Sexual violence and American manhood
Taking up topics as diverse as the work of FBI profilers, the pornography debates, feminist analyses of male supremacy as sexual abuse, the ritual meanings of fraternity gang rape, and the interplay of racial and sexual injustice, T. Walter Herbert illuminates the chronic masculine anxieties that seek compensation in fantasies of sexual coercion and in sexual offenses against women. His work offers a clear view of this prevailing convention of insecure and destructive masculinity, which Herbert connects with contemporary analyses of male identity formation, sexuality, and violence and with cultural, political, and ideological developments reaching back to the nation's democratic beginnings. Reading iconic nineteenth-century texts by Whitman, Hawthorne, and Stowe, and pursuing the articulation of their gender logic in Richard Wright's Native Son, Herbert traces a gender ideology of dominance and submission, its persistence in masculine subcultures like the military and big-time football, and its debilitating effects on imaginations and lives in our own day. This book taps into popular culture and high art alike to outline the logic of American manhood's violent streak--and its dire consequences for a culture with truly democratic and egalitarian ambitions
Print Book, English, 2002
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002
255 pages ; 21 cm
9780674009172, 0674009177
50091682
Prologue
Frontiers of masculinity
Rape as an activity of the imagination
Becoming a natural man
Pornographic manhood
Investigations behind the veil
Rape as redemption
Democratic masculinities
Epilogue