Routledge Gender, Sexuality, and the Cultural Politics of Men’s Identity: Literacies of Masculinity (Interdisciplinary Research in Gender)

This book considers mass media and contemporary cultural trends to examine masculinity at a point of unprecedented change. While sexual and gender politics have always been fraught, the long unexamined privilege associated with masculinity is now subject to intense scrutiny marked by a host of complex factors. As past markers of masculine norms have been challenged on cultural, social, and economic fronts, men occupy public space ever aware that how they interact with others is questioned and questionable. What does manhood mean? Who is included in its dominant formations? What performances signify membership in the club? How are men reading this contemporary moment and to what extent does cultural literacy inform, maintain, or challenge normative male identities and subsequent performances? This work examines such questions through language and symbolic meaning, and challenges its readers to critically examine what men know and how they understand and embody gender and sexuality in a post-millennial society. Gender, Sexuality, and the Cultural Politics of Men’s Identity in the New Millennium: Literacies of Masculinity crosses academic disciplines and will be highly relevant in composition/rhetoric, gender studies, masculinity studies, and cross-curricular courses that take up popular/contemporary culture as well as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It has been designed with both undergraduate and graduate students in mind. About the Author Robert Mundy is assistant professor of English and writing program director at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY. His research focuses on composition theory and pedagogy, masculinity studies, writing center theory and practice, and cultural studies. His essays have appeared in the collection Class in the Composition Classroom and the journal The Peer Review. Most recently, he was a contributor to and co-editor of Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles (2018). Harry Denny is associate professor of English and director of the Writing Lab at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. His scholarship focuses on composition and writing center studies, cultural studies, and research methods. He has published on identity politics in writing centers; the politics of assessment in writing programs; and media, governmental, legal, and activist responses to HIV and civil rights. He is the author of Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-one Tutoring and a contributor to and co-editor of Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles (2018).