Warren Hedges English Dept. Southern Oregon University
Clatterbaugh, Kenneth. Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women, and Politics in Modern Society. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1990.
Kimmel, Michael S. Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and
Masculinity. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987
Several essays written from a profeminist perspective.
Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990.
This is a great in-depth overview of recent social change (or lack of change) by heterosexual men and of theories about heterosexual men in the U.S. & Great Britian. Written from a theoretically savvy but accessible perspective, it's a good book to read after Clatterbaugh's.
Beneke, Timothy. Men On Rape. New York: St. Martins, 1982.
This pioneering collection has interviews with husbands and lovers of rape survivors, rapists, lawyers, doctors, policemen, and a response by a rape advocate. The accounts are powerful because of their immediacy.
Kimmel, ---. Men Confront Pornography. New York: Meridian--Penguin, 1990.
Diverse and challenging collection. Some essays address gay porn and questions about whether men can be profeminist and still enjoy some forms of porn.
Stoltenberg, John. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. Meridian-Penguin, 1989.
A radical profeminist effort. Stoltenberg is a pivotal figure in male debates about pornography.
Tucker, Scott. "Gender, Fucking, and Utopia: An Essay in Response to John Stoltenberg's Refusing to Be a Man." Social Text 27. (I don't have the year).
Tucker, theorist par excellance and former leather calendar model, mounts a powerful critique of Stoltenberg's position on porn.
Collections of Essays
Brod, Harry. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987.
Several good essays, some only okay. Except for Brod's introduction, which is well-worth reading, I refer to the best essays elsewhere in this bibliography.
Jardine, Alice and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Originally a high-powered Modern Language Association session, this may? be a moot point. Some good essays for the poststructually inclined, plus several (especially one by Cary Nelson) that are good to steer by men who don't see "male feminism" as problematic.
Nelson, Cary. "Men, Feminism: The Materiality of Discourse." In
Jardine & Smith's book.
Although the title is misleadingly dull Nelson's article is pivotal because it explicitly states that profeminist men's relation to feminism is one of self-interest. This was an important break from figuring men's profeminism as the result of altruism.
Kaufman, Michael. Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Though not as extensive as Kimmel's later anthology, this book has many excellent essays written from profeminist perspectives.
Metcalf, Andy with and Martin Humphries, eds. The Sexuality of Men. London: Pluto Press, 1985.
Essays by members of the British men's CR group, Achilles Heel
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World. New York: Basic-Harper, 1994.
Chauncey's work is the new bible for all the grad students in history that I know who work on gay culture. It breaks off roughly where D'Emilio's Sexual Politics begins.
D'Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper, 1988.
A much-needed book that provides a comprehensive account of sexual attitudes, conflicts, practices, and legislation in American history. Filled with surprises like the randiness of the puritans, Victorian porn and prostitution, and the relationship between McCarthyism and gay baiting in the 50's. An extremely worthwhile book to steer by people who believe that today's sexual behavior is more "liberated" than in the past.
D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a
Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago
Press, 1983.
A path-breaking book laying out gay history and experience in America just prior to Stonewall and gay pride.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight
from Commitment. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1983.
I like this for its prose as much as its thought. Not rigorous history or sociology, but suggestive, witty, provocative, and useful.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1995.
I haven't finished this solid and useful book. Katz does the vital work of taking heterosexuality, something usually considered to be self-evident, unchanging, and free from internal contradictions, and pulling it apart by giving it a history.
Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Pres-Schuster, 1996.
This comprehensive and accessible history will surely be the standard for years.
Rotundo, J. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity
from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books--Harper,
1993.
Along with Kimmel's, one of the best histories date on masculinity in America. Although slightly overschematic at times, Rotundo's book is well-written and contains a wealth of information often culled from primary sources like personal letters and school archives.
Abelove, Henry, with Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin. The Lesbain and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993.
A challenging reader that reflects the best work in recent theorizations of sexuality, as well as reproducing many pivotal essays, such as Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex," that are not always easy to find.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
A paradigm-shifting book, and for those interested in high theory, an indispensable one. Not easy to read, however. Butler argues that gender is not a being, but a doing--not something that you possess, but something that you perform. Among other things, this entails that butch is to masculine not as original is to copy, but as copy is to copy. Also, in Butler's framework, the opposition male/female proves to be a matter of culture rather than anatomy, and a heterosexist opposition at that. In other words, rather than merely being mapped onto anatomical differences that preexist culture, gender (culturally constituted) defines and delimits anatomy. Ask me for my notes on it.
Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. NY, Routledge, 1989.
An eminently readable overview of thinking about essentialism and social construction with regard to race, gender, and sexual orientation. A nice entry book to understanding recent debates about identity politics.
"Feminism Meets Queer Theory" Special issue of differences 6.2+3 (summer-fall) 1994.
Especially helpful are Judith Butler's interviews of Rosi Bradotti and of Gayle Rubin where they clarify how queer theory emerged out of their commitment to feminist politics.
Fuss, Diana. Ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 1991.
A wide-ranging collection well-suited for the theoretical sophisticate. A regular item on any queer theory shelf-list.
Rubin, Gayle. "Thinking Sex." In Ablelove collection.
This essay paved the way for a great deal of the queer theory that will emerge in the 90s, and it becomes a central debate piece in the "porn wars" about whether women's oppression is a function of their objectification.
Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Eve does a great job showing how the straight/gay opposition affects and regulates all men's behavior in a homophobic society. Many other helpful readings.
Sedgwick, ---. The Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990.
An amazing, though sometimes difficult, book. Eve untangles many of the conceptual roadblocks in recent gender theory. Particularly useful are her distinctions between universalizing and minoritizing accounts of gayness and between theorizing sex and theorizing gender.
Sedgwick, ---. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke Press, 1993.
This is Eve's most accessible work to date, although, as always, it's challenging. Includes pieces on nationalism, steroids, uncles & aunts in Oscar Wilde, and Divine.
Madhubuti, Haki R. Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? The Afrikan American Family in Transition: Essay in Discovery, Solution and Hope. Chicago: Third World Press, 1990.
Acessible, lucid, and written by a member of the community he writes about.
Pfeil, Fred. White Guys: Essays in Postmodern Domination and Difference. New York: Verso, 1995.
As with heterosexuality, historians are beginning to dissect the ways that whiteness also has a history and is self-divided rather than monolithic. Among other things, an entertaining read.
Staples, Robert. Black Masculinity: The Black Male's Role in American Society.
I don't have the publication data on this. I've read several essays by Staples and have consistently been impressed with his work.
Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman. London:
John Calder, 1979.
Wallace both critiques and tries to understand the gender dynamics that undergirded much of the black power movement.
Boone, Joseph A. and Michael Cadden. Engendering Men: The Question of
Male Feminist Criticism. N Y: Routledge, 1990.
The subtitle to this is very misleading. It's a hit and miss collection, but the hits are big ones. There are a several essays from a gay studies perspective that are excellent.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity on the Margins. New York: Routledge,
1992.
I found Silverman's high-octane film criticism bracing and helpful. Besides making Lacan relatively comprehensible, she offers a veritable arsenal of conceptual tools for demonstrating that masculinity ain't what it appears to be. The discussions I found most helpful were her dissections of Freudian distinctions about different kinds of masochism, her discussion of the difference between the Lacan gaze and the look, and her contention that men project their castration onto women.
Simpson, Mark. Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 1994.
I've barely started this, but it looks really good. Since it's written by a journalist (film critic), it's much more readable than most theory, and a lot of fun.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Vols 1 & 2. (Translated) Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota Press, 1987 & 1989.
Attempts a post-Lacanian, post-Anti-Oedipus take on novels and memories by the German Freikorps in the 1920s. I found paradigms in here that were extremely accessible and appropriable on the fragment level (he'd argue that there is no other level). It's rambling, schizophrenic format agrees with me.