Marked men : white masculinity in crisis
White men still hold most of the political and economic cards in the United States; yet stories about wounded and traumatized men dominate popular culture. Why are white men jumping on the victim bandwagon? Examining novels by Philip Roth, John Updike, James Dickey, John Irving, and Pat Conroy and such films as Deliverance, Misery, and Dead Poets Society as well as other writings, including The Closing of the American Mind Sally Robinson argues that white men are tempted by the possibilities of pain and the surprisingly pleasurable tensions that come from living in crisis
1 online resource (x, 271 pages)
9780231500364, 023150036X
51311723
Introduction: Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded White Male Body; Chapter 1. Marking Men, Embodying America: John Updike and the Reconstruction of Middle American Masculinity; The "Discovery" of Middle America and the Marking of White Masculinity; Rabbit Redux: Black Power, the Counterculture, and the Decentering of White Masculinity; Rabbit Is Rich: Feminism, the Third World, and the Screwing of White Masculinity; Coda: The Death of White Masculinity?; Chapter 2. Pale Males, Dead Poets, and the Crisis In White Masculinity: Scenes from the Culture WarsSpectacles of (Dis)Embodiment; American Minds and American Bodies: Reproducing Elitism; Dead Poets and the Pathos of Wounded White Masculinity; Chapter 3. Traumas of Embodiment: White Male Authorship in Crisis; The "Myth of Male Inviolability": Somatic Disintegration in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man; Rapists, Feminists, and the World According to Garp: Inauthentic versus Authentic Traumas; "Exercising Editorial Authority Over His Body": The Crippling of Body and Text in Stephen King's Misery; Chapter 4. Masculinity as Emotional Constipation: Men's Liberation and the Wounds of Patriarchal PowerThe Hazards of Being Male; The Wisdom of the Penis; The Embarrassments of Emotional Incontinence; Chapter 5. Expression, Repression, and Male Hysteria: Marked Men and the Wounds of A Dammed Masculinity; Men's Liberation Redux: Sexuality, Evolution, and the Embodied Struggle Between Blockage and Release; Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't: Deliverance and the Hysterical Male Body; Feminism and Masochism: The Prince of Tides and the Pleasures of Repression; Notes; Bibliography; Index
English