The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture
Lydia R. Cooper (editor)
New York, Routledge, 2022
425 pages
ISBN: 978-0-367-52008-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-15662-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-52009-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780367520090

In The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture, Lydia Cooper brings together an interesting array of scholarly contributions to western masculinity studies starting from its historical contemplations until the present moment transformable masculine statuses, particularly within the American social orbit. This collection discusses blurring the thin line between the traditional white supremacy advocates and the American political powers that affect gender roles. In fact, the core interest of this collection is to underscore the factors that contribute to altering the white hegemonic masculinity in the U.S. It also draws the reader’s attention to the disappearance of certain traditional gender roles within the heteronormative space and the occurrence of other queer forms in the same time. This volume expresses that masculinity is always relational with negotiated grounds.

The first section, “A Literary and Cultural History of American Masculinity,” opens with a historical overview of various masculinities that have shaped the nation and which still have a great impact on the current discourses in the United States. For this section’s contributors, framing a historic charter to American manhood demands the recurrence of three fundamental concepts, and namely: whiteness, intersectionality, and queerness. Indeed, all authors of this chapter emphasize the intersection of class, race, and age on gender perspectives, starting with the Spanish scholar, Josep M. Armengol, who delves into the complexity of American racialized masculinity. By revisiting Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative from the perspective of masculinity and whiteness, he asserts that Black masculinity has been concealed by the white supremacist ideology. Similarly, Hyoseol Ha underscores the impact of white supremacy in the making of the hegemonic white masculinity as a repressive tool of Black masculinity during the Reconstruction by analyzing Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Eran Zelnik’s essay offers a geographical division of masculinity in early America and namely in the Atlantic world (divided into the British Atlantic and Atlantic Slavery), through borderlands and settler-colonialism. Moreover, the following two essays by Rachel Warner and Angelica de Vido explore another type of space: the transgender/queer frontier as represeanted in early twentieth century American literature and cinema, claiming the that strict cultural models of masculinity and femininity have been affecting females and adolescents’ struggle to conform to the cultural norms. This section renders abundant evidence in supporting the need to see the American social fabric from an intersectional eye. Later on, in section four of the book, academic studies about Indian American masculinity, their histories and characteristics are tackled by John Gamber’s section about queer indigenous masculinity that could have been covered as part of the nation’s identity equally as other ‘Atlantics.’ Nevertheless, what the final chapter investigates with Stefan L. Brandt’s ecomasculinity, could be a good framework to consider the American wilderness’ effect on the indigenous masculinity prior to the arrival of settlers as a social practice and performance of indigenous identity.

The second section of the book discusses “Current Crises and New Directions,” dealing with current alternative masculinities, more precisely, in terms of the transgender/queer frontier. This part of the book defends the masculine performativity theory. In this sense, masculinity is neither a stable notion nor a straightforward construct. The authors of this section view masculinity as a social construct that ought to be followed by an acceptance of the variety of masculinities, thereby reconfiguring the traditional masculine “rebels” as normal since, after all, “On ne naît pas homme: on le deviant” one is not born a man, one becomes one (Mallet, 2015, vi). Starting with B. K. Alexander’s “queer” masculinity in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) to heterostalgia depicted in Fox’s television show Last Man Standing, Michael Mayne argues that these kinds of shows are trying to reclaim the traditional patriarchal masculinity norms as an attempt to contain feminist movements. This point is negotiated within Erin Spampinato’s analysis of David Foster Wallace’s critiques of patriarchal masculinity. Spampinato’s contribution suggests the need to consider other masculine figures harmed by such radical masculine norms as well considering women’s harm dealing with Wallace’s misogynist behavior, for example in the #MeToo movement. What is vital in this section is highlighted in the fact that even men are struggling with their fellow toxic masculinity as women. Finally, Mark Greene’s contribution to Man box culture is a solidified example of how men can and are subjected to bullying and trauma as reaction to their unconventional manhood. All the essays in this section assert the need for the critical rereading of the past for a better understanding of not only the contemporary American man but also on the masculinity globally man as well.

In the third section of the volume written on “War, Violence, and American Masculinity,” the authors reflect on martial masculinity during and following the Vietnam War, on the 9/11 incidents and even those of the sports arena and the depiction of these in literature and films, mostly as aggressive male heroes. This is exactly what Hyunyoung Moon tries to look at in her essay debating recent U.S. military marketing campaigns, which portray a particular gendered “warrior” to be the ideal man despite the significant roles of women as military service members. She claims that the American Army’s ideal “warrior” is still represented by the white, aggressive masculine man. Furthermore, in the book’s fourteenth chapter Reed Puc studies the hyper-masculinity and hyper-violence presented in Marvel’s The Punisher arguing for the existence of a queer and trans mode of identification with the Punisher’s masculinity. His refusal to be identified with military values lies in his abjection to be identified as a cisgender white man. Puc asserts that The Punisher is not necessarily transgender par excellence but represents the modern American man with all the various masculinities he could belong to. What I find interesting in this chapter is how Puc reforms the representation of violence from being the tool of claiming the hegemonic masculinity to a sign of rebel and rage towards cisgender discourse, which means not every heroic aggressive man in the present-day era is a hegemonic masculine. However, as Puc shows, there is a great possibility that even the hegemonic masculinity does no longer maintains its “hegemony.”

The fourth section of The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture examines masculinity in its geographic settings. Farmers, Midwesterners, wild western life, and the emergence of the outlaw frontier challenge the hegemonic white masculinity by shifting attention from its rigid characteristics to fluid American identity. This section asserts that U.S. territories celebrate diversity and non-conformity through queer masculinity; for example, the U.S./Mexico border masculinities, and even traveler’s masculinities are affected by the geographies visited and affecting, in return, spaces they have stayed in. The final section of the book examines “Representation in Contemporary Literature, Film, T.V., and New Media.” It prompts us to see America outside the geographical boundaries and outside conventionality, providing a clear metonymic representation of multicultural America in a direct way by creating a space of multi-masculinities. These new masculinities are not affected by social norms but by migrated culture, King-Kok Cheung argues in his analysis of the American Asian literature that exemplifies the complexity of U.S. masculinity vis-à-vis its complex ethnic components. Staying with the complexity of American identification, Joshie Tikka, R. Noam Ostrander, Mica Hilson and Jana Fedtke examine the mediated contemporary queer masculinities under severe misrepresentation and lack of comprehension of queer erotica. They call for a respect for crip-masculinities in online media, especially in terms of disability-masculinity discourse, while on the other, they reclaim pride by taking the example of The Big Bang Theory with Sheldon’s asexuality that was rather shown as an error within his heteromasculinity. This approach indicates that mediated masculinity is still taking sexual desire as the apex of masculinity. Falling by the same token, Sara Villamarín-Freire explores representations of American fatherhood that are tightly linked to hegemonic masculinity, finding a remedy in the feminist movement for more fluid, non-hegemonic representations of fathers and fathering in contemporary popular culture. In the final essay of this volume, Hailey J. Austin delves into various reasons why female characters are often masculinized in superhero comics. Characters such as She-Hulk, Big Barda, and The Mighty Thor are fetishized for the toxic masculinity of fandoms and “geek culture” surrounding their production.

This volume on American masculinities provides a well-grounded protocol for understanding American masculinity first of all in popular culture. The book sheds light on many under-represented forms of masculinity and answers many questions about current issues in regard to this concept. Generally, masculinity in this volume implies a joint identification with the others but it is never a singular perspective, it is rather a social product. Still, new investigations about American masculinity in terms of ethnicities could make this book more relevant in masculinity studies. What I find intriguing is the fact that this book focuses much on queer masculinities to the extent that it renders straight heteronormative masculinity an issue becoming completely synonymous with patriarchy. The other interesting fact is that it raises the issue and the need for a masculine #MeToo to unveil sexual abuses on men, too. Lydia R. Cooper’s edited volume book is a very useful collection to researchers, academics and students interested in American and gender studies and it can function as a manual for masculinity studies in general.

Works cited

• Mallett, Philip, 2015. “Preface.” In P. Mallett (ed.), The Victorian Novel and Masculinity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, vi-xiii.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.