Description
Book SynopsisA study of post-Vietnam American literature and culture focusing on narratives of bodily trauma evident in a wide range of texts by and about other white men.
Trade ReviewMarked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis is an intelligent, wide-ranging, clearly argued and thoroughly femnist book about the shifting meanings of dominant masculinity in American culture...Robinson makes appropriate but not heavy-handed use of other theorists and literary critics, often developing their insights in original directions...Robinson is an astute critic of cultural images. -- Judith Kegan Gardiner The Women's Review of Books White men have it all, except the hardship of having to live in a world dominated by white men. Sally Robinson argues, with shocking originality... that they now want that too: Through victimization, we find the tensions that make us most alive. -- Jonathon Keats San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle Book Review
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded White Male Body Notes to Intorduction One: Marked Men, Embodying America: John Updike and the Reconstruction of Middle American Masculinity I. The "Discovery" of Middle America and the Marking of White Masculinity II. Rabbit Redux: Black Power, the Counterculture, and the Decentering of White Masculinity III. Rabbit is Rich: Feminism, the Third World, and the Screwing of White Masculinity Coda: The Death of White Masculinity? Notes to Chapter One Two: Pale Males, Dead Poets and the Crisis in White Masculinity: Scenes from the Culture Wars I. Spectacles of (Dis)Embodiment II. American Minds and American Bodies: Reproducing Elitism III. Dead Poets and the Pathos of Wounded White Masculinity Notes to Chapter Two Three: Traumas of Embodiment: White Male Authorship in Crisis I. The "Myth of Male Inviolability": Somatic Disintegration in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man II. Rapists, Feminists and The World According to Garp: Authentic and Inauthentic Trauma III: "Exercising Editorial Authority Over His Body: The Crippling of Body and Text in Stephen King's Misery Notes to Chapter Three Four: Masculinity as Emotional Constipation: Men's Liberation and the Wounds of Patriarchal Power I. The Hazards of Being Male II. The Wisdom of the Penis III. The Embarrassments of Emotional Incontinence Notes to Chapter Four Five: Expression, Repression, and Male Hysteria: Marked Men and the Wounds of Patriarchal Power I. Men's Liberation Redux: Sexuality, Evolution, and the Embodied Struggle Between Blockage and Release II. Damned if They Do, Damned if They Don't: Deliverance and the Hysterical Male Body III. Feminism and Masochism: The Prince of Tides and the Pleasure of Repression Notes to Chapter Five Works Cited
