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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Men's studies
Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open
Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No
Derivatives 4.0 license available at
http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429431197 Focused on the
emergence of US President Donald Trump, the United Kingdom's
departure from the European Union, and the recruitment of Islamic
State foreign fighters from Western Muslim communities, this book
explores the ways in which the decay and corruption of key social
institutions has created a vacuum of intellectual and moral
guidance for working people and deprived them of hope and an upward
social mobility long considered central to the social contract of
Western liberal democracy. Examining the exploitation of this
vacuum of leadership and opportunity by new demagogues, the author
considers two important yet overlooked dimensions of this new
populism: the mobilization of both religion and masculinity. By
understanding religion as a dynamic social force that can be
mobilized for purposes of social solidarity and by appreciating the
sociological arguments that hyper-masculinity is caused by social
injury, Roose considers how these key social factors have been
particularly important in contributing to the emergence of the new
demagogues and their followers. Roose identifies the challenges
that this poses for Western liberal democracy and argues that
states must look beyond identity politics and exclusively
rights-based claims and, instead, consider classical conceptions of
citizenship.
Finalist for the 2011 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize "A seminal work.
. . . One of the best examples of new, sophisticated scholarship on
the social history of Civil War soldiers." -The Journal of Southern
History "Will undoubtedly, and properly, be read as the latest word
on the role of manhood in the internal dynamics of the Union army."
-Journal of the Civil War Era During the Civil War, the Union army
appeared cohesive enough to withstand four years of grueling war
against the Confederates and to claim victory in 1865. But
fractiousness bubbled below the surface of the North's presumably
united front. Internal fissures were rife within the Union army:
class divisions, regional antagonisms, ideological differences, and
conflicting personalities all distracted the army from quelling the
Southern rebellion. In this highly original contribution to Civil
War and gender history, Lorien Foote reveals that these internal
battles were fought against the backdrop of manhood. Clashing
ideals of manliness produced myriad conflicts, as when educated,
refined, and wealthy officers ("gentlemen") found themselves
commanding a hard-drinking group of fighters ("roughs")-a dynamic
that often resulted in violence and even death. Based on extensive
research into heretofore ignored primary sources, The Gentlemen and
the Roughs uncovers holes in our understanding of the men who
fought the Civil War and the society that produced them.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford
Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and
selected open access locations. The relationship between men and
the domestic in eighteenth-century Britain has been obscured by two
well-established historiographical narratives. The first charts
changes in domestic patriarchy, founded on political patriarchalism
in the early modern period and transformed during the eighteenth
century by new types of family relationship rooted in contract
theory. The second describes the emergence of a new kind of
domestic interior during the long eighteenth century, a 'home'
infused with a new culture of 'domesticity' primarily associated
with women and femininity. The Little Republic shifts the terms of
these debates, rescuing the engagement of men with the house from
obscurity, and better equipping historians to understand
masculinity, the domestic environment, and domestic patriarchy.
Karen Harvey explores how men represented and legitimized their
domestic activities. She considers the relationship between
discourses of masculinity and domesticity, and whether there was a
particularly manly attitude to the domestic. In doing so, Harvey
suggests that 'home' is too narrow a concept for an understanding
of eighteenth-century domestic experience. Instead, focusing on the
'house' foregrounds a different domestic culture, one in which men
and masculinity were central. Reconstructing men's experiences of
the domestic as shaped by their own and others' beliefs,
assumptions and expectations, Harvey argues for the continuation of
a model of domestic patriarchy and also that effective domestic
patriarchs remained important to late-eighteenth-century political
theory. It was a discourse of 'oeconomy' - the practice of managing
the economic and moral resources of the household for the
maintenance of good order - that shaped men's attitudes towards and
experiences in the house. Oeconomy combined day-to-day and global
management of people and resources; it was a meaningful way of
defining masculinity and established the house a key component of a
manly identity that operated across the divide of 'inside' and
'outside' the house. Significantly for histories of the home which
so often narrate a process of privatization and feminization,
oeconomy brought together the home and the world, primarily through
men's domestic management.
This book is open access and available on
www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first
book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size
and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great
director are content to consign his large figure and larger
appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick
argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative
process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering
his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his
publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with
his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films,
feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's
Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's
creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.
In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote, "What then, is the
American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him
all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the
new mode of life he has embraced." In casting aside their European
mores, these pioneers, de Crevecoeur implied, were the very
embodiment of a new culture, society, economy, and political
system. But to what extent did manliness shape early America's
character and institutions? And what roles did race, ethnicity, and
class play in forming masculinity? Thomas A. Foster and his
contributors grapple with these questions in New Men, showcasing
how colonial and Revolutionary conditions gave rise to new
standards of British American manliness. Focusing on Indian,
African, and European masculinities in British America from
earliest Jamestown through the Revolutionary era, and addressing
such topics that range from slavery to philanthropy, and from
satire to warfare, the essays in this anthology collectively
demonstrate how the economic, political, social, cultural, and
religious conditions of early America shaped and were shaped by
ideals of masculinity. Contributors: Susan Abram, Tyler Boulware,
Kathleen Brown, Trevor Burnard, Toby L. Ditz, Carolyn Eastman,
Benjamin Irvin, Janet Moore Lindman, John Gilbert McCurdy, Mary
Beth Norton, Ann Marie Plane, Jessica Choppin Roney, and Natalie A.
Zacek.
The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new style of
man: the metrosexual. Overwhelmingly straight, white, and wealthy,
these impeccably coiffed urban professionals spend big money on
everything from facials to pedicures, all part of a
multi-billion-dollar male grooming industry. Yet as this innovative
study reveals, even as the industry encourages men to invest more
in their appearance, it still relies on women to do much of the
work. Styling Masculinity investigates how men's beauty salons have
persuaded their clientele to regard them as masculine spaces. To
answer this question, sociologist Kristen Barber goes inside Adonis
and The Executive, two upscale men's salons in Southern California.
Conducting detailed observations and extensive interviews with both
customers and employees, she shows how female salon workers not
only perform the physical labor of snipping, tweezing, waxing, and
exfoliating, but also perform the emotional labor of pampering
their clients and pumping up their masculine egos. Letting salon
employees tell their own stories, Barber not only documents
occasions when these workers are objectified and demeaned, but also
explores how their jobs allow for creativity and confer a degree of
professional dignity. In the process, she traces the vast network
of economic and social relations that undergird the burgeoning male
beauty industry.
The 'Dandy' is not just an elaborately, well-dressed man - nor is
he an exclusively English phenomenon. He is something far more
universal and intriguing. The author captures the lives of the
Dandies - some were aristocratic but most were not. All, however,
had the chutzpah and style to be a true Dandy. Their stories are
told against a backdrop of revolutions and war in the world's great
cities (London, Paris, New York, Hollywood, Moscow, Berlin), and
amid financial and sexual scandals. All too often Dandies lived in
luxury but died in penury. The Dandy's place in history is assured.
Not because Dandies have made any major contributions to politics,
economics or warfare, but because they were, and continue to be,
figures of huge but subtle significance - baffling, enigmatic,
iconic.
In early-twentieth-century motion picture houses, offensive
stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were
prevalent. Watermelon eating, chicken thievery, savages with
uncontrollable appetites, Sambo and Zip Coon were all
representations associated with African American people. Most of
these caricatures were rendered by whites in blackface.
Few people realize that from 1915 through 1929 a number of African
American film directors worked diligently to counter such racist
definitions of black manhood found in films like D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 epic that glorified the Ku Klux
Klan. In the wake of the film's phenomenal success, African
American filmmakers sought to defend and redefine black manhood
through motion pictures.
Gerald Butters's comprehensive study of the African American
cinematic vision in silent film concentrates on works largely
ignored by most contemporary film scholars: African
American-produced and -directed films and white independent
productions of all-black features. Using these "race movies" to
explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race
in popular culture, he separates cinematic myth from historical
reality: the myth of the Euro American-controlled cinematic
portrayal of black men versus the actual black male experience.
Through intense archival research, Butters reconstructs many
lost films, expanding the discussion of race and representation
beyond the debate about "good" and "bad" imagery to explore the
construction of masculine identity and the use of race as device in
the context of Western popular culture. He particularly examines
the filmmaking of Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific and
controversial of all African American silent film directors and
creator of the recently rediscovered Within Our Gates-the legendary
film that exposed a virtual litany of white abuses toward
blacks.
"Black Manhood on the Silent Screen" is unique in that it takes
contemporary and original film theory, applies it to the
distinctive body of African American independent films in the
silent era, and relates the meaning of these films to larger
political, social, and intellectual events in American society. By
showing how both white and black men have defined their own sense
of manhood through cinema, it examines the intersection of race and
gender in the movies and offers a deft interweaving of film theory,
American history, and film history.
Increasing numbers of people in our culture, particularly
middle-aged men, are finding that the things they worked for over
the past two decades are simply not providing the fulfillment they
originally expected from them. We are coming to realize that our
homes, vehicles, jobs and possessions are not sufficient to stave
off the crisis of meaning many of us find when life does not meet
our expectations. Sojourn reminds us that life is often
messy--complex and full of fear--just as it should be. Learning
from the few wild places still available to us in our culture can
provide us with the realization that a weighty life is a life on
its way to an important integration of body, soul, heart, and
spirit.
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