What does it mean to be a man? To be manly? How has this changed throughout history? This text examines the manly stereotype, which stresses courage and athletic comportment, which from the 18th century onwards became representative of normative modern society.

Contemporary Western societies are currently witness to a “crisis of masculinity” but also to an intriguing diversification of images of masculinity. Once relatively stable regimes of masculine gender representation appear to have been replaced by a wider spectrum of varieties of masculine “lifestyles” taken up by the media and the market, to produce new and immensely flexible forms consumerised gender hegemony. The essays in Subverting Masculinity concentrate on contemporary film, literature and diverse forms of popular culture. The essays show that the subversion of traditional images of masculinity is both a source of gender contestation, but may equally be susceptible to assimilation by new hegemonic configurations of masculinity. Subverting Masculinity maps out the ongoing relevance of gender politics in contemporary culture, but also raises the question of increasingly unclear distinctions between hegemonic and subversive versions of masculinity in contemporary cultural production. Subverting Masculinity will be of interest to students and teachers of gender, cultural, film and literary studies.

This book argues for the importance of 'cowboy masculinity,' from late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister, and analyzes the democratic politics of masculinity in American literature and positions the American West as central to modernism.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

DIV In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by “roughing it� in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. Rico uncovers the networks of elite men—British and American—who circulated between the West and the metropoles of London and New York. Each chapter tells the story of an individual who, by traveling these transatlantic paths, sought to resolve anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation. All of the men Rico discusses—from the well known, including Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, to the comparatively obscure, such as English cattle rancher Moreton Frewen—envisioned the American West as a global space into which redemptive narratives of heroic upper-class masculinity could be written. /div

Here is a powerful reply to Iron John, a fresh look at the complicated nature of what R.W. Connell calls "masculinities." One of the most important voices in the new feminist scholarship by men, Connell provides a nuanced and incisive analysis of how our notions of masculinity have evolved in psychoanalysis, social science, and historically in the creation of a global economy. There is not one but many masculinities, he claims, in a bold critique of the "men's movement" and other simplistic approaches to sexual identity. Instead, Connell delineates the complicated dynamics of masculine politics and recent changes in male identity. Drawing on rich ethnographic work, Connell offers portraits of dozens of men of different classes, some working to change masculinities, some resisting change. Eel openly disparages his wife: "The first chance I can see to get rid of her, she's gone." Mark, who calls himself "a very straight gay," thinks men should behave in traditionally masculine ways. "If you're a guy why don't you just act like a guy?" he asks. Danny, undertaking the "long haul" of his own sexism, admits, "It's hard not to be aggressive sometimes." Connell offers the first critical history of ideas and the most sophisticated theoretical analysis of masculinity to date. His attempts to understand changes in male identity and to think about these issues on a global scale are unique. Integrating social science, feminist theory, gay theory, and psychoanalysis in an innovative yet unusually accessible way, he develops a new theory of masculinity politics. This is a book for everyone interested in the history of western masculinities and the sexual politics of the contemporary era.