Abstract
Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US offers an innovative approach to understanding Anglo-American men’s anxieties, combining cultural and sociological studies. The editors seek to challenge long-standing (disciplinary) tensions between “abstract” structural and “corporeal” performative analyses of masculinities (p. 2), as reflected by the collection’s subtitle: Between Bodies and Systems. Although informed by “cultural, ethnographic, and sociological” approaches (p. 6), the evidence presented across twelve chapters is largely drawn from literary and filmic representations of men, with only two employing social research methods.
One sociological contribution is Kimmel’s study of American white supremacism, which reads as more polemical than empirical, drawing on only two quotes from participants. The other is Higate’s ethnography of private military and security contractors, drawing on “a small number” of qualitative interviews; participant observations; and analysis of magazines, memoirs, and digital media (p. 25). Exploring binaries between the emotional habitus of aggressive American “peacock masculinity” and bourgeois British “professional masculinity,” neoliberalism is invoked to suggest that “irrational, violent, and hypermasculine” behaviors are bad for business (p. 30). Written in conversation with Fox’s analysis of “benevolent dominance and control” in Cold War era representations of military masculinity in novels including The Dogs of War (1974), these chapters persuasively bridge the “factual” and “fictional” to show how stereotypes of “overt macho aggression” influence storytelling and self-perception (p. 40).
The collection’s organizing themes are well theorized in chapters exploring relationships between gender, economics, and politics. For example, Schwanebeck’s interpretation of the satirical British television series The Thick of It explores how “political power becomes a measure of masculinity” through metaphors of “the phallus” and “body politic,” with nods to leviathans of political philosophy from Plato and Cicero to Hobbes and Machiavelli (p. 86). Such “dick waving” is returned to in Georgi-Findlay’s analysis of the American television series Deadwood, whose nineteenth-century characters are similarly “troubled by their own physical and psychological limitations” (p. 127), and Schein’s analysis of Irish-American men represented in film and television (e.g., Blue Bloods, The Departed, Rescue Me) who “also measure their penises in efforts to assert their adequacy” (p. 164). These chapters emphasize the role of economic systems for making sense of “old-fashioned” masculinities, whether through the “compromised nature of an American masculinity tied to the marketplace and to a history of violent acquisition and expansion” (p. 128), or working-class men who “fear that there is, literally, no place for them in the contemporary cultural landscape” (p. 165).
The masculinist logics of capitalism and crisis are further interrogated in Reichardt’s account of men represented in New York City’s financial sector (e.g., Cosmopolis, American Psycho, Wall Street), suggesting that “patterns of masculine behavior” including competition, overconfidence, and risk-taking have “as much to do with culture as with internal economic developments, including neoliberal theory” (p. 220). Here, the 2008 financial crisis is understood not only as an abstract economic problem but as part of culturally conditioned gender norms. Relatedly, critiquing “crisis of masculinity” clichés, Yekani’s analysis of the film World Trade Center and the novel Saturday (p. 70) cautions against framing “cultural crisis as male crisis” in the post–9/11 context.
My main frustration with this collection is its narrow focus on one model of masculinity, the (formerly) hegemonic archetype of heterosexist white men. All the authors characterized these men’s attitudes as “outdated,” in contrast with a “contemporary” (p. 161), “mainstream” (p. 183), or “postmodern” (p. 202) culture of ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity. This is illustrated by Schein’s account of “Irish-American paragons of backwardness and stalwart masculinity” (p. 162), and Kanzler’s analysis of the novel A Frolic of His Own, where the concept of “postpatriarchal malaise” is used to understand “white, middle-class man’s sense of victimhood in postmodern American society,” something both “anachronistic” and “inherently self-defeating” (p. 202). Perhaps the collection’s title should have adopted the term conservative rather than contemporary.
If mentioned, people of color, sexual minorities, and women were ubiquitously cast as “Other,” foils against which these men’s frustrations are articulated. Problematically, Kimmel even joked that “these guys” (neo-Nazis) “would feel appropriately dressed in a gay S/M leather bar” (p. 194). An exception to this was Manolova’s reading of the novel Giovanni’s Room, which not only draws attention to the author’s race and sexuality but critiques the protagonist’s “liberal attitudes towards issues such as women’s liberation while also treating women unethically” (p. 138) and dehumanization of drag queens, where “a non-man translates to a non-human” (p. 143). This was mirrored by Yekani’s suggestion that “crisis” narratives privilege straight white men’s problems as universal. These chapters were impactful for adopting performative gender theories, where texts can be “at times battling and at times reinscribing” (p. 140). Thus, I was left wondering whether—by focusing on one archetype of masculinity—this collection may have discursively contributed to the very power relations it sought to challenge.