The Agony of Masculinity

The Agony of Masculinity
Author: Pierre W. Orelus
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781433104176

Drawing on critical race theory and empirical data from case studies involving fifty men of African descent, this book presents a new perspective on black masculinity, maleness, sexism, and institutional racism. The book situates black masculinity in a racial, socio-historical, and postcolonial context to provide innovative ways of understanding the profound effects of institutional racism. Although its focus is primarily on people of African descent, the book addresses issues concerning all races and ethnicities, explores the harmful effects of sexism and homophobia on women and queer people, and proposes practical steps that can be taken to fight against socio-economic inequality and injustice that is racially-, gender-, and sexually-based. Given the practical nature and interdisciplinary dimension of this book, readers and educators studying race, racism, sexism, and gender issues will find it germane to their needs and their classes.

For the Love of Men

For the Love of Men
Author: Liz Plank
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1250196256

A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For The Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world, while also exploring how being a man in the world has evolved. In 2019, traditional masculinity is both rewarded and sanctioned. Men grow up being told that boys don’t cry and dolls are for girls (a newer phenomenon than you might realize—gendered toys came back in vogue as recently as the 80s). They learn they must hide their feelings and anxieties, that their masculinity must constantly be proven. They must be the breadwinners, they must be the romantic pursuers. This hasn’t been good for the culture at large: 99% of school shooters are male; men in fraternities are 300% (!) more likely to commit rape; a woman serving in uniform has a higher likelihood of being assaulted by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire. In For the Love of Men, Liz offers a smart, insightful, and deeply-researched guide for what we're all going to do about toxic masculinity. For both women looking to guide the men in their lives and men who want to do better and just don’t know how, For the Love of Men will lead the conversation on men's issues in a society where so much is changing, but gender roles have remained strangely stagnant. What are we going to do about men? Liz Plank has the answer. And it has the possibility to change the world for men and women alike.

The Will to Change

The Will to Change
Author: bell hooks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2004-01-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0743480333

From New York Times bestselling author, feminist pioneer, and cultural icon bell hooks, a timelessly necessary treatise on how patriarchy and toxic masculinity hurts us all, with a new introduction by poet Ross Gay. Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men. Everyone needs to love and be loved—including men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways in which patriarchal culture keeps them from understanding themselves. In The Will to Change, bell hooks provides a compassionate guide for men of all ages and identities to understand how to be in touch with their feelings, and how to express versus repress the emotions that are a fundamental part of who we are. With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. The Will to Change “creates space for men to acknowledge their traumas and heal—not only for their sake, but for the sake of everyone in their lives” (BuzzFeed).

The End of Men

The End of Men
Author: Hanna Rosin
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-09-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101596929

Essential reading for our times, as women are pulling together to demand their rights— A landmark portrait of women, men, and power in a transformed world. “Anchored by data and aromatized by anecdotes, [Rosin] concludes that women are gaining the upper hand." –The Washington Post Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But Hanna Rosin was the first to notice that this long-held truth is, astonishingly, no longer true. Today, by almost every measure, women are no longer gaining on men: They have pulled decisively ahead. And “the end of men”—the title of Rosin’s Atlantic cover story on the subject—has entered the lexicon as dramatically as Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex,” Susan Faludi’s “backlash,” and Naomi Wolf’s “beauty myth” once did. In this landmark book, Rosin reveals how our current state of affairs is radically shifting the power dynamics between men and women at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more. With wide-ranging curiosity and insight unhampered by assumptions or ideology, Rosin shows how the radically different ways men and women today earn, learn, spend, couple up—even kill—has turned the big picture upside down. And in The End of Men she helps us see how, regardless of gender, we can adapt to the new reality and channel it for a better future.

War and Gender

War and Gender
Author: Joshua S. Goldstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2003-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521001809

Gender roles are nowhere more prominent than in war. Yet contentious debates, and the scattering of scholarship across academic disciplines, have obscured understanding of how gender affects war and vice versa. In this authoritative and lively review of our state of knowledge, Joshua Goldstein assesses the possible explanations for the near-total exclusion of women from combat forces, through history and across cultures. Topics covered include the history of women who did fight and fought well, the complex role of testosterone in men's social behaviours, and the construction of masculinity and femininity in the shadow of war. Goldstein concludes that killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, and that gender norms often shape men, women, and children to the needs of the war system. lllustrated with photographs, drawings, and graphics, and drawing from scholarship spanning six academic disciplines, this book provides a unique study of a fascinating issue.

Rethinking Race, Class, Language, and Gender

Rethinking Race, Class, Language, and Gender
Author: Pierre Wilbert Orelus
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2011-08-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1442204575

Oftentimes, critical examinations of oppression solely focus on one type and neglect others. In this single volume, Pierre Orelus examines the way various forms of oppression, such as racism, classism, capitalism, sexism, and linguicism (linguistic discrimination) operate and limit the life chances people, across various race, class, language, and gender lines, have. Utilizing dialogue as a form of inquiry, Pierre Orelus conducts in-depth interviews carried over the course of two years with committed social justice educators and intellectuals from different fields and foci to examine the way and the extent to which these forms of oppression have profoundly affected the subjectivity and material conditions of women, poor working-class people, queer people, students of color, female faculty and faculty of color. This book presents a novel and critical perspective on race, social class, gender, and language issues echoed through authentic, collective, and dissident voices of these educators and intellectuals.

The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture

The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture
Author: C. Fitzgerald
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2007-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230604994

This study argues that late medieval English 'mystery plays' were about masculinity as much as Christian theology, modes of devotion, or civic self-consciousness. Performed repeatedly by generations of merchants and craftsmen, these Biblical plays produced fantasies and anxieties of middle class, urban masculinity, many of which are familiar today.

Measuring Manhood

Measuring Manhood
Author: Melissa N. Stein
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452944695

From the “gay gene” to the “female brain” and African American students’ insufficient “hereditary background” for higher education, arguments about a biological basis for human difference have reemerged in the twenty-first century. Measuring Manhood shows where they got their start. Melissa N. Stein analyzes how race became the purview of science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and how it was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonances. She tells of scientific “experts” who advised the nation on its most pressing issues and exposes their use of gender and sex differences to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference. Stein examines the works of scientists and scholars from medicine, biology, ethnology, and other fields to trace how their conclusions about human difference did no less than to legitimize sociopolitical hierarchy in the United States. Covering a wide range of historical actors from Samuel Morton, the infamous collector and measurer of skulls in the 1830s, to NAACP leader and antilynching activist Walter White in the 1930s, this book reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making?and unmaking?of race.

Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism

Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism
Author: Betty Kaklamanidou
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135090033

The romantic comedy has long been regarded as an inferior film genre by critics and scholars alike, accused of maintaining a strict narrative formula which is considered superficial and highly predictable. However, the genre has resisted the negative scholarly and critical comments and for the last three decades the steady increase in the numbers of romantic comedies position the genre among the most popular ones in the globally dominant Hollywood film industry. The enduring power of the new millennium romantic comedy, proves that therein lies something deeper and worth investigating. This new work draws together a discussion of the full range of romantic comedies in the new millennium, exploring the cycles of films that tackle areas including teen romance, the new career woman, women as action heroes, motherhood and pregnancy and the mature millennium woman. The work evaluates the structure of these different types of films and examines in detail the ways in which they choose to frame key contemporary issues which influence how we analyse global politics, including gender, class, race and society. Providing a rich understanding of the complexities and potential of the genre for understanding contemporary society, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural & film studies, gender & politics and world politics in general.

Black Men, Black Feminism

Black Men, Black Feminism
Author: Jared Sexton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319741268

A brief commentary on the necessity and the impossibility of black men’s participation in the development of black feminist theory and politics, Black Men, Black Feminism examines the basic assumptions that have guided—and misguided—black men’s efforts to take up black feminism. Offering a rejoinder to the contemporary study of black men and masculinity in the twenty-first century, Jared Sexton interrogates some of the most common intellectual postures of black men writing about black feminism, ultimately departing from the prevailing discourse on progressive black masculinities. Sexton examines, by contrast, black men’s critical and creative work—from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to Jordan Peele’s Get Out— to describe the cultural logic that provides a limited moral impetus to the quest for black male feminism and that might, if reconfigured, prompt an ethical response of an entirely different order.