Manliness and Its Discontents

Manliness and Its Discontents PDF

Author: Martin Summers

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-12-15

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 080786417X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In a pathbreaking new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century, Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life, work, leisure, and cultural production. Examining both the public and private aspects of gender formation, Summers challenges the current trajectory of masculinity studies by treating black men as historical agents in their own identity formation, rather than as screens on which white men projected their own racial and gender anxieties and desires. Manliness and Its Discontents focuses on four distinct yet overlapping social milieus: the fraternal order of Prince Hall Freemasonry; the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, or the Garvey movement; the modernist circles of the Harlem Renaissance; and the campuses of historically black Howard and Fisk Universities. Between 1900 and 1930, Summers argues, dominant notions of what it meant to be a man within the black middle class changed from a Victorian ideal of manliness--characterized by the importance of producer values, respectability, and patriarchy--to a modern ethos of masculinity, which was shaped more by consumption, physicality, and sexuality. Summers evaluates the relationships between black men and black women as well as relationships among black men themselves, broadening our understanding of the way that gender works along with class, sexuality, and age to shape identities and produce relationships of power.

What Do Men Want?

What Do Men Want? PDF

Author: Nina Power

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2022-02-03

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 0241356512

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From the acclaimed philosopher and author of One-Dimensional Woman, a bold, playful and open-minded exploration of the role of men in the twenty-first century Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men's Rights activists and incels to spiralling suicide rates, it's easy to see that, while men still rule the world, masculinity is in crisis. How can men and women live together in a world where capitalism and consumerism has replaced the values - family, religion, service and honour - that used to give our lives meaning? Feminism has gone some way towards dismantling the patriarchy, but how can we hold on to the best aspects of our metaphorical Father? With illuminating writing from an original, big-picture perspective, Nina Power unlocks the secrets hidden in our culture to enable men and women to practice playfulness and forgiveness, and reach a true mutual understanding and a lifetime of love.

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature PDF

Author: Andrew Dowling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1351920146

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The purpose of this book is to address two principal questions: 'Was the concept of masculinity a topic of debate for the Victorians?' and 'Why is Victorian literature full of images of male deviance when Victorian masculinity is defined by discipline?' In his introduction, Dowling defines Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline. He then addresses the central question of why an official ideal of manly discipline in the nineteenth century co-existed with a literature that is full of images of male deviance. In answering this question, he develops a notion of 'hegemonic deviance', whereby a dominant ideal of masculinity defines itself by what it is not. Dowling goes on to examine the fear of effeminacy facing Victorian literary men and the strategies used to combat these fears by the nineteenth-century male novelist. In later chapters, concentrating on Dickens and Thackeray, he examines how the male novelist is defined against multiple images of unmanliness. These chapters illustrate the investment made by men in constructing male 'others', those sources of difference that are constantly produced and then crushed from within gender divide. By analysing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given.

Masculinity and Its Discontents

Masculinity and Its Discontents PDF

Author: Michael J. Diamond

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9780367724030

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Offering a uniquely psychoanalytic developmental perspective on male gender identity and the sense of maleness, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the development of masculinity in childhood and its continued evolution throughout a man's life. Drawing on classical Freudian theory, as well as on more contemporary psychoanalytic theories, this book explores early infancy and child development, preoedipal factors and the oedipal complex, the influence of parenting and the unconscious transmission of gendered factors both by mothers and both biological and symbolic fathers, the male ego ideal, social, cultural, and biological influences, the role of inherent psychic bi-genderality in the context of gender binaries, and the inherent gendered tensions and challenges experienced as an individual progresses into adult and later life. This book is original in its characterization of the male developmental trajectory as underpinned by psychoanalytic principles pertaining to conflict and inherent tensions that continue throughout the life cycle and strongly impact other areas of life. Deeply rooted in the unconscious, a man's multiply determined sense of masculinity requires deconstructing the mother, the feminine, and the other in the male psyche. As the text illustrates via clinical vignettes, an awareness and an understanding of these areas can improve the clinical work of psychoanalysts working with men who struggle with the intrinsic conflicts in their sense of maleness. This book will be of great clinical value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, and will stimulate the thinking of scholars in such areas as gender theory, psychodynamic and sociocultural aspects of gender roles, and the changing social definition of masculinity.

Manliness & Civilization

Manliness & Civilization PDF

Author: Gail Bederman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0226041492

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

Stormy Weather

Stormy Weather PDF

Author: Anastasia Carol Curwood

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0807834343

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The so-called New Negroes of the period between World Wars I and II embodied a new sense of racial pride and upward mobility for the race. Many of them thought that relationships between spouses could be a crucial factor in realizing this dream. But there

A History of Masculinity

A History of Masculinity PDF

Author: Ivan Jablonka

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2022-02-03

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0141993715

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

'Exhilarating . . . a work of scholarship, but also inspiration. . . Go and read Jablonka and change the world' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times 'An unexpected bestseller in France. . . it has sparked conversations' Challenges A highly acclaimed, bestselling work from one of France's preeminent historians What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good father, or a good partner? A good brother, or a good friend? In this insightful analysis, social historian Ivan Jablonka offers a re-examination of the patriarchy and its impact on men. Ranging widely across cultures, from Mesopotamia to Confucianism to Christianity to the revolutions of the eighteenth century, Jablonka uncovers the origins of our patriarchal societies. He then offers an updated model of masculinity based on a theory of gender justice which aims for a redistribution of gender, just as social justice demands the redistribution of wealth. Arguing that it is high time for men to be as involved in gender justice as women, Jablonka shows that in order to build a more equal and respectful society, we must gain a deeper understanding of the structure of patriarchy - and reframe the conversation so that men define themselves by the rights of women. Widely acclaimed in France, this is an important work from a major thinker.

The Manly Art

The Manly Art PDF

Author: Elliott J. Gorn

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-05-02

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0801462525

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet Vachel Lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him—Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize fighting J. P. Morgan'—and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts, noted approvingly that he never met a lad who would not rather be Sullivan than Leo Tolstoy."—from the Afterword to the Updated EditionElliott J. Gorn's The Manly Art tells the story of boxing's origins and the sport's place in American culture. When first published in 1986, the book helped shape the ways historians write about American sport and culture, expanding scholarly boundaries by exploring masculinity as an historical subject and by suggesting that social categories like gender, class, and ethnicity can be understood only in relation to each other.This updated edition of Gorn's highly influential history of the early prize rings features a new afterword, the author's meditation on the ways in which studies of sport, gender, and popular culture have changed in the quarter century since the book was first published. An up-to-date bibliography ensures that The Manly Art will remain a vital resource for a new generation.

Set the World on Fire

Set the World on Fire PDF

Author: Keisha N. Blain

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0812249887

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"[This book] examine[s] how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960's"--Amazon.com.