Masculinities and Literary Studies: Intersections and New Directions

225 Pages·2017·1.138 MB·English

by  Josep M. Armengol, Marta Bosch Vilarrubias, Àngels Carabí, Teresa Requena (eds.)

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Masculinities and Literary Studies
This volume explores the conjunction between masculinities and literary studies,
revising some of the latest developments and new directions resulting from their
intersection. If much of the existing masculinity scholarship has traditionally been
grounded in a specific discipline, this study also provides an innovative methodologi-
cal approach to the subject of literary masculinities by proving the applicability of
the latest interdisciplinary masculinity scholarship—namely, sociology, social work,
psychology, economics, political science, ecology, etc.—to the literary analysis, thus
crossing the traditional boundary between the Social Sciences and the Humanities in
new and profound ways. Presenting the latest advances in masculinity scholarship,
this interdisciplinary book will appeal to gender and masculinity scholars from a
wide variety of fields, including sociology and social work, psychology, philosophy,
political science, and cultural and literary studies.
Josep M. Armengol is Associate Professor at the University of Castilla–La
Mancha, Spain.
Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias received her PhD in English from the University of
Barcelona, Spain, where she is currently an assistant lecturer.
Àngels Carabí is Emeritus Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain.
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí is a lecturer at the University of Barcelona, Spain.
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
Core editorial group: Dr. Kathy Davis (Institute for History and Culture, Utre-
cht, The Netherlands), Professor Jeff Hearn (managing editor; Örebro Univer-
sity, Sweden; Hanken School of Economics, Finland; University of Huddersfield,
UK), Professor Anna G. Jónasdóttir (Örebro University, Sweden), Professor Nina
Lykke (managing editor; Linköping University, Sweden), Professor Elżbieta H.
Oleksy (University of Łódź, Poland), Dr. Andrea Petö (Central European Uni-
versity, Hungary), Professor Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of
London, UK), Professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Syracuse University, USA).
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is committed to
the development of new feminist and profeminist perspectives on changing gen-
der relations, with special attention to:
• Intersections between gender and power differentials based on age, class,
dis/abilities, ethnicity, nationality, racialisation, sexuality, violence, and other
social divisions.
• Intersections of societal dimensions and processes of continuity and change:
culture, economy, generativity, polity, sexuality, science and technology.
• Embodiment: Intersections of discourse and materiality, and of sex and gender.
• Transdisciplinarity: intersections of humanities, social sciences, medical,
technical and natural sciences.
• Intersections of different branches of feminist theorizing, including: his-
torical materialist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, radical
feminisms, sexual difference feminisms, queerfeminisms, cyberfeminisms,
posthuman feminisms, critical studies on men and masculinities.
• A critical analysis of the travelling of ideas, theories and concepts.
• A politics of location, reflexivity and transnational contextualising that
reflects the basis of the Series framed within European diversity and transna-
tional power relations.
21 Visualizing Difference
Performative Audiencing in the Intersectional Classroom
Elżbieta Oleksy
22 Masculinities and Literary Studies
Intersections and New Directions
Edited by Josep M. Armengol, Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias, Àngels Carabí and
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí
Masculinities and Literary
Studies
Intersections and New Directions
Edited by Josep M. Armengol,
Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias,
Àngels Carabí and
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 Josep M. Armengol, Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias, Àngels Carabí and
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí
The right of Josep M. Armengol, Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias, Àngels Carabí
and Teresa Requena-Pelegrí to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
PART I
Rethinking Ethnic Masculinities 7
1 The Negro Goes to War 9
ROBERT REID-PHARR
2 Revisiting Masculinities from Whiteness Studies: Herman
Melville’s “Benito Cereno” 16
JOSEP M. ARMENGOL
3 Staging Intersectionality: Beyond Gender and Race in the
American Theater 25
BARBARA OZIEBLO
PART II
Transnational Masculinities 37
4 Men Around the World: Global and Transnational Masculinities 39
JEFF HEARN
5 Transnational Legacies and Masculinity Politics in
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao 56
AISHIH WEHBE-HERRERA
vi Contents
6 New Arab Masculinities: A Feminist Approach to Arab
American Men in Post-9/11 Literature Written by Women 66
MARTA BOSCH-VILARRUBIAS
PART III
The Ages of Men 77
7 “Men Who Cry in Their Sleep”: Aging Male Hysteria in
Martin Amis’s London Stories 79
LYNNE SEGAL
8 Negotiating Childhood and Boyhood Boundaries: Richard
Linklater’s Boyhood and Toni Morrison’s Black Boys 89
MAR GALLEGO
9 Fighting the Monsters Inside: Masculinity, Agency,
and the Aging Gay Man in Christopher Bram’s Father of
Frankenstein 98
SARA MARTÍN
PART IV
Masculinities and Affect 107
10 Theorizing the Masculinity of Affect 109
TODD W. REESER
11 Men of War: Affect, Embodiment, and Western Heroic
Masculinity in Dispatches and The Hurt Locker 120
KATARZYNA PASZKIEWICZ
PART V
Eco-masculinities 131
12 The “Wild, Wild World”: Masculinity and the Environment
in the American Literary Imagination 133
STEFAN BRANDT
13 Green Intersections: Caring Masculinities and the
Environmental Crisis 143
TERESA REQUENA-PELEGRÍ
Contents vii
PART VI
Masculinities and/in Capitalism 153
14 Masculinities and Financial Capitalism 155
PENNY GRIFFIN
15 Capitalism, Slavery, and Mask-ulinities: New Directions 168
DAVID LEVERENZ
16 “To Love What Death Doesn’t Touch”: Questioning
Capitalist Masculinity in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch 181
MERCÈ CUENCA
PART VII
Epilogue
Masculinity Studies: New Directions 191
ROBERT REID-PHARR, JEFF HEARN, LYNNE SEGAL, TODD W. REESER,
STEFAN BRANDT, AND MICHAEL KIMMEL IN CONVERSATION WITH
THE MEMBERS OF THE RESEARCH GROUP “CONSTRUCTING NEW
MASCULINITIES” (CNM), UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
Index 209
Acknowledgments
We wish to heartily thank Jeff Hearn for his encouragement and support, and for
trusting in this project from the start. Our gratitude to all the contributors for so
kindly accepting to participate in this volume, which would never have seen the
light without their generous efforts and enthusiasm. The following members of
the University of Barcelona–based research group (CNM) would like to acknowl-
edge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitive-
ness (Research Project “Men in Fiction,” Ref. FFI2011–23589) for the writing of
their essay: Josep M. Armengol (UCLM); Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias (UB); Àngels
Carabí (UB); Mercè Cuenca (CNM); Barbara Ozieblo (UM); Teresa Requena-
Pelegrí (UB); Aishih Wehbe-Herrera (CNM). Mar Gallego (UM) would like to
express her thanks to the research project, “Bodies in Transit” (Ref. FFI2013–
47789-C2–1-P), and to the European Regional Development Fund. We also want
to acknowledge the help given by Rubén Cenamor, our kind and hardworking
research assistant, who has helped us in formatting the volume.
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Traditionally, gender studies have generally focused on women. Politically, this
is logical enough. It is women who have undergone the worst effects of gender
discrimination, and so it is women who had to make gender visible as a political
category for the first time. Nevertheless, gender studies have since the late 1980s
started to pay increasing attention to men’s lives as well, recognizing that the
lives of women are inextricably linked to men’s, and that men can, indeed should,
actively participate in the struggle for gender equality if we are all to live bet-
ter, happier lives (Kimmel and Messner 1–10). Over the last twenty years, then,
gender studies have increasingly expanded to incorporate both women’s studies
and critical studies on men and masculinities. This has contributed to promoting a
thriving interdisciplinary research on men and masculinities, which has given way
to a fast-growing number of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humani-
ties, including sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, and cul-
tural studies of masculinity, among others.
While the first studies of masculinities in the late 1980s stemmed from soci-
ology and psychology, the field, as Michael Kimmel has argued, has since the
late 1990s moved very influentially into the Humanities (16, 18), resulting in the
recent publication of a growing number of studies on cultural representations of
masculinity in literature, cinema, art, music, the media, and so forth. As part of this
growing interest in cultural representations, a whole field has emerged that deals
specifically with literary representations of masculinities. If, as Teresa de Lauretis
has argued, “the representation of gender is (its) construction” (2), then there is no
doubt that cultural representations play a key role in the social construction—and
deconstruction—of masculinities. While the early feminist literary scholarship
from the 1970s and 1980s focused on fictional representations of women and
femininity, feminist criticism has since the 1990s expanded to include literary
representations of masculinities as well, exploring depictions of male sexualities,
the male body, fatherhood, friendship, and gender violence, among others.1
As more and more work is being done in the name of this ever-growing field
of research, it seems necessary, therefore, to not only review its development and
main contributions to the larger field of masculinity studies, but also to look at
its latest advances and new directions. These are precisely the two main aims of
the present volume, which, on the one hand, focuses on the intersections between