Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

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.

Psychological study of literature --- Thematology --- Sociology of culture --- United States --- Men, White --- Masculinity --- Men in popular culture --- Men in literature. --- Blancs --- Masculinité --- Hommes dans la culture populaire --- Hommes dans la littérature. --- Masculinity. --- Men in popular culture. --- Men, White. --- United States. --- White men. --- Gender & Ethnic Studies --- Social Sciences --- Gender Studies & Sexuality --- United States of America

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940's, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

Hommes dans la culture populaire --- Hommes dans la littérature --- Mannen in de literatuur --- Mannen in de volkscultuur --- Men in literature --- Men in popular culture --- Psychological study of literature --- Sociology of culture --- United States --- Reverse discrimination --- Masochism --- Men in literature. --- Masculinity --- Men, White --- Discrimination --- Psychic masochism --- Paraphilias --- Personality disorders --- Sadomasochism --- Suffering --- Popular culture --- White men --- United States of America