As each generation confronts aging and responds to its challenges, the literary community-ranging from Philip Roth to Jonathan Franzen-has provided nuanced and thoughtful depictions that transcend stereotypes of old men as feeble and broken individuals. Under the sage guidance of these authors-many facing old age themselves-older male characters have become increasingly prevalent in literary fiction. In Aging Masculinity in the American Novel, Alex Hobbs turns the spotlight on matters related to later life by examining a broad range of works. Hobbs looks at novels not only by literary lions of the Baby Boom generation, but authors on the cusp of old age who anticipate its consequences. In addition to works by Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, and Ethan Canin, the author considers the perspectives of female writers, such as Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler, and Jane Smiley, who have created complex older male characters. Hobbs argues that previous studies regarding male aging in popular culture have been reductive, and she suggests that male and female experiences and interpretations of aging are individualistic and unique. With a bold argument for how readers should contemplate masculinity in literary fiction, this book helps us better understand the full range of issues that older men face-from legacy and loss to health issues and grace. The author's illuminating and persuasive perspectives will ignite a new way of thinking about this subject and its central place in the national conversation. Looking at how older men's lives are documented in American fiction, Aging Masculinity in the American Novel will be of interest to scholars and students of popular culture, gender studies, aging studies, and literature.

This book unpacks the character of pornographic representations of queer Black masculinity and how these representations vary between corporate and noncorporate producers. The author argues that representations of Black men in gay porn rely on stereotypes of Black masculinity to arouse consumers, especially those which characterize Black men as "missing links" or focus excessively on their "dark phalluses." Moreover, these depictions consistently separate gay Black and white men's sexuality into bifurcated discursive spaces, thereby essentializing sexual aspects of racial identity. Lastly, though such depictions are less prevalent in user-submitted videos, overall, both user-submitted and corporate content reify stereotypes about Black masculinity. This book is written for researchers, lecturers, and graduate courses in the social sciences and humanities, including Sociology, Social Psychology, Sexuality, African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Culture and Art Studies, Porn Studies, Social Media Studies, and Public Health.

* Introduces a comprehensive sexological model through which Black sexuality can be understood and navigated in the contemporary era. * Offers a sex positive perspective, addressing sensual pleasure, mental excitation, and positive emotion. * Demystifies and clarifies some of the sexual experiences of African Americans, increasing the reader's understanding and ensuring clinicians are well-informed when treating clients. * Will be the first title to be published in on the topic of black sexuality for over a decade, with the potential to be a truly leading book in the field.

* Introduces a comprehensive sexological model through which Black sexuality can be understood and navigated in the contemporary era. * Offers a sex positive perspective, addressing sensual pleasure, mental excitation, and positive emotion. * Demystifies and clarifies some of the sexual experiences of African Americans, increasing the reader's understanding and ensuring clinicians are well-informed when treating clients. * Will be the first title to be published in on the topic of black sexuality for over a decade, with the potential to be a truly leading book in the field.

This book makes a unique contribution to contemporary research into masculinities, men's movements, and fathers' rights groups. It examines the role of changing masculinities in creating equality and/or reinforcing inequality by analysing diverse men's movements, their politics, and the identities they (re)construct. Jordan advances a typology for categorising men's movements ('feminist', 'postfeminist', and 'backlash' movements) and addresses debates over the construction of 'masculinity-in-crisis', arguing that 'crisis' is frequently invoked in problematic ways. These themes are further explored through original analyses of material produced by 'feminist', 'postfeminist', and 'backlash' men's groups. The main empirical contribution of the book draws on interviews with fathers' rights activists to explore the (gendered) implications of the 'new' politics of fatherhood. The nuanced examination of fathers' rights perspectives reveals multiple, complex narratives of masculinity, fatherhood, and gender politics. The cumulative effect of these is, at best, postfeminist and depoliticising, and, at worst, another vitriolic 'backlash'. The New Politics of Fatherhood expands scholarly understandings of gender, masculinities, and social movements in the under-researched UK context, and will appeal to readers with interests in these areas.

Images and ideas associated with masculinity are forever in flux. In this book, Donald Moss addresses the never-ending effort of men-regardless of sexual orientation-to shape themselves in relation to the unstable notion of masculinity. Part 1 looks at the lifelong labor faced by boys and men of assessing themselves in relation to an always shifting, always receding, ideal of "masculinity." In Part 2, Moss considers a series of nested issues regarding homosexuality, homophobia and psychoanalysis. Part 3 focuses on the interface between the body experienced as a private entity and the body experienced as a public entity-the body experienced as one's own and the body subject to the judgments, regulations and punishments of the external world. The final part looks at men and violence. Men must contend with the entwined problems of regulating aggression and figuring out its proper level, aiming to avoid both excess and insufficiency. This section focuses on excessive aggression and its damaging consequences, both to its object and to its subjects. Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Man will be of great interest not only to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, but also to a much wider audience of readers interested in gender studies, queer studies, and masculinity.

This book explores the lived, embodied experiences of aging men as a counterpoint to the weary stereotypes often imposed on them. Conventionally, in Western cultures, they are seen as inevitably in decline. The book challenges these distorted images through a detailed analysis of aging men's life stories.

The Everyday Lives of Gay Men draws on the expertise of 12 contributors from different countries and fields, writing from an autoethnographic first-person approach. Putting the power of personal stories at the centre of the construction of sophisticated narratives of gay men's lives, the accounts draw attention to the limits of traditional perspectives to gay men's studies that look at gayness through a sexualised lens and explore how gay men make sense of their identity in their everyday lives. Together they present a complex, nuanced understanding of gayness and challenge the conception of 'being gay' as a sexual orientation because it describes in sexual terms an identity that is not only, not always, and not predominantly sexual. The authors come from a variety of fields, including counselling studies and sociology, to communication, religion, and education. The innovative approach of The Everyday Lives of Gay Men makes it ideal for students and scholars in gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology, mental health, and research methods. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367676834, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book presents an analysis of representations of white, heterosexual, working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989 to trace the development of the sociocultural and material conditions that shaped the masculinities which are helping to shape contemporary culture. This book seeks to fan the 'spark of hope' in the past that informs our present. The period which saw the establishment of the welfare state and the construction and breakdown of the post-war consensus in British politics was of great significance in the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities and their correspondent representations. The author engages with a variety of cultural texts across various modes and media including films (Alfie), plays (Don't Look Back in Anger), television (Boys from the Blackstuff), and music (The Beatles), and employs the analysis of the representation of working-class masculinities as a lens through which to examine a range of historical and cultural moments. This book reinstates class as a central precept in the study of British cultural representations and offers a timely intervention in ongoing debates around class and gender identities in Britain. The book will be key reading for students and researchers with interests in twentieth-century social and cultural British history, masculinities and gender studies, twentieth-century British literature, British television, and cultural studies more broadly.

The Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies provides a contemporary critical and scholarly overview of theorizing and research on masculinities as well as emerging ideas and areas of study that are likely to shape research and understanding of gender and men in the future. The forty-eight chapters of the handbook take an interdisciplinary approach to a range of topics on men and masculinities related to identity, sex, sexuality, culture, aesthetics, technology and pressing social issues. The handbook's transnational lens acknowledges both the localities and global character of masculinity. A clear message in the book is the need for intersectional theorizing in dialogue with feminist, queer and sexuality studies in making sense of men and masculinities. Written in a clear and direct style, the handbook will appeal to students, teachers and researchers in the social sciences and humanities, as well as professionals, practitioners and activists.

Charting production, distribution, censorship, and reception, this book examines Y Tu Mama Tambien in its presentation as a journey of self-discoveries. Three young adults enjoy a road trip together in search of a legendary beach. Behind their stories are mythologies of youth, a network of ideas in the film that reflects life outside the theaters. The deceptively complex film leaves the characters and its viewers with, instead of oversimplified and hollow answers, provocative questions and existential concerns. Made independently in Mexico, the film crosses over transnational issues, global markets, and mainstream and alternative aesthetics. It transforms road movie and youth film genres and shows a 'musical, magical' Mexico to the world. This book synthesizes several approaches in order to extensively examine Y Tu Mama Tambien. Covering the film's production history, its distribution and censorship, and larger industrial, political, and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the too-often overlooked aspects of youthful sexuality alongside figurations of maturity, rites of passage, and covenants-made, broken, and remade-that not only inform representations of identity but also complicate the processes of identity formation themselves.

While a majority of people identify as "heterosexual" if asked about their sexual identity, what does that really mean? How did identifying as "straight" arise, particularly in relation to identifying as "queer," "lesbian," and "gay"? How are individuals socialized to view themselves and others as straight, even when many people are sexually fluid? How do institutions like government bodies, the educational system, and the family reinforce heterosexuality? This collection introduces the field of Critical Heterosexualities Studies and key lines of inquiry within the field. Like Masculinity Studies and Whiteness Studies, Heterosexualities Studies critically examines the dominant category and identity group in order to illuminate the taken-for-granted assumptions that surround heterosexual identities. This critical perspective questions the idea that heterosexuality is natural, normal, and biologically driven. A recurring question throughout this Handbook is: what does it mean to say that there are multiple forms of heterosexuality? The answer is provided by cases showing how straightness varies between men and women but also across different racial groups, social classes, and one's status as trans or cisgender. Organized around key themes of inquiry including heterosexualities across the life course, straight identities and their intersections, the power of straightness in state politics, and the changing meaning of heterosexualities in the context of sexual fluidity, this collection provides readers with an introduction to Critical Heterosexualities Studies through important theoretical statements, key historical studies, and current empirical research. Featuring both classic works and original essays written expressly for this volume, this collection provides a state-of-the-art overview of this exciting new field in sexualities studies.

1. This is the only book like it on the market. It has a multi-disciplinary market across criminology, sociology and gender studies, and can be used as key reading on courses on sex crime, gender and sexuality and the sociology of deviance 2. Features include international case studies and a glossary of key terms. 3. The new edition has been fully revised and updated to include up-to-the-minute crime data and literature updates, as well as further coverage of LGBTQ rights, expanded discussion of non-binary identities, and coverage of new studies on online dating, pornography and sexting.

One of America's greatest challenges is to reverse the steep decline of the intellectual performance of its young men. The dramatic increase in violent acts and the downward spiral of high stakes testing in our schools has confirmed that many of our young men have lost hope or simply given up. Reconnecting, Redirecting, and Redefining 21st Century Males identifies the physical, emotional, and psychological adjustments many boys have been forced to navigate alone during their most vulnerable, formative years and provides adjustments that adults must make to assist them in these transitions.

Gendered Power Dynamics and Exotic Dance examines the social phenomenon of exotic dancing. Presenting a compelling multilevel analysis of dancer interactions, organizational practices, and institutional forces, this book challenges our understanding of sexuality and power. Centering the voices and experiences of exotic dancers, this book explores the relationship between exotic dancing and power at the micro-interactional, meso-organizational, and macro-institutional levels, informing a feminist theory of power that seeks out systems of domination in order to challenge and change them. Through direct interviews and observations collected between 1993 and 2021 from 40 different clubs in the United States, Deshotels and Forsyth demystify the seemingly contrary findings about exotic dancing and power. They show how and why individual dancers can be simultaneously empowered and exploited beyond individual traits, interactions, or settings in the nexus of gender and power in exotic dancing. The book will be useful for scholarly readers in the subject areas of sociology, cultural studies, gender/sexualities studies, sex work, and organizations theory. Written in a clear, accessible manner, this book will also appeal to a general audience interested in understanding the complex interactions of gender, power, feminism, and exotic dance.

This book critically unpacks the why and how around everyday rhetorics and slogans promoting global LGBTQ equality. Examining the means by which particular discourses of progress and hope are circulated globally, it offers unique insights into how LGBTQ livelihoods, relationships, and social movements are legitimated and valued in contemporary society. Adopting an innovative critical discourse-ethnographic approach, Comer draws on scholarship from the sociolinguistics of global mobility, queer linguistics, and digital media studies, offering in-depth analyses of representations of LGBTQ identity across a range of domains. The volume examines semiotic linkages between: LGBTQ tourism marketing; Cape Town, South Africa, as a locus for contemporary ideologies of global mobility and equality; diversity management practices framing LGBTQ equality as a business imperative; and, humanitarian discourses within transnational LGBTQ advocacy. Autoethnographic vignettes and principles from within queer theory are incorporated by Comer's critical discourse-ethnographic approach, giving voice to personal experience in order to sharpen scholarly understanding of the relationships between everyday 'social voices', globalized neoliberal political economy, and the media. Taken together, the volume expansively (if queerly) maps what Comer refers to as 'the mediatization of equality', and will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, as well as those working across such fields as media studies, queer studies, and sociology.

seeks to intervene in critical academic conversations by traversing different historical periods and different geographic locations within the African Diaspora, to expand the global reach of black women's stories challenges the ahistorical lens of U.S.-based women's and gender studies scholarship which has marginalized women's histories and erased the racial, class, sexual, and geographical differences of women's experiences Uses interdisciplinary scholarship in critical race and feminist theories, literary and art histories, and media studies to tell a new kind of Black Feminist History

1. This is the only book like it on the market. It has a multi-disciplinary market across criminology, sociology and gender studies, and can be used as key reading on courses on sex crime, gender and sexuality and the sociology of deviance 2. Features include international case studies and a glossary of key terms. 3. The new edition has been fully revised and updated to include up-to-the-minute crime data and literature updates, as well as further coverage of LGBTQ rights, expanded discussion of non-binary identities, and coverage of new studies on online dating, pornography and sexting.

The term "femme" originates from 1940s Western working-class lesbian bar culture, wherein femme referred to a feminine lesbian who was typically in a relationship with a butch lesbian. Expanding from this original meaning, femme has since emerged as a form of femininity reclaimed by queer and culturally marginalized folks. Importantly, femme has also evolved into a theoretical framework. Femme theory argues that "femme" constitutes a missing piece in queer and feminist discourses of femininity. Attending to this gap, femme theory centres queer femininities as a means of pushing against the deeply embedded masculinist orientation of queer and gender theory. Thus, femme theory offers tools to shift the way researchers and readers understand femininity as well as systems of gender and power more broadly. This book is an introduction to femme theory, showcasing how femme can be used as a theoretical framework across a variety of contexts and disciplines, such as Film & Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology, or Critical Disability Studies; from countries, including Canada, China, Guyana and the USA. Femme theory asks readers to reconsider how femininity is conceptualized, revealing some of the many taken for granted assumptions that are embedded within cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, and power. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Gendered Power Dynamics and Exotic Dance examines the social phenomenon of exotic dancing. Presenting a compelling multilevel analysis of dancer interactions, organizational practices, and institutional forces, this book challenges our understanding of sexuality and power. Centering the voices and experiences of exotic dancers, this book explores the relationship between exotic dancing and power at the micro-interactional, meso-organizational, and macro-institutional levels, informing a feminist theory of power that seeks out systems of domination in order to challenge and change them. Through direct interviews and observations collected between 1993 and 2021 from 40 different clubs in the United States, Deshotels and Forsyth demystify the seemingly contrary findings about exotic dancing and power. They show how and why individual dancers can be simultaneously empowered and exploited beyond individual traits, interactions, or settings in the nexus of gender and power in exotic dancing. The book will be useful for scholarly readers in the subject areas of sociology, cultural studies, gender/sexualities studies, sex work, and organizations theory. Written in a clear, accessible manner, this book will also appeal to a general audience interested in understanding the complex interactions of gender, power, feminism, and exotic dance.

Queer Democracy undertakes an interdisciplinary critical investigation of the centuries-old metaphor of society as a body, drawing on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment as a constructive resource for reimagining politics and society. Daniel Miller argues that this metaphor has consistently expressed a desire for social and political order, grounded in the social body's imagined normative shape or morphology. The consistent result, from the "concord" discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics, all the way through to contemporary nationalism and populism, has been the suppression of any dissent that would unmake the social body's presumed normativity. Miller argues that the conception of embodiment at the heart of the metaphor is a fantasy, and that negative social and political reactions to dissent represent visceral, dysphoric responses to its reshaping of the social body. He argues that social body's essential queerness, defined by fluidity and lack of a fixed morphology, spawns queer democracy, expressed through ongoing social and political practices that aim to extend liberty and equality to new social domains. Queer Democracy articulates a new departure for the ongoing development of theoretical articulations linking queer and trans theory with political theory. It will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers engaged in research on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.

Queer Democracy undertakes an interdisciplinary critical investigation of the centuries-old metaphor of society as a body, drawing on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment as a constructive resource for reimagining politics and society. Daniel Miller argues that this metaphor has consistently expressed a desire for social and political order, grounded in the social body's imagined normative shape or morphology. The consistent result, from the "concord" discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics, all the way through to contemporary nationalism and populism, has been the suppression of any dissent that would unmake the social body's presumed normativity. Miller argues that the conception of embodiment at the heart of the metaphor is a fantasy, and that negative social and political reactions to dissent represent visceral, dysphoric responses to its reshaping of the social body. He argues that social body's essential queerness, defined by fluidity and lack of a fixed morphology, spawns queer democracy, expressed through ongoing social and political practices that aim to extend liberty and equality to new social domains. Queer Democracy articulates a new departure for the ongoing development of theoretical articulations linking queer and trans theory with political theory. It will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers engaged in research on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.

A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.

Unleashing Manhood in the Cage: Masculinity and Mixed Martial Arts addresses the question "Why do mixed martial arts participants endure grueling workouts and suffer through injury, with little or no pay, just to compete?" The answer is because the participants enjoy a form of idolization from their supporters, each other, and culture more generally, which is linked to masculinity. In fact, MMA organizers, from the very beginning, purposefully created elements of the sport that are linked to dominant narratives about manhood. In this context, men don thin open-fingered gloves, lock themselves in a caged enclosure, and slug it out in a fight with few rules to see who comes out on top. This all occurs while "ring girls" in high-heels and skin-tight shirts and shorts stride around outside the cage holding signs and peddling t-shirts. The sum of these elements is the creation of a type of a publicly accessible and consumable form of masculinity. The sport of mixed martial arts is a rich and intriguing space where the construction of gender can be explored through a sociological and ethnographic lens.

The volume engages with sexuality and queer issues in India. It brings cinema and representation in order to understand the reality of sexuality and queer existence in contemporary neo-liberal India. With the increasing interest gender and sexuality studies this volume will appeal international readership.