Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Table of Contents1. Returning to Matter: Critical Perspectives on Representations of the Male Body.- 2. Brother to Brother: A Rereading of Black Masculinities in Embodied Performance.- 3. ‘You’re a Real Man After All’: Fashioning the Male Physique in Twentieth-Century Boxing and Wrestling Magazines.- 4. Basil Dearden’s Violent Playground (1958): Masculinity, Class, and Sentimental Politics.- 5. Refashioning the Male Body: Contemporary Media Representations of the Spornosexual and the Waif.- 6. English Dandies and French Lions: Policing the Male Body in Popular Print and Visual Culture between 1815 and 1848.- 7. Stiliagi Masculinity and the Re-Fashioning of the Male Body in the Soviet Union (1948–1958).- 8. Claiming the Flâneur’s Body: Cross-Dressing Women, Autobiographical Self-Fashioning, and the Pleasures of Passing and Not Passing as a Man on the Street.- 9. Jake and Ellen in Transition: On Clarissa Sligh’s Mutable Bodies.- 10. “A Most Unlikely Hero”: Disability, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Harlequin Superromance Novels.- 11. Of Cyborgs, Aliens, and Tricksters: Posthumanist Perspectives on the Male Body in Caribbean Speculative Literature.- 12. Fashionable Men in Skin-Tight Pants: Shifts in Body Images and Concepts of Masculinity in the History of Men’s Legwear.- 13. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” – Disability and the Queering of Masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.- 14. Rereading the Male Body: The Cultural Power of Representation.
