Description
Book SynopsisInnovative essays that explore how men perform femininity and what femininity looks like without women
What counts as male femininity? Is it simply men behaving in effeminate ways or is it the absence of masculinity? Male Femininities presents a nuanced, critical collection of essays that highlight the extent to which male femininities are neither an imitation of femaleness nor an emptying of masculinity. These innovative essays focus on both gay and straight men, and transmasculine and genderqueer people in their construction and performance of femininity, thereby revealing the possibilities that open up when we critically examine femininity without women. Male Femininities asks, What does femininity look like for men?
The contributorshighly regarded scholars and rising starscover a range of topics, including drag queens, cosmetic enhancements, trans fertility, and gender-non-conforming childhoods. Male Femininities illuminates what happens whe
Trade Review
"Rigorously and playfully complicating its core concepts, Male Femininities takes a sociological tour through the spaces where male bodies and male subjectivities encounter, embrace, disavow, and inhabit the feminine. Expansive in its empirical and theoretical scope, this book is a must-have for scholars and students of gender studies." * Jane Ward, author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality *
"Male Femininities explores the political potential of gender boundary crossing and encourages readers to see gender as distinct from sex and sexuality. Focusing on what happens when social rules are broken, each chapter reveals the variety of spaces in which gender can look different from what we might expect." * Kristen Barber, author of Styling Masculinity *
"Kudos to the editors for bringing together such engaging work – including compelling first-person narratives and theoretically- and historically-grounded ethnographic research – that illustrates a range of male femininities in action." * Wendy Simonds, author of Hospital Land USA *
