Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US: Between Bodies and Systems

   • Kevin Floyd, Stefan Horlacher

   Pages 1-18

3. Modern-Day Mercenaries? Cowboys, Grey Men, and the Emotional Habitus

   • Paul Higate

   Pages 19-38

4. Rugged Individualists and Systemic Coups: Imagining Mercenary Masculinities in The Dogs of War (1974)

   • Charity Fox

   Pages 39-56

5. Privileged Crises in the Wake of 9/11: Universalizing Masculinity in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

   • Elahe Haschemi Yekani

   Pages 57-74

6. Does the Body Politic Have No Genitals? The Thick of It and the Phallic Nature of the Political Arena

   • Wieland Schwanebeck

   Pages 75-97

7. The Use of Celebrity Men in Anti-Trafficking and Ending Demand Interventions: Observations on the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” Public Service Campaign

   • Sarah L. Steele, Tyler Shores

   Pages 99-120

8. “Stand It Like a Man”: The Performance of Masculinities in Deadwood

   • Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

   Pages 121-130

9. The Tragic “Complexity of Manhood”: Masculinity Formations and Performances in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

   • Velina Manolova

   Pages 131-155

10. “Guys Like Me Are a Dying Breed”: The Politics of Irish-American Masculinity in Recent Movies and TV Series

    • Alexandra Schein

    Pages 157-176

11. White Supremacists, or the Emasculation of the American White Man

    • Michael Kimmel

    Pages 177-200

12. Law, Language, and Post-Patriarchal Malaise in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own

    • Katja Kanzler

    Pages 201-217

13. Wall Street and Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Film and Fiction

    • Ulfried Reichardt

    Pages 219-232

14. Back Matter

    Pages 233-243

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This book is about ways to understand masculinity as systemic and corporeal, structural and performative all at once. It argues that the tension between an understanding of “masculinity” in the singular and “masculinities” in the plural poses a problem that can better be understood in relation to a concomitant tension: between systems on the one hand, and bodies on the other - between abstract structures such as patriarchy, kinship or even language, and the various concrete forms taken by gendered, individuated corporeality.

The contributions collected here investigate how masculinities become apparent, how they take shape and what systemic functions they have. What, they ask, are the relations between the abstract and corporeal, metaphorical and metonymic manifestations of masculinity? How are we to understand masculinity as a simultaneously systemic and corporeal, performative concept? 

• masculinity studies
• biological body
• gendered self
• gendered social systems
• performative masculinity

“Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US is a very enjoyable collection of rather heterogeneous texts. … the collection accomplishes very well what it set out to do, namely to raise awareness of the gap Between Bodies and Systems.” (Monika Müller, Anglia, Vol. 138 (4), 2020)

• Institute of English and American Studies, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

  Stefan Horlacher

• Department of English, Kent State University , Kent, USA

  Kevin Floyd

Stefan Horlacher is Chair of English Literature at TU Dresden, Germany. He is the author of two monographs and the editor or co-editor of 17 books. His latest publications are Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice (2015); Männlichkeit. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch / Metzler Handbook on Masculinities and Masculinity Studies (2016), and Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives (2016).


Kevin Floyd is Professor of English at Kent State University, USA, a recent recipient of Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt grants, and the author of The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009; French translation 2013). His articles have appeared in journals including Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, Cultural Critique, Mediations, Science and Society, and Works and Days. 

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