"The Absence of Grace" is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's "Il libro del Cortegiano" (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa's "Galateo" (1558). The interpretive method is a form of close reading the author describes as reconstructed old New Criticism, that is, close reading conditioned by an interest in and analysis of the historical changes reflected in the text. The book focuses on the way the "Courtier" and "Galateo" cope with and represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe. More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and gender.
The book is in three parts. Part One examines a distinction and correlation the "Courtier" establishes between two key terms, (1) "sprezzatura, " defined as a behavioral skill intended to simulate the attributes of (2) "grazia, " understood as the grace and privileges of noble birth. Because "sprezzatura" is negatively conceptualized as the absence of grace it generates anxiety and suspicion in performers and observers alike. In order to suggest how the binary opposition between these terms affected the discourse of manners, the author singles out the titular episode of "Galateo, " an anecdote about table manners, which he reads closely and then sets in its historical perspective. Part Two takes up the question of "sprezzatura" in the gender debate that develops in Book 3 of the "Courtier, " and Part Three explores in detail the characterization of the two narrators in the "Courtier" and "Galateo, " who are represented as unreliable and an object of parody or critique.

This books sounds a bold call to the highest consecration in our sexuality. Get ready for a unique book that is apprehending, prudent, and empowering. Based on Bob's own experience with Job 31:1, this book extends an invitation to actually make a covenant vow before God with our eyes. Written for all ages, men and women alike, this book excavates from the ancient spirituality of the book of Job the master key to consecration and illuminates its relevance to us today. The careful writing style will make you feel safe recommending this book even to teens.

Surveys reveal that domestic abuse is more commonplace among teenagers and young adults than older populations, yet surprisingly little is written about young men's involvement in it. Reporting on a three-year study based in the UK, this book explores young men's involvement in domestic abuse, whether as victims, perpetrators or witnesses to violent behaviors between adults. Original survey data, focus group material and in-depth biographical interviews are used to make the case for a more thoroughgoing engagement with the meanings young men come to attribute to violent behavior, include the tendency among many to configure violence within families as "fights" that call for acts of male heroism. The book also highlights the dearth of services interventions for young men prone to domestic abuse, and the challenges of developing responsive practice in this area. Each section of the book highlights further online resources that those looking to conduct research in this area or apply its insights in practice can draw upon.

Gender, especially masculinity, is a perspective rarely applied in discourses on cinema of Eastern/Central Europe. Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema exposes an English-speaking audience to a large proportion of this region's cinema that previously remained unknown, focusing on the relationship between representation of masculinity and nationality in the films of two and later three countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The objective of the book is to discuss the main types of men populating Polish, Czech and Slovak films: that of soldier, father, heterosexual and homosexual lover, against a rich political, social and cultural background. Czech, Slovak and Polish cinema appear to provide excellent material for comparison as they were produced in neighbouring countries which for over forty years endured a similar political system - state socialism.

This study examines the impact of racial, gender, and religious constructs of Jewish masculinity on a select group of male writers including George Du Maurier, Theodor Herzl, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Philip Roth during the Modernist and Postmodern eras. In reading the work of these authors, Davison demonstrates how religious-based prejudices as well as doctrinal Judaic concepts were sustained in the discourse of race and gender surrounding "the Jew." The project engages a dynamic composed of the historically constitutive Jewish racial portrait, the psychosexual impact of that racial theory as internalized by Jewish males, and differing or conflicting discussions of Judaic-based gender and codes of male behavior. By focusing alternately on non-Jewish and Jewish writers, Davison explores how the racial/gender construct of "the feminized Jew" was pivotal to each in negotiating male-selfhood during his encounter with modernity. The study engages these issues during the Dreyfus era, within early Zionism, and in post-war High Modernism. In a final chapter on Roth, Davison explores how the author's postmodernism remains tethered to Jewish history, liberalism, gender, and Judaic concepts.

This book, first published in 1987, is both simple in conception and ambitious in intention. It aims at legitimating the new interdisciplinary field of men's studies as one of the most significant and challenging intellectual and curricular developments in academia. The fourteen essays included here are drawn from such diverse disciplines as men's studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, Black studies, biology, English literature, and gay studies.

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity and quantity of 'quality' television programs, many of which featuring complicated versions of masculinity that are informed not only by the women's movement of the sixties and seventies, but also by several decades of backlash and debate about the effects of women's equality on men, masculinity, and the relationship between men and women. Drawing upon studies of contemporary television programs, including popular series viewed internationally such as Mad Men, The League, Hung, Breaking Bad, Louie, and Girls, this book explores the ways in which popular cultural texts address widely circulating discourses of the ostensible 'crisis of masculinity' in contemporary culture. A rich study of masculinity and its representation in contemporary television, Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, popular culture, television studies and cultural sociology with interests in gender, masculinities, and sexuality.

In What God Wants Every Dad to Know, Pastor James Merritt encourages dads to pass along to their children God's timeless wisdom found in Proverbs. Through his personable and engaging style, he reveals important life principles on such key topics as

• finances
• use of the tongue
• sexuality
• work ethic
• friendships

No book ever written has been a better or more practical guide than Proverbs for helping fathers guide their children toward right choices and away from wrong ones. The advice of wise King Solomon remains invaluable for today's dads struggling with the pressures of home and career responsibilities, travel, broken families, and other realities of modern life.

Merritt makes liberal use of anecdotes and stories from his own experience as the father of three children as he urges dads to take seriously their important role as leaders in their homes and their responsibility to teach godly wisdom to their children.

This study argues that in Japanese popular cinema the 'tragic hero' narrative is an archetypal plot-structure upon which male genres, such as the war-retro and yakuza films are based. Two central questions in relation to these post-war Japanese film genres and historical consciousness are addressed: What is the relationship between history, myth and memory? And how are individual subjectivities defined in relation to the past? The book examines the role of the 'tragic hero' narrative as a figurative structure through which the Japanese people could interpret the events of World War II and defeat, offering spectators an avenue of exculpation from a foreign-imposed sense of guilt. Also considered is the fantasy world of the nagare-mono (drifter) or yakuza film. It is suggested that one of the reasons for the great popularity of these films in the 1960s and 1970s lay in their ability to offer men meanings that could help them understand the contradictions between the reality of their everyday experiences and the ideological construction of masculinity.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND. Amid the heavy politicisation and problematisation of male migrants in Europe, this ethnographic study casts new light on their experiences, struggles and everyday resistance. The author follows the journeys of those who seek, but have little hope of achieving, permanent residence status in European countries, tracking their successive migrations, detentions and deportations within and beyond the continent. She explores migrants' tactics, the impact of precarity on their lives and the dual feelings of enduring hope and powerless vulnerability they experience. This is a sensitive and insightful analysis of how the European migration regime shapes, and is shaped by, migrants' practices.

All over the world, men as well as women exchange sex for money and other forms of reward, sometimes with other men and sometimes with women. In contrast to female prostitution, however, relatively little is known about male sex work, leaving questions unanswered about the individuals involved: their identities and self-understandings, the practices concerned, and the contexts in which they take place.

This book updates the ground-breaking 1998 volume of the same name with an entirely new selection of chapters exploring health, social, political, economic and human rights issues in relation to men who sell sex. Looking at Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Asia-Pacific, each chapter explores questions such as:

• What is known among the different ways in which men exchange sex for money or other forms of reward?
• What are the major contexts in which sexual exchange takes place?
• What meanings do such practices carry for the different partners involved?
• What are the health and other implications of contemporary forms of male sex work?

Men Who Sell Sex" seeks to push the boundaries both of current personal and social understandings and the practices to which these give rise. It is an important reference work for academics and researchers interested in sex work and men s health including those working in public health, sociology, social work, anthropology, human geography and development studies."

This volume showcases cutting-edge research in the linguistic and discursive study of masculinities, comprising the first significant edited collection on language and masculinities since Johnson and Meinhof's 1997 volume. Overall, the chapters are linked together by a critical analytical perspective that seeks to understand the relationships between discourse, masculinities, and power. Whereas some of the chapters offer detailed, linguistically informed critiques of the ways in which old and new expressions of masculinities are complicit in the reproduction of men's hegemonic positions of power, others provide a more complex picture, one in which collusion and subversion go hand in hand. Contributions argue for the need for research on language and masculinities to expand its remit so as to engage with "gay masculinities," and unsettle gendered categories in order to consider the ways in which women, transgender, and intersex individuals also perform a variety of masculinities. Finally, unlike Johnson and Meinhof's 1997 collection, this volume not only offers a wider-and perhaps "queerer" perspective-on the study of language and masculinities, but also covers a broader geographical and socio-cultural spectrum, including work on Brazil, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa.

What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men's moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men's intimate sense of self.

All over the world, men as well as women exchange sex for money and other forms of reward, sometimes with other men and sometimes with women. In contrast to female prostitution, however, relatively little is known about male sex work, leaving questions unanswered about the individuals involved: their identities and self-understandings, the practices concerned, and the contexts in which they take place.

This book updates the ground-breaking 1998 volume of the same name with an entirely new selection of chapters exploring health, social, political, economic and human rights issues in relation to men who sell sex. Looking at Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Asia-Pacific, each chapter explores questions such as:

• What is known among the different ways in which men exchange sex for money or other forms of reward?
• What are the major contexts in which sexual exchange takes place?
• What meanings do such practices carry for the different partners involved?
• What are the health and other implications of contemporary forms of male sex work?

Men Who Sell Sex" seeks to push the boundaries both of current personal and social understandings and the practices to which these give rise. It is an important reference work for academics and researchers interested in sex work and men s health including those working in public health, sociology, social work, anthropology, human geography and development studies."

This book explores how the traditional ideal of Chinese manhood - the "wen" (cultural attainment) and "wu" (martial prowess) dyad - has been transformed by the increasing integration of China in the international scene. It discusses how increased travel and contact between China and the West are having a profound impact; showing how increased interchange with Western men, for whom "wu" is a more significant ideal, has shifted the balance in the classic Chinese dichotomy; and how the huge emphasis on wealth creation in contemporary China has changed the notion of "wen" itself to include business management skills and monetary power. The book also considers the implications of Chinese "soft power" outside China for the reconfigurations in masculinity ideals in the global setting. The rising significance of Chinese culture enables Chinese cultural norms, including ideals of manhood, to be increasingly integrated in the international sphere and to become hybridised. The book also examines the impact of the Japanese and Korean waves on popular conceptions of desirable manhood in China. Overall, it demonstrates that social constructions of Chinese masculinity have changed more fundamentally and become more global in the last three decades than any other time in the last three thousand years.

Black Men in Higher Education bridges theory to practice in order to better prepare practitioners in their efforts to increase the success of Black male students in colleges and universities. In this comprehensive but manageable text, leading researchers J. Luke Wood and Robert T. Palmer highlight the current status of Black men in higher education and review relevant research literature and theory on their experiences in various postsecondary education contexts. The authors also provide and contextualize innovative, actionable strategies and solutions to help institutions increase the participation and success of Black male college students. The most recent addition to the "Key Issues on Diverse College Students" series, this volume is a valuable resource for student affairs and higher education professionals to better serve Black men in higher education.

Winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Book Award Winner of the 2017 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award Border Crossing "Brothas" examines how Black males form identities, define success, and utilize community-based pedagogical spaces to cross literal and figurative borders. The tragic deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and numerous others from Brooklyn, Britain, and Bermuda whose lives have been taken prematurely suggest that negotiating race, place, and complex space is a matter of life and death for Black males. In jurisdictions such as the U.S. and Bermuda, racial tensions are the palpable and obvious reality, yet the average citizen has no idea how to sensibly react. This book offers a reasonable response that pushes readers to account for and draw on the best of what we know, the core of who we are, and the needs and histories of those we serve. Drawing on the educational and socializing experiences of Black males in Bermuda - a beautiful yet complex island with strong connections to the U.S., England, and the Caribbean - this book offers educators and leaders new language for postcolonial possibilities and emancipatory epistemologies related to Black male identities and success in a global context. Intriguing findings and fresh frameworks grounded in understandings of race, class, ability, transnationalism, culture, colonialism, and the construction/performance of gendered identity emerge in this book.

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity: A psychoanalytic approach attempts to describe in psychoanalytic terms the psychological consequences of massive social trauma and national humiliation, and the regression that takes place within the individual under these circumstances. The book is not about understanding fascism as a historical, political or sociological phenomenon, but about understanding the special relationship between masculinity and fascism and "the state of mind" which both shaped, and was shaped by, the historical phenomenon of fascism.

Christina Wieland explores fascism as a product of certain forms of masculinity and focuses on the dynamics of masculinity as a mode of psychic functioning. She examines in detail masculine anxieties and defences and their interaction with stresses of modernity and with the social and political unrest that followed World War One. "

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity" is divided into four parts:

Part One The meaning of fascism and the fascist state of mind theories and definitions

Part Two Masculinity, its meaning and its vulnerability

Part Three Group and group theory, and the total environment

Part Four Exploring the links between masculinity, groups and fascism

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity uses clinical material, literary texts, and extensive psychoanalytic interpretation of some passages from Mein Kampf to illustrate the interplay of the psychological processes with social and political events. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, teachers and students of psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to those interested in the application of psychoanalytic insights in the understanding of social and political phenomena. "

This book is the result of research commissioned by the World Bank. Its primary focus is on incorporating men in gender and development interventions at the grassroots level. It begins by identifying the rationale for the study of, and key issues surrounding, men and masculinities in gender and development. It draws attention to some of the key problems that have arisen from male exclusion, as well as to the potential benefits of and obstacles to men s inclusion. The book then moves on to explore how far men in development has been a feature in the practices of development organizations. Drawing on consultation with over 30 NGOs in the UK and USA, current in-house approaches to gender and development are reviewed, and the authors explore the extent to which men are actively engaged at the policy-making, operational, and grassroots levels. The book concludes with suggestions on the ways in which gender and development policy might realistically move towards a more gender-balanced, male-inclusive approach."

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.

What role did manhood play in early American Politics? In A Republic of Men, Mark E. Kann argues that the American founders aspired to create a "republic of men" but feared that "disorderly men" threatened its birth, health, and longevity. Kann demonstrates how hegemonic norms of manhood-exemplified by "the Family Man," for instance--were deployed as a means of stigmatizing unworthy men, rewarding responsible men with citizenship, and empowering exceptional men with positions of leadership and authority, while excluding women from public life.

Kann suggests that the founders committed themselves in theory to the democratic proposition that all men were created free and equal and could not be governed without their own consent, but that they in no way believed that "all men" could be trusted with equal liberty, equal citizenship, or equal authority. The founders developed a "grammar of manhood" to address some difficult questions about public order. Were America's disorderly men qualified for citizenship? Were they likely to recognize manly leaders, consent to their authority, and defer to their wisdom? A Republic of Men compellingly analyzes the ways in which the founders used a rhetoric of manhood to stabilize American politics.

This volume presents a series of illustrative and critical perspectives upon the developing study of men and masculinities and its importance for sociological theory. The contributions, by women and men from Britain and the United States, are organized around the unifying themes of Power and Domination; Sexuality; Identity and Perception. Feminism has raised profound questions for the social sciences, for sociological theory and for the study of men. The contributors to this volume discuss how such questions can be addressed. They demonstrate the range of theoretical traditions that can be brought to bear on the study of men, and underline the importance of understanding 'masculinities' in the plural. In a concluding section, three different views upon the controversy surrounding 'Men's Studies' are presented.

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity: A psychoanalytic approach attempts to describe in psychoanalytic terms the psychological consequences of massive social trauma and national humiliation, and the regression that takes place within the individual under these circumstances. The book is not about understanding fascism as a historical, political or sociological phenomenon, but about understanding the special relationship between masculinity and fascism and "the state of mind" which both shaped, and was shaped by, the historical phenomenon of fascism.

Christina Wieland explores fascism as a product of certain forms of masculinity and focuses on the dynamics of masculinity as a mode of psychic functioning. She examines in detail masculine anxieties and defences and their interaction with stresses of modernity and with the social and political unrest that followed World War One. "

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity" is divided into four parts:

Part One The meaning of fascism and the fascist state of mind theories and definitions

Part Two Masculinity, its meaning and its vulnerability

Part Three Group and group theory, and the total environment

Part Four Exploring the links between masculinity, groups and fascism

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity uses clinical material, literary texts, and extensive psychoanalytic interpretation of some passages from Mein Kampf to illustrate the interplay of the psychological processes with social and political events. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, teachers and students of psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to those interested in the application of psychoanalytic insights in the understanding of social and political phenomena. "

Conflicting Identities and Multiple Masculinities takes as its focus the construction of masculinity in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages until the fifteenth century, crossing from pre-Christian Scandinavia across western Christendom. The essays consult a broad and representative cross section of sources including the work of theological, scholastic, and monastic writers, sagas, hagiography and memoirs, material culture, chronicles, exampla and vernacular literature, sumptuary legislation, and the records of ecclesiastical courts. The studies address questions of what constituted male identity, and male sexuality. How was masculinity constructed in different social groups? How did the secular and ecclesiastical ideals of masculinity reinforce each other or diverge? These essays address the topic of medieval men and, through a variety of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary approaches, significantly extend our understanding of how, in the Middle Ages, masculinity and identity were conflicted and multifarious.