Male Bodies Unmade explores white men’s disunified physicality in modern and contemporary art while attending to erotic polysemy that questions the visual ethos of Occidental patriarchy. Art historian Jongwoo Jeremy Kim's approach is informed by his own status as an immigrant—a polyglot queen, drawn to extravagant fantasies of misbehaving bodies that are in truth foreign territories, colonies of misbelief. In six case studies focusing on configurations of irrational anatomy and horny self-extinction, this book celebrates the lessons and pleasures of disrupting art history’s hegemonically Western narratives.
In Stalinist Russia, the idealized Soviet man projected an image of strength, virility, and unyielding drive in his desire to build a powerful socialist state. In monuments, posters, and other tools of cultural production, he became the demigod of Communist ideology. But beneath the surface of this fantasy, between the lines of texts and in film, lurked another figure: the wounded body of the heroic invalid, the second version of Stalin's New Man. In How the Soviet Man Was Unmade, Lilya Kaganovsky exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, she examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body, which appears with startling frequency. Kaganovsky views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Because the communist state was "full of heroes," a man could only truly distinguish himself and attain hero status through bodily sacrifice-yet in his wounding, he was forever reminded that he would be limited in what he could achieve, and was expected to remain in a state of continued subservience to Stalin and the party.Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr'ev's The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin's The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding and dismemberment in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.
This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of ‘non/conforming bodies’, ‘fashionable bodies’, ‘passing bodies’, and ‘pioneering bodies’ that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.
`This book is a goldmine for students...it is brilliantly conceptualized and brilliantly executed. With this book cultural studies finally comes of age methodologically′ - Professor Norman K Denzin, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois Doing Research in Cultural Studies outlines the key methodological approaches to the study of lived experience, texts and social contexts within the field of cultural studies. It offers a comprehensive discussion of classical methodologies and introduces the reader to more contemporary debates that have argued for new ethnographic, poststructuralist and multi-scape research methods. Through a detailed yet concise explanation, the reader is shown how these methodologies work and how their outcomes may be interpreted. Key features of the book include: - An innovative framework - combining different methodologies and approaches. - A variety of `real-life′ examples and case studies - enriches the book for the reader - A set of practical exercises in each chapter - pedagogical and student-focused throughout. The book has a flowing narrative and student-friendly structure which make it accessible to and popular with students, while the discussion of fresh approaches makes it also of interest to experienced researchers. It contains all the ingredients necessary to help the reader attain a solid grasp of analytical and practical challenges to doing effective research in cultural studies today.
"Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history. The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men's resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men's particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials."--Pub. desc. v.1.
In Modernist Women Writers and War, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick examines important avant-garde writings by three American women authors and shows that during World Wars I and II a new kind of war literature emerged—one in which feminist investigation of war and trauma effectively counters the paradigmatic war experience long narrated by men. In the past, Goodspeed-Chadwick explains, scholars have not considered writings by women as part of war literature. They have limited "war writing" to works by men, such as William Butler Yeats's poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" (1919), which relies on a male perspective: a pilot contemplates his forthcoming flight, his duty to his country, and his life in combat. But works by Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein set in wartime reveal experiences and views of war markedly different from those of male writers. They write women and their bodies into their texts, thus creating space for female war writing, insisting on female presence in wartime, and, perhaps most significantly, critiquing war and patriarchal politics, often in devastating fashion. Goodspeed-Chadwick begins with Barnes, who in her surrealist novel Nightwood (1936) emphasizes the actual perversity of war by placing it in contrast to the purported perverse and deviant behavior of her main characters. In her epic poem Trilogy (1944–1946), H.D. validates female suffering and projects a feminist, spiritual worldview that fosters healing from the ravages of war. Stein, for her part, in her experimental novel Mrs. Reynolds (1952) and her long love poem Lifting Belly (1953), captures her experience of the everyday reality of war on the home front, within the domestic economy of her household. In these works, the female body stands as the primary textual marker or symbol of female identity—an insistence on women's presence in both the text and in the world outside the book. The strategies employed by Barnes, H.D., and Stein in these texts serve to produce a new kind of writing, Goodspeed-Chadwick reveals, one that ineluctably constructs a female identity within, and authorship of, the war narrative.
Here's a book for both men and women that is guaranteed to start some heated discussions!FOR WOMEN: Eavesdrop on the secret codes of masculinity. Discover what makes men tick. Penetrate the brain-fog of masculine thinking. Peel the cerebral onion of guy-hood. Find out how to get your way with your man.FOR GUYS: Here's a fishing trip down the river of your natural self. A vacation from "relationships." A holiday from all things feminine. A trout stream for your brain, naturally cleansed of "shopping," feminism and other female-borne viruses. A chance to drain the blackened oil from your cerebral engine, and fill it with five clean quarts of good feelings about yourself. Kick off your boots and wiggle your frozen toes on the fireplace of your masculine soul. You'll never be the same again.
The brilliantly shocking story of the ultimate transplant from New York Times bestselling author Robert A. Heinlein. As startling and provocative as his famous Stranger in a Strange Land, here is Heinlein's awesome masterpiece about a man supremely talented, immensely old and obscenely wealthy who discovers that money can buy everything. Even a new life in the body of a beautiful young woman. Once again, master storyteller Robert A. Heinlein delievers a wild and intriguing classic of science fiction.
Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits ‘canonical’ forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image—either actual or thematic—and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.
