This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing court eunuchs and bishops together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered pre-modern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities. The thirteen chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyze how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks, provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.

On April 22, 2015, Boston University professor Saida Grundy set off a Twitter storm with her provocative question: "Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the "few bad apples" frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of "post- racialism."

This engaging and accessibly-written textbook has a unique framework to study men and their masculinities in Western society. Truly interdisciplinary, it introduces the student reader to the theories, research, and debates about men within gender politics.

This textbook is perhaps unique for masculinity studies because it stimulates student learning by not only examining classical men’s studies research that focuses on men’s harms and men’s advantages, but it provides an investigation of men’s good, and men’s disadvantages.

It is well-balanced, provocative, research-informed, and sure to keep the student reading.

Being a Man is a formative work which reveals the myriad and complex negotiations for constructions of masculine identities in the greater ancient Near East and beyond. Through a juxtaposition of studies into Neo-Assyrian artistic representations and omens, biblical hymns and narrative, Hittite, Akkadian, and Indian epic, as well as detailed linguistic studies on gender and sex in the Sumerian and Hebrew languages, the book challenges traditional understandings and assumed homogeneity for what it meant "to be a man" in antiquity. Being a Man is an indispensable resource for students of the ancient Near East, and a fascinating study for anyone with an interest in gender and sexuality throughout history.

There continues to be much concern about the retention and persistent of men in college, particularly Black, Latinx, and Native American men. In addition, queer and trans* men also have found institutions to be problematic spaces. For those who do persist, we know that men are overrepresented in student conduct cases and engage in risky behaviors around alcohol, drug use, and sexual relationships. Additionally, we know that college men have historically avoided engaging in help-seeking behaviors for their academic and personal success. This book addresses the ways that theory can be put into practice for powerful, transformative learning to support college men and their development. This book synthesizes the research of the past three decades on college men to inform college student educators on the developmental needs of college men and illuminates how young men are socialized prior to their arrival to campus, but perhaps more importantly, how the collegiate environment becomes a training ground for the socialization of masculinities by students, their peers, and their environments. Beyond that it aims to set out how practitioners can help young men understand why and how they have been socialized around their gender identity, but also what their gender identity and sense of masculinity means for their future selves. The book highlights programs and services designed to have college men engage with and dialogue around issues of hegemonic, toxic, or unhealthy aspects of masculinity. These promising practices can offer college men opportunities to understand their power, privilege, and identity in ways that can be affirming and healthier, leading to more life-giving chances. This is all the more important in the context of an ever-evolving society where traditionally held norms and expectations around gender, particularly masculinities, are shifting. This book equips student affairs staff, faculty, and administrators to better support college men's development. It offers readers insights, ideas, and models for adapting and developing programs, services, and initiatives that may meaningfully meet the needs of specific student populations, while recognizing that there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to this work.

When a man follows the principles of biblical manhood, those around him benefit from his leadership and care. "Kingdom Man" challenges and equips men to fully understand their position under God as well as their position over what God has given them. The biblical definition of a man is one who has learned to operate under the authority of Jesus Christ while carrying out responsible and legitimate leadership within the sphere of influence that God has placed him. "Kingdom Man" provides concepts men can follow that will help them to actively pursue ways to maximize and develop the character qualities of biblical manhood in their lives.

In recent years, menswear has moved decisively center stage. Menswear Revolution investigates the transformation of men's fashion through the lens of shifting masculinities, examining how its increasing diversity has created new ways for men to explore and express their identities. Harnessing sustained market growth and creative dynamism on the runway, ground-breaking designers from Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane to Craig Green have revolutionized the discipline with their bold re-imaginings of the male wardrobe. Analysing the role of the media in shaping attitudes to men's fashion, Menswear Revolution studies how competing narratives of masculinity are reflected in popular discourse. Taking us from the mod and peacock revolutions of the 1960s to the new wave aesthetics of the 1980s, the book explores historical precedents for today's menswear scene - and looks at the evolution of the 'ideal' male body, from the muscular to the lean and boyish. Combining interviews with fashion professionals with close analyses of garments and advertising, Menswear Revolution provides an authoritative account of menswear design today. Highlighting its relationship to changing concepts of gender, the book provides a much-needed update to scholarship on masculinity, fashion and the body.

This book offers a developmental neuroendocrinologically-oriented perspective in the area of specialized psychiatric care for men termed "Men's Mental Health." This book collates the contributions of over 40 authors in the field of men's mental health throughout 24 chapters in an attempt to overview the emerging developments in this field. Developmental neurobiology serves as the central organizational factor for this four-sectioned book. In the first section, the developmental neurobiological perspective is introduced and considerations specific to men's mental health in infants, toddlers, children, and adolescents are discussed. In the second section, the relevance of men's mental health to informed suicide and homicide prevention among men are presented. The third section reviews major mental illness in men, while the last section provides an overview of the intersection of men's mental health with general medical conditions and the future directions for the field. This collection gathers the latest writings from authors around the world in this field and will be of value for clinicians and researchers interested in an increasingly-popular approach to providing neurobiologically-tailored care for men.

According to masculinities theory, masculinity is not a biological imperative but a social construction. Men engage in a constant struggle with other men to prove their masculinity. Masculinities and the Law develops a multidimensional approach. It sees categories of identity--including various forms of raced, classed, and sex-oriented masculinities--as operating simultaneously and creating different effects in different contexts. By applying multidimensional masculinities theory to law, this cutting-edge collection both expands the field of masculinities and develops new thinking about important issues in feminist and critical race theories. The topics covered include how norms of masculinity influence the behavior of policemen, firefighters, and international soldiers on television and in the real world; employment discrimination against masculine cocktail waitresses and all transgendered employees; the legal treatment of fathers in the U.S. and the ways unauthorized migrant fathers use the dangers of border crossing to boost their masculine esteem; how Title IX fails to curtail the masculinity of sport; the racist assumptions behind the prison rape debate; the surprising roots of homophobia in Jamaican dancehall music; and the contradictions of the legal debate over women veiling in Turkey. Ultimately, the book argues that multidimensional masculinities theory can change how law is interpreted and applied.

In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow does not deny the strong cultural and historical constraints that placed limits on identity formation in the early modern period. Still, as he contends in this witty, reflective, and generously illustrated book, the category of the individual was important and highly complex for a variety of men in this particular time and place, for both those who belonged to the elite and those who aspired to be part of it. Biow explores the individual in light of early modern Italy's new patronage systems, educational programs, and work opportunities in the context of an increased investment in professionalization, the changing status of artisans and artists, and shifting attitudes about the ideology of work, fashion, and etiquette. He turns his attention to figures familiar (Benvenuto Cellini, Baldassare Castiglione, Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgio Vasari) and somewhat less so (the surgeon-physician Leonardo Fioravanti, the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio). One could excel as an individual, he demonstrates, by possessing an indefinable nescio quid, by acquiring, theorizing, and putting into practice a distinct body of professional knowledge, or by displaying the exclusively male adornment of impressively designed facial hair. Focusing on these and other matters, he reveals how we significantly impoverish our understanding of the past if we dismiss the notion of the individual from our narratives of the Italian and the broader European Renaissance.

This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, events which have redrawn maps and remapped or unmapped bodies with different effects. These include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, civil wars, religious conflicts, and migration. Political crisis functions as a framing device to offer nuances and clarifications to the assumed visibility of male bodies and male activities during political crisis. The focus on masculinities in historical moments of crisis divests masculinity of its naturalization and calls for a heterogeneous conceptualization of the everyday practices and experiences of 'being a man.' Written by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and drawing on a range of written and visual texts, this book contributes to this recent rethinking of South Asian literary and cultural history by engaging masculinity as a historicized category of analysis that accommodates an understanding of history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain's fall from imperial power after 1640. This book culls genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose fiction, to restore the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court to the history of masculinity. Refuting the current conception that Spain's political decline precipitated a 'crisis of masculinity', Masculine Virtue maps changes in figurations of normative masculine conduct from 1500 to 1700. As Spain assumed the role of Europe's first modern centralized empire, codes of masculine conduct changed to meet the demands of global rule. Viewed chronologically, Shifra Armon shows Spanish conduct literature to reveal three axes of transformation. The ideal subject (gendered male in both practice and law) became progressively more adaptable to changing circumstances, more intensely involved in currying his own public image, and more desirous of achieving renown. By bringing recent advances in gender theory to bear on normative rather than non-normative masculinities of early modern Spain, Armon is able to foreground the emergence of energizing new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.

Despite a decade of sociological research documenting that black fathers' level of engagement with their children is equal to or higher than average, stereotypes of black men as "deadbeat dads" still shape popular perceptions and scholarly discourse. In Fathering from the Margins, the sociologist Aasha M. Abdill draws on four years of fieldwork in low-income, predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to dispel these destructive assumptions. She considers the obstacles faced-and the strategies used-by black men with children. Abdill presents qualitative and quantitative evidence that confirms the increasing presence of black fathers in their communities, arguing that changing social norms about gender roles in black families have shifted fathering behaviors. Black men in communities such as Bed-Stuy still face social and structural disadvantages, including disproportionate unemployment and incarceration, with significant implications for family life. Against this backdrop, black fathers attempt to reconcile contradictory beliefs about what makes one a good father and what makes one a respected man by developing different strategies for expressing affection and providing parental support. Black men's involvement with their children is affected by the attitudes of their peers, the media, and especially the women of their families and communities: from the grandmothers who often become gatekeepers to involvement in a child's life to the female-dominated sectors of childcare, primary school, and family-service provision. Abdill shows how supporting black men in their quest to be-and be seen as-family men is the key to securing not only their children's well-being but also their own.

Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within larger social structures that define whiteness as desirable and normative while othering men of color. In queer erotic economies this othering may take the form of sexual rejection or fetishization of men of color, but C. Winter Han argues that the real danger of sexual racism is that it creates a hierarchy of racial worth that extends outside of erotic encounters into the everyday lives of gay men of color. In this way, sexual racism perpetuates a larger project of racial erasing that equates gayness with whiteness to secure acceptance for gay white men at the expense of queers of color. With vivid examples from interviews, media representations, and online dating sites, Han highlights the creative means through which gay men of color, cordoned off in spaces both gay and straight, produce alternative frameworks to combat dominant narratives. Racial Erotics offers a new paradigm for understanding the connection of race and queer desire, demonstrating how race profoundly shapes sexual desires among men while racialized notions of desire construct beliefs about belonging.

Two best friends, 500 miles, one wheelchair, and the challenge of a lifetime.

Friendship takes on new meaning in this true story of Justin and Patrick, born less than two days apart in the same hospital. Best friends their whole lives, they grew up together, went to school together, and were best man in each other's weddings. When Justin was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease that robbed him of the use of his arms and legs, Patrick was there, helping to feed and care for him in ways he'd never imagined. Determined to live life to the fullest, the friends refused to give into despair or let physical limitations control what was possible for Justin.

So when Justin heard about the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile trek through Spain, he wondered aloud to Patrick whether the two of them could ever do it. Patrick's immediate response was: "I'll push you."

I'll Push You is the real-life story of this incredible journey. A travel adventure full of love, humor, and spiritual truth, it exemplifies what every friendship is meant to be and shows what it means to never find yourself alone. You'll discover how love and faith can push past all limits--and make us the best versions of ourselves.

In Manhood Acts Michael Schwalbe offers a new perspective on the social construction of manhood and its relationship to male domination. Schwalbe argues that study of masculinity has lost touch with its feminist roots and has been seduced by the politically safe notion of 'multiple masculinities'. Manhood Acts delineates the practices males use to construct 'women' and 'men' as unequal categories. Schwalbe reclaims the radical feminist insights that gender is a field of domination, not a field of play, and that manhood is fundamentally about exerting or resisting control. Manhood Acts arrives at the conclusion that abolishing gender as a system of oppression will require more than transgressive self-presentation. It will be necessary to end the exploitive economic relationships that necessitate manhood itself.

In 1933, George L. Mosse fled Berlin and settled in the United States, where he went on to become a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Through rigorous and innovative scholarship, Mosse uncovered the forces that spurred antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and populism. His transformative work was propelled by a desire to know his own persecutors and has been vital to generations of scholars seeking to understand the cultural and intellectual origins and mechanisms of Nazism. This translation makes Emilio Gentile's groundbreaking study of Mosse's life and work available to English language readers. A leading authority on fascism, totalitarianism, and Mosse's legacy, Gentile draws on a wealth of published and unpublished material, including letters, interviews, lecture plans, and marginalia from Mosse's personal library. Gentile details how the senior scholar eschewed polemics and employed rigorous academic standards to better understand fascism and the "catastrophe of the modern man"-how masculinity transformed into a destructive ideology. As long as wars are waged over political beliefs in popular culture, Mosse's theories of totalitarianism will remain as relevant as ever.

"A man cannot be passive about what Scripture tells him to do for his family and expect to be found faithful to God in the end. He must see with spiritual eyes and realize that future generations are directly impacted by his daily decisions." --The Resolution for Men

The Resolution for Men is the inspiring book born out of Courageous, a new film by the makers of Fireproof coming to theaters nationwide in fall 2011. The movie, which presents a powerful story of strong male leadership, is an emotionally charged wake-up call to fathers whose influence upon their children and society is immeasurable. The Resolution for Men follows to challenge men of all ages to become as bold and intentional about embracing their responsibilities as leaders of their homes, marriages, and children.

Written by Stephen and Alex Kendrick, screenwriters of Courageous and authors of New York Times No. 1 best seller The Love Dare (five million copies sold), The Resolution for Men strategically inspires men to reconcile with their past, re-engage in the present by taking full responsibility for their wives and children, and then move forward with a bold and clear resolution for the future. Written in partnership with the movie and Priscilla Shirer's new book, The Resolution for Women, it is designed to inspire a revolution.

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.

Men and Sex provides a comprehensive yet accessible account of male sexuality by using the theoretical concept of the 'sexual script' to illuminate different aspects of men's sexual behaviour. Graham begins by discussing different theories of sexuality, before providing a more detailed description of sexual script theory. This proposes how male sexual behaviour can be explained as a result of cultural influences modified by individual experience and personality as well as by interaction with others. Individual chapters detail the development of sexual scripts in childhood and adolescence, masturbation, cultural influences on sexuality, heterosexual behaviour, variations and problems in sexual functioning, homosexual behaviour, transsexualism, procreative sex, coercive sexual behaviour, the impact of physical and mental health problems on sexuality, and sexuality and pornography. The concluding chapter looks at the future of male sexuality. The book makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on masculinity studies.

As much as it may distress us, our boys are future men. Unbelief cannot look past surfaces. Unbelief squashes. But faith teaches. Faith takes a boy aside and tells him that this part of what he did was good, while that other part of what he did got in the way. "And this is how to do it better next time." As we look to Scripture for patterns of masculinity for our sons, we find them manifested perfectly in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who set the ultimate pattern for friendship, four courage, for faithfulness, and for integrity.

Over the last few decades, there has been a marked increase in media and debate surrounding a specific group of offences in modern Democratic nations which bear the brunt of the label 'crimes against morality'. Included within this group are offences related to prostitution and pornography, homosexuality and incest and child sexual abuse. This book examines the nexus between sex, crime and morality from a theoretical perspective. This is the first academic text to offer an examination and analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of sex-related crimes and social attitudes towards them and the historical, anthropological and moral reasons for differentiating these crimes in contemporary western culture. The book is divided into three sections corresponding to three theoretical frameworks: Part 1 examines the moral temporality of sex and taboo as a foundation for legislation governing sex crimes Part 2 focuses on the geography of sex and deviance, specifically notions of public morality and the public private divide Part 3 examines the moral economy of sex and harm, including the social construction of harm. Sex, Crime and Morality will be key reading for students of criminology, criminal justice, gender studies and ethics, and will also be of interest to justice professionals.

This book examines key themes and concepts pertaining to religious and sexual identities and expressions, mapping theoretical, methodological, and empirical dimensions. It explores the ways in which debates around sexuality and religion have been framed, and what research is still needed to expand the field as it develops. Through the deployment of contemporary research, including data from the authors' own projects, Religion and Sexualities offers an encompassing account of the sociology of sexuality and religion, considering theoretical and methodological lenses, queer experiences, and how sexuality is gendered in religious contexts. This comprehensive text will act as an essential accompaniment to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, whether they have a general interest in the field or are embarking on their own research in this area.