This book explores a vital though long-neglected clash between republicans and Catholics that rocked fin-de-siecle France. At its heart was a mysterious and shocking crime. In Lille in 1899, the body of twelve-year-old Gaston Foveaux was discovered in a school run by a Catholic congregation, the Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes. When his teacher, Frere Flamidien, was charged with sexual assault and murder, a local crime became a national scandal. The Flamidien Affair shows that masculinity was a critical site of contest in the War of Two Frances pitting republicans against Catholics. For republicans, Flamidien's vow of chastity as well as his overwrought behaviour during the investigation made him the target of suspicion; Catholics in turn constructed a rival vision of masculinity to exonerate the accused brother. Both sides drew on the Dreyfus Affair to make their case.

This book examines community group settings for young men who are fathers, with particular emphasis on the role of gender within the groups and the possibilities of such groups for the 'un-doing' of gender. Young men who are fathers are often marginalized and negatively portrayed within society. Groups allow them space and opportunity for peer support with other young men, to gain confidence and skills, and to positively develop their fatherhood identities. They offer young fathers opportunities to encounter new role models and can therefore help to reimagine young men who are fathers, challenging stereotypes and offering support for young men and their families. Supporting Young Men as Fathers will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of sociology, social work, health promotion and youth work as well as practitioners working within family settings or who may encounter young men who are parents within their professional roles.

The Western genre provides the most widely recognized, iconic images of masculinity in the United States - gun-slinging, laconic white male heroes who emphasize individualism, violence, and an idiosyncratic form of justice. This idealized masculinity has been fused with ideas of national identity and character. Masculinities in Literature of the American West examines how contemporary literary Westerns push back against the coded image of the Western hero, exposing pervasive anxieties about what it means to "act like a man." Contemporary Westerns critique assumptions about innate connections between power, masculinity, and "American" character that influence public rhetoric even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These novels struggle with the monumental challenge of all Westerns: the challenge of being human in a place where "being a man" is so strictly coded, so unachievable, so complicit in atrocity, and so desirable that it is worth dying for, worth killing for, or perhaps worth nothing at all.

Offering a new perspective on male prostitution, In the Company of Men employs qualitative methodology to present a real-world view of the issues, both obvious and obscure, surrounding the world's "second-oldest profession." In the Company of Men: Inside the Lives of Male Prostitutes is the only book to document male prostitution from the perspective of a group of men working for a single male escort agency. The in-depth account goes behind the scenes to shed light on the very hidden world of Internet male escorts, their customers, and the niche they inhabit in modern American society. At the same time, it has much to tell us about post-modern identity, culture, and sexuality-and the transformative influence of the Internet on sexual behavior and male prostitution. Through numerous interviews, the book examines the sometimes-dichotomous relationship between the image men convey and the lengths to which they go in order to meet their most private needs. Readers travel down a cyber Sunset Boulevard to see what attracts young men to work as escorts, how an escort agency serves economic and personal goals, and how a community can evolve among the men involved. Field observations from more than 200 contact hours at the agency and with the escorts First-hand accounts and stories from interviews and interactions with men working as male escorts and with managers at their agency

Drawing from political sociology, pop psychology, and film studies, Cinemas of Boyhood explores the important yet often overlooked subject of boys and boyhood in film. This collected volume features an eclectic range of films from British and Indian cinemas to silent Hollywood and the new Hollywood of the 1980s, culminating in a comprehensive overview of the diverse concerns surrounding representations of boyhood in film.

This book is about how Chinese men make sense of and practise fatherhood within the context of changing gender conventions and socio-cultural conditions. Liong analyses data from participant observations at a men's centre, focus groups, and in-depth interviews, to assess the subjective experience and identities of Chinese fathers in Hong Kong, from a gender perspective. His findings show that economic provision, education, and marriage are the three "natural" and "normal" domains of paternity. Not being able to fulfil these requirements is a threat to fathers' masculinity, yet is also an opportunity for fathers to reflect upon these accepted conventions. In order to compensate, these men typically develop a closer and more caring relationship with their children, however these fathers still struggle with feelings of inferiority.

Updated and expanded-with a new foreword by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne-Malestrom provides a redemptive vision of biblical manhood and a way through the treacherous seas of patriarchy. Like the danger of a maelstrom in the open seas, a relentless force threatens our culture, swirling with hidden currents that distorts God's image of personhood. This book reveals how the malestrom is one of the Enemy's single most successful strategies. Its victories are flashed before us every day in the headlines as men lose sight of who God created them to be. It has consumed the evangelical church that stoops to offering toxic "manly" solutions to the wrongs it perceives in society and distracts from the rich potential God has entrusted to his sons. Digging deeply into the stories of men in the Bible who subverted cultural hierarchies, Carolyn Custis James shows us how countercultural God's design for men really is. Through personal story, biblical commentary, and cultural analysis, Custis James: Makes a strong case for the unbiblical nature of patriarchy. Illuminates the sociology of marginalization and cultural gender roles. Takes a close biblical look at Jesus and what his character and humanity means to the men of the church today. Malestrom offers what we so desperately need-a biblical, global, timeless vision of godly personhood that is big enough to encompass the diversity of men's lives and strong enough to withstand the crises they face. "It is one thing to critique the abuses of a domineering masculinity and lament the religious and societal consequences, but Carolyn Custis James takes the next crucial step and offers us a better path forward. For those asking, "What now?" Malestrom serves as a sure-footed guide." -Kristin Kobes Du Mez

This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people's affective responses to an adult Yoruba male with a 'deviant' hairstyle. The work, which views hairstyles as a form of symbolic communicative signal that encodes messages that are perceived and interpreted within a culture, provides an ontological and epistemological interpretation of Yoruba beliefs regarding dreadlocks with real-life illustrations of their treatment of an adult male with what they term irun were (insane person's hairdo). Based on experiential observations as well as socio-cultural and linguistic analyses, the book explores the dynamism of Yoruba worldview regarding head-hair within contemporary belief systems and discusses some of the factors that assure its continuity. It concludes with a cross-cultural comparison of the perceptions of dreadlocks, especially between Nigerian Yoruba people an d African American Yoruba practitioners.

A history of what it meant to be a man, and a citizen of an emerging nation throughout the nineteenth century. This book not only relates how Belgians were taught how to move and fight, but also how they spoke and sang to express masculinity and patriotism.

""Something very ancient and very new is being presented here Gary Stamper is bringing together many disciplines, much experience, fine scholarship, and good writing style too.""
-Richard Rohr, OFM, Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and author of "Wild Man to Wise Man" and "Adam's Return"
""Gary Stamper has done a masterful job of pulling together various integral and visionary shamanic approaches to assist the change that is greatly needed for not only men of all ages but also for the masculine that is ready to be activated within us all.""
-Linda Star Wolf, author of six books, including "Visionary Shamanism: Activating the Imaginal Cells of the Human Energy Field"
"Awakening the New Masculine "is a brave, exciting and significant contribution to one of the most important aspects of our time- the birth of a New Sacred Masculine capable of being fiercely and tenderly protective of the world and human life.""
-Andrew Harvey, Author of "The Hope a Guide to Sacred Activism"

"Awakening the New Masculine" is a bridge from the first wave of the mythopoetic men's movement of the last twenty-five years to what is only now beginning to emerge. Gary Stamper points the way to the second wave of men's work with humor, intelligence, and the kind of compassion that holds men accountable-daring, insisting, and giving them the tools they need to step up to a new way of being men.

You're going to awaken to the real possibility of becoming the man you've always known you could be, stepping into the truth of who you are in your fullness, cultivating potentials that have called to you, bringing your full presence and awareness to every moment for yourself, your loved ones, and the planet.

Many fathers are now providing hands-on, engaged care to babies and young children. This book draws on observations of, and interviews with, caregiving fathers, as well as analyses of fathers' memoirs and online blogs, to examine fathers' caregiving work as embodied practice and as lived experience.

Kojo Baffoe embodies what it is to be a contemporary African man. Of Ghanaian and German heritage, he was raised in Lesotho and moved to South Africa at the age of 27. Forever curious, Kojo has the enviable ability to simultaneously experience moments intimately and engage people (and their views) sincerely, while remaining detached enough to think through his experiences critically. He has earned a reputation as a thinker, someone who lives outside the box and free of the labels that society seeks to place on us.

Listen to Your Footsteps is an honest and, at times, raw collection of essays from a son, a father, a husband, a brother and a man deeply committed to doing the internal work. Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be ‘a man’.

Charles Berg (1892-1957) trained medically at St Thomas's Hospital, but before he could qualify the First World War broke out. He served in several medical positions throughout the war, having been released to obtain his medical qualification. After the war he started his career in general practice, but more interested in the causation of illness, went on to train firstly as a psychiatrist, then as a psychoanalyst, working at the Tavistock Clinic for seventeen years. During his time there under the founder Crichton-Miller he learnt to treat patients from the point of view of psychotherapy and eventually opened his own psychiatric and analytical practice. Out of print for many years, the Collected Works of Charles Berg is a great opportunity to revisit some of his finest works including his 'Sort of Autobiography'. This set will be a useful resource for those interested in the history of psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, queer studies and beyond.

This book captures the contested terrain of contemporary masculinity and explores a range of conceptualisations, with a specific focus on the role of the media and promotional culture within the context of sport. Asking whether sport is the final frontier of masculinity in society, the book focuses on how the production and representation of sport-related advertising and marketing contribute to the shifting and contested nature of masculinity and its alleged crisis. Drawing upon conceptual and empirical examples spanning across sport celebrity, professional sport leagues, beer advertising and indigenous cultures, the authors explore the links between sport, masculinity, promotional and consumer culture. Collectively, the chapters illustrate how advertising and promotional campaigns continue to circulate representations of particular forms of hegemonic masculinity while also accommodating new forms. Sport, Promotional Culture and the Crisis of Masculinity will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociology of sport, media studies, marketing, gender and masculinity studies.

Masculinity is not a monolithic phenomenon, but a historically discontinuous one-a fabrication as it were, of given cultural circumstances. Because of its opacity and instability, masculinity, like more recognizable systems of oppression, resists discernibility. In Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative, Jason Cortes seeks to reveal the inner workings of masculinity in the narrative prose of four major Caribbean authors: the Cuban Severo Sarduy; the Dominican American Junot Diaz; and the Puerto Ricans Luis Rafael Sanchez and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. By exploring the relationship between ethics and authority, the legacies of colonial violence, the figure of the dictator, the macho, and the dandy, the logic of the Archive, the presence of Oscar Wilde, and notions of trauma and mourning, Macho Ethics fills a gap surrounding issues of power and masculinity within the Caribbean context, and draws attention to what frequently remains invisible and unspoken.

Depictions of an alcohol-saturated Japan populated by intoxicated salarymen, beer dispensing vending machines, and a generally tolerant approach to public drunkenness, typify domestic and international perceptions of Japanese drinking. Even the popular definitions of Japanese masculinity are interwoven with accounts of personal alcohol consumption in public settings; gender norms that exclude and marginalize the alcoholic. And yet the alcoholic also exists in Japan, and exists in a manner revealing of the dominant processes by which alcoholism and addiction are globally influenced, understood, and classified. As such, this book examines the ways in which alcoholism is understood, accepted, and taken on as an influential and lived aspect of identity among Japanese men. At the most general level, it explores how a subjective idea comes to be regarded as an objective and unassailable fact. Here such a process concerns how the culturally and temporally specific treatment methodology of Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which much of Japan's other major sobriety association, Danshukai, is also based, has come to be the approach in Japan to diagnosing, treating, and structuring alcoholism as an aspect of individual identity. In particular, the gendered consequences, how this process transpires or is resisted by Japanese men, are considered, as they offer substantial insight into how categories of illness and disease are created, particularly the ramifications of dominant forms of such categorizations across increasingly porous cultural borders. Ramifications that become starkly obvious when Japan's persistent connection between notions of masculinity and alcohol consumption are considered from the perspective of the sober alcoholic and sobriety group member.

This book is open access under a CC BY license and explores the under-researched history of male mental illness from the mid-twentieth century. It argues that statistics suggesting women have been more vulnerable to depression and anxiety are misleading since they underplay a host of alternative presentations of 'distress' more common in men.