Marked Men

by Robinson, Sally

• ISBN13: 9780231112932
• ISBN10: 0231112939
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded white Male Body	1	(22)
Marketing Men, Embodying America: John Updike and the Reconstruction of Middle American Masculinity	23	(29)
The ``Discovery'' of Middle America and the Marking of White Masculinity	27	(5)
Rabbit Redux: Black Power, the Counterculture, and the Decentering of White Masculinity	32	(7)
Rabbit Is Rich: Feminism, the Third World, and the Screwing of White Masculinity	39	(8)
Coda: The Death of White Masculinity?	47	(5)
Pale Males, Dead Poets, and the Crisis in White Masculinity: Scenes from the Culture Wars	52	(35)
Spectacles of (Dis)Embodiment	57	(13)
American Minds and American Bodies: Reproducing Elitism	70	(9)
Dead Poets and the Pathos of Wounded White Masculinity	79	(8)
Traumas of Embodiment: White Male-Authorship in Crisis	87	(41)
the ``Myth of Male Inviolability'': Somatic Disintegration in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man	89	(12)
Rapists, Feminists, and The World According to Garp: Inauthentic versus Authentic Traumas	101	(12)
``Exercising Editorial Authority Over His Body'': The Crippling of Body and Text in Stephen King's Misery	113	(15)
Masculinity As Emotional Constipation: Men's Liberation and The Wounds of Patriarchal Power	128	(25)
The Hazards of Being Male	132	(8)
The Wisdom of the Penis	140	(5)
The Embarrassment s f Emotional Incontinence	145	(8)
Expression, Repression, and Male Hysteria: Marked Men and the Wounds of a Dammed Masculinity	153	(40)
Men's Liberation Redux: Sexuality, Evolution, and the Embodied Struggle Between Blockage and Release	155	(10)
Dammed If They Do, Damned If They Don't: Deliverance and the Hysterical Male Body	165	(15)
Feminism and masochism: The Prince of Tides and the Pleasures of Repression	180	(13)
Notes	193	(50)
Bibliography	243	(18)
Index	261