Description
Book SynopsisAffirmative Reaction explores the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States.
Trade Review“
Affirmative Reaction is a remarkable transvaluation of the terms by which we currently understand post-Fordist white masculinist hegemony. Not an unmarked norm but a particularized, and particularly abject, new identity category, white maleness is here submitted to fresh, riveting, lucid, and eye-opening analysis. An exemplary account of recent U.S. mediascapes.”—
Eric Lott, author of
The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual“In analyses that move deftly across economic, political, and affective registers, Hamilton Carroll draws out the dynamics of early-twenty-first-century backlash that have produced the popularity of texts as different as
Brokeback Mountain and
American Chopper, and draws our attention to the nuances to be found in unexpected places such as comic-book responses to 9/11.
Affirmative Reaction can be read as a set of smart, related essays on a common theme, but it is also a tight, cohesive argument about recent developments in white U.S. masculinity. It will be welcomed by specialists in cultural studies, film studies, and gender studies, and it intervenes in the research conversation about the constitution of whiteness that continues in and across several fields and disciplines.”—
Glenn Hendler, Director of the American Studies Program, Fordham University
“
Affirmative Reaction does a good job of critiquing privileged media archetypes. . . . This book will help forward an important dialogue about the contemporary status of white ethnicity, the masculinisation of class and nation, and the development of identity politics in the United States. . . .” -- Timothy Laurie * Critical Race and Whiteness Studies *
“Carroll is at his best when he is drawing out the substance of his multifarious analyses in order to do some theory making about contemporary white masculinity. The most powerful moments of critical insight come when he skillfully jumps from Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in
24 to George W. Bush’s speeches on the War on Terror to Judith Butler and back to Bauer again, underscoring the connections between ideas that are neither obvious nor simple.” -- Patrick Ryan Grzanka * Men and Masculinities *
“Carroll offers a theoretically sophisticated account of some novel recent manoeuvres of white masculine identity, which provides a powerful framework for the critical interrogation of the texts he explores, and many others.” -- James Zborowski * Journal of Gender Studies *
“Carroll’s work makes a valuable contribution to literature on contemporary masculinity and its discontents. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” -- D. E. Magill * Choice *
“I found Carroll’s reading coherent, convincing and resonant in many respects with the ethnographies and qualitative interviewing projects on American whiteness with which I am more familiar. Addressing whiteness as contingent, heterogeneous and rooted in cultural, political and economic shifts is a project in which a number of scholars are already engaged, and Carroll’s text is a very welcome contribution to this field.” -- Steve Garner * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: White Masculinities and the Politics of Representation 1
Part I. 9-11/24-7
Affective Time and the War on Terror
1. Jack Bauer's Extraordinary Rendition: Neoliberal Melodrama and the Ethics of Torture 27
2. Future Perfect: "Everyday Heroes" and the New Exceptionalism 49
Part II. Embodying Difference
Whiteness, Class, and the Postindustrial Subject
3. Men's Soaps: Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary Working-Class Masculinities 77
4. "My Skin Is It Startin' to Work in My Benefit Now?": Eminem's White Trash Aesthetic 101
Part III. Daddy's Home
Family Melodrama and the Fictions of State
5. The Fighting Irish: Ethnic Whiteness and
Million Dollar Baby 131
6. Romancing the Nation: Family Melodrama and the Sentimental Logics of Neoliberalism 157
Notes 181
Bibliography 201
Index 213
