White men still hold most of the political and economic cards in the United States; yet stories about wounded and traumatized men dominate popular culture. Why are white men jumping on the victim bandwagon? Examining novels by Philip Roth, John Updike, James Dickey, John Irving, and Pat Conroy and such films as "Deliverance", "Misery", and "Dead Poets Society" - as well as other writings, including "The Closing of the American Mind" - Sally Robinson argues that white men are tempted by the possibilities of pain and the surprisingly pleasurable tensions that come from living in crisis.
Recenzijos
" Marked 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
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"In the past two decades, white men have proclaimed themselves the new victims -- buffeted by feminism and other forces out of their control, and often even 'falling down.'In this textured and nuanced reading of central works from that era, Sally Robinson helps us understand the crisis of white masculinity and thus chart a course away from victimhood and towards accountability." -- Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood in America " Marked Men turns the emergent field of whiteness studies on its head: where other scholars posit that making whiteness and masculinity visible as specific forms of embodiment is an inherent critical insurgency, Sally Robinson shows that such critical strategies are actually complicit with the dominant project of white masculinity in the public sphere. This book is the single most important and concise revisiting of the social and scholarly terrain of white masculinity to date." -- Robyn Wiegman, author of American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender "In Marked Men, Sally Robinson argues persuasively that the white male role of individual victim serves to turn social and political issues into purely personal matters -- an analysis that explains contemporary American masculinity more cogently than either the judgment that now men are behaving badly out of a pure 'backlash'against feminism or that they have been 'stiffed'by uncontrollable cultural forces." -- Judith Kegan Gardiner, editor of Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice "Brilliant and timely, Marked Men pries open the workings of American masculinity in the cultural wars of the 1970s and 1980s with piercing intellect and wit -- bringing critical attention to a broad range of pressing contemporary issues. Robinson deftly interweaves interdisciplinary readings of cultural texts, from novels and movies to academic theory and self-help books, to deliver a stunning critique not only of white male anxiety but also of the more general cultural fall-out plaguing American society in the aftermath of the 1960s." -- Marlon Bryan Ross, author of The Contours of Masculine Desire
Sally Robinson is associate professor of English at Texas A& M University and the author of Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction.
