moon shows that stories told by a poet especially resound with beauty and depth.
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cover of Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan: Male Family Carers in a Society in Transition

Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan

Male Family Carers in a Society in Transition

Hiroko Costantini

University College London, 2026

A study of well-being and care within the evolving Japanese family context, with a focus on the men who care for older family members. 

Moving beyond the predominant focus on men in the workplace, Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan offers an innovative perspective on men’s well-being through their involvement in caring for older family members. Focusing on super-aged Japanese society, the book provides a valuable way to understand key social challenges relevant to countries on the cusp of an aging society. The book traces a shift away from the traditional family structures, highlighting how this transformation has reshaped men's roles within the family, and the increasingly important role of sons-in-law in extended family relations. 

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cover of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History

Men, Mobs, and Law

Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History

Rebecca N. Hill

Duke University Press, 2008

In Men, Mobs, and Law, Rebecca N. Hill compares two seemingly unrelated types of leftist protest campaigns: those intended to defend labor organizers from prosecution and those seeking to memorialize lynching victims and stop the practice of lynching. Arguing that these forms of protest are related and have substantially influenced one another, Hill points out that both worked to build alliances through appeals to public opinion in the media, by defining the American state as a force of terror, and by creating a heroic identity for their movements. Each has played a major role in the history of radical politics in the United States. Hill illuminates that history by considering the narratives produced during the abolitionist John Brown’s trials and execution, analyzing the defense of the Chicago anarchists of the Haymarket affair, and comparing Ida B. Wells’s and the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaigns to the Industrial Workers of the World’s early-twentieth-century defense campaigns. She also considers conflicts within the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, chronicles the history of the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense, and explores the Black Panther Party’s defense of George Jackson.

As Hill explains, labor defense activists first drew on populist logic, opposing the masses to the state in their campaigns, while anti-lynching activists went in the opposite direction, castigating “the mob” and appealing to the law. Showing that this difference stems from the different positions of whites and Blacks in the American legal system, Hill’s comparison of anti-lynching organizing and radical labor defenses reveals the conflicts and intersections between antiracist struggle and socialism in the United States.

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cover of Men, War and Film: The Calling Blighty Films of World War II

Men, War and Film

The Calling Blighty Films of World War II

Steve Hawley

Intellect Books, 2025

A reclamation of a largely unknown genre of British wartime filmmaking.

The Calling Blighty series of films produced by the Combined Kinematograph Service around the end of World War II were one-reel films in which soldiers of the “Forgotten Army” gave short spoken messages to the camera as a means of connecting the front line and the home front. Shown in local cinemas, these were the first films in which men spoke openly in their regional accents, and they hold profound meaning for remembrance, documentary representation, and the ecology of film in wartime. Of the four hundred films made on the Far Eastern Front, only sixty-four survive. Until now, however, these films have barely been researched, despite being a valuable source of social history. This book expands the history of Calling Blighty, placing it in a broader context for contemporary audiences. 
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cover of Men, Women, and Jobs: A Study in Human Engineering

Men, Women, and Jobs

A Study in Human Engineering

Donald Paterson

University of Minnesota Press, 1936

Men, Women, and Jobs was first published in 1936. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Basing their recommendations on reliable tests of vocational aptitudes, the authors point the way to better vocational guidance and re-education, and to their use as weapons against unemployment.This is the story of a five-year investigation conducted as part of the work of the Employment Stabilization Research Institute of the University of Minnesota. The Institute’s Committee on Individual Diagnosis and Training (including experts in the fields of psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics) interviewed thousands of persons, and endeavored to discover why some were employed and others were not, and to devise means for the retraining and improved adjustment of those who were unemployed. This non-technical report includes scores of case histories and describes the tests used to determine whether persons had been doing the kind of work for which they were fitted by nature and training.
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cover of Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910

Men, Women, and Work

Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910

Mary H. Blewett

University of Illinois Press, 1988

Mary H. Blewett's award-winning look at the men and women working in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, explores the sexual division of labor and gender relationships in the workplace.
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cover of Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41

Mining Cultures

Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41

Mary Murphy

University of Illinois Press, 1997

Butte, Montana, long deserved its reputation as a wide-open town. Mining Cultures shows how the fabled Montana city evolved from a male-dominated mining enclave to a community in which men and women participated on a more equal basis as leisure patterns changed and consumer culture grew. Mary Murphy looks at how women worked and spent their leisure time in a city dominated by the quintessential example of "men's work": mining. Bringing Butte to life, she adds in-depth research on church weeklies, high school yearbooks, holiday rituals, movie plots, and news of local fashion to archival material and interviews. 

A richly illustrated jaunt through western history, Mining Cultures is the never-told chronicle of how women transformed the richest hill on earth.

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cover of Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities

Misframing Men

The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities

Kimmel, Michael

Rutgers University Press, 2010


This past decade has witnessed an extraordinary transformation in men's lives. For years, wave after wave of the women's movement, a movement that reshaped every aspect of American life, produced nary a ripple among men. But suddenly men are in the spotlight.

Yet, the public discussions often seem strained, silly, and sometimes flat-out wrong. The spotlight itself seems to obscure as much as it illuminates. Old tired clichTs about men's resistance to romantic commitment or reluctance to be led to the marriage altar seem perennially recyclable in advice books and on TV talk shows, but these days the laughter feels more forced, the defensiveness more pronounced. Pop biologists avoid careful confrontation with serious scientific research in their quest to find anatomical or evolutionary bases for promiscuity or porn addiction, hoping that by fiat, one can pronounce that "boys will be boys" and render it more than a flaccid tautology. And political pundits wring their hands about the feminization of American manhood, as if gender equality has neutered these formerly proud studs. Misframing Men, a collection of Michael Kimmel's commentaries on contemporary debates about masculinity, argues that the media have largely misframed this debate.

Kimmel, among the world's best-known scholars in gender studies, discusses political moments such as the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel cases that reached the Supreme Court (he participated as expert witness for the Justice Department) along with Promise Keepers rallies, mythopoetic gatherings, and white supremacists. He takes on antifeminists as the real male bashers, questions the unsubstantiated assertions that men suffer from domestic violence to the same degree as women, and examines the claims made by those who want to rescue boys from the "misandrous" reforms initiated by feminism.

In writings both solidly grounded and forcefully argued, Kimmel pushes the boundaries of today's modern conversation about men and masculinity.
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