This work, first published in 1972, is an objective introduction to the social, political, and cultural changes that took place in the Middle East in the years after the Second World War. It includes papers by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field as well as personal accounts by insightful observers living in the area. It includes articles on such topics as Arab socialism and nationalism, religious communities, ethnic minorities, women in Arab society, education, and many more.
What is social reality for men in modern society? What maintains or explains this social reality? What condition might we imagine that would be better for men? How might we achieve this better condition? These are the questions Kenneth Clatterbaugh brings to seven different visions of men in modern society considered in this newly updated edition. In clear and insightful language, Clatterbaugh surveys not just conservative, liberal, and radical views of masculinity, but also the alternatives offered by the men's rights movement, spiritual growth advocates, and black and gay rights activists. Each of these is explored both as a theoretical perspective and as a social movement, and each offers distinctive responses to the questions posed.The first edition of this book was the first to survey the range of responses to feminism that men have made as well as the first to put political theory at the center of men's awareness of their own masculinity. This new edition adds chapters on recent highly-publicized movements such at the Promise Keepers, Million Man March, and the evolution of gay men's rights. Clatterbaugh treats all views with fairness and timeliness as he develops and defends a vision of men and masculinity consistent with feminist ideals and a just society.
From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.
A Man among Other Men examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chronological and transatlantic scope that culminates in a deep ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy. A Man among Other Men provides a theoretically innovative, historically grounded, and empirically rich account of Black masculinity that illuminates the sustained power of imaginaries even as capitalism affords a deficit of material opportunities. Revealed is a story of Black abjection set against the anticipation of male privilege, a story of the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism.
One of the most important texts of modern times, Herbert Marcuse's analysis and image of a one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional society has shaped many young radicals' way of seeing and experiencing life. Published in 1964, it fast became an ideological bible for the emergent New Left. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction, Marcuse's greatest work was a 'damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist.' Yet it also expressed the hopes of a radical philosopher that human freedom and happiness could be greatly expanded beyond the regimented thought and behaviour prevalent in established society. For those who held the reigns of power Marcuse's call to arms threatened civilization to its very core. For many others however, it represented a freedom hitherto unimaginable.
From boys to men: learning to love women and money -- Expensive intimacies: courtship, marriage, and fatherhood -- "Money problem": work, class, consumption, and men's social status -- "Ahhheee club": money, intimacy, and male peer groups -- Masculinity gone awry: intimate partner violence, crime, and insecurity -- Becoming an elder, burying one's father.
Regarded as one of the most important sociological and business commentaries of modern times, The Organization Man developed the first thorough description of the impact of mass organization on American society. During the height of the Eisenhower administration, corporations appeared to provide a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies—television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food—and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family. William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. As an editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte was well placed to observe corporate America; it became clear to him that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from one of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual. With its clear analysis of contemporary working and living arrangements, The Organization Man rapidly achieved bestseller status. Since the time of the book's original publication, the American workplace has undergone massive changes. In the 1990s, the rule of large corporations seemed less relevant as small entrepreneurs made fortunes from new technologies, in the process bucking old corporate trends. In fact this "new economy" appeared to have doomed Whyte's original analysis as an artifact from a bygone day. But the recent collapse of so many startup businesses, gigantic mergers of international conglomerates, and the reality of economic globalization make The Organization Man all the more essential as background for understanding today's global market. This edition contains a new foreword by noted journalist and author Joseph Nocera. In an afterword Jenny Bell Whyte describes how The Organization Man was written.
Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture offers readers a multidisciplinary, intersectional overview of masculinity studies that includes both theoretical and applied lenses. Keith combines current research with historical perspectives to demonstrate the contexts in which masculine identities have come evolved. With an emphasis on popular culture -- particularly film, TV, video games, and music -- this text invites students to examine their gendered sensibilities and discuss the ways in which different forms of media appeal to toxic masculinity.
This is the first systematic international comparative study of the transformation of couples' careers in modern societies. The countries included are Germany, the Netherlands, the Flemish part of Belgium, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and China. Using longitudinal data, this book explores what has and what has not changed for couples in various countries due to women's greater involvement in paid employment. It provides evidence that despite substantial improvement in women's educational attainment and career opportunities in all the countries studied, dimensions of role specialization in dual-earner couples have not undergone transformation to the same extent. Gender role change within the family has generally been asymmetric, so that housework and childcare primarily remain 'women's work'. There are, however, also significant institutional differences among modern societies which determine a country's timing, speed, and pattern of change from the traditional male breadwinner to the dual-earner family model. In particular, the impact of males' resources on their female partners' employment careers is dependent on the welfare state regime. In conservative and Mediterranean welfare state regimes, women's paid employment is negatively correlated with the occupational position of their husbands. In liberal welfare state regimes, no impact of husbands' resources on their wives' labour force participation could be detected. In the social democratic welfare state regime and generally in (former) socialist countries, husbands' resources have a positive effect on their wives' employment so that occupational resources cumulate in dual-earner families.
