From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through to Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timonthy McVeigh, white men in the USA have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In this book, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, 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-mythologizing of the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctly 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 US culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard, both as 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. The book 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. Discussin 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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Covering a spectrum of masculine imagery that embraces everything from John Wayne and Rambo to Tony Kushner and gay S&M, Savran (Communists, Cowboys, and Queers) traces the rising fortunes of the white-man-as-victim in recent American history. At first isolated and alienated in the margins of the 1950s Beat generation, the American White Man as a type was "feminized" at the center of the '60s radical discourse before returning as a reconstructed concept in an array of backlash movements in the '70s, finally establishing itself as a cultural center in the '80s and '90s. Despite Savran's wide range of accessible sources and broad canvas, however, his demanding, psychoanalytically informed prose, dense with wordplay, parentheses, and jargon, makes for tough going. Moreover, the sheer volume of material hereAamong the genres surveyed are poetry, fiction, literary criticism, drama, political discourse and filmAsometimes becomes overwhelming; the same case might well have been made with fewer examples. Yet the author's argument is worth pursuing, and a number of readings are acute and original. In the movie Twister, for instance, he finds both a post-Cold War fear of terrorism ("a new and unpredictable monster that may strike at any moment, destroying property, killing innocent people, and uprooting families") and a renewed spirituality (the awful, and awe-ful, monster twister as "the finger of God"). Not for the uninitiated, but valuable for those with the stamina to push to the end.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
A professor of English at Brown University who has published widely on American theater and culture, Savran draws on earlier journal articles and research to take a critical look at the white male as a victim of contemporary society. He observes the changing model of masculinity in post-World War II America, examining the social and sexual milieu that has created that model and scouring literary, film, and journalistic material to lay bare the foundation for the self-destructive, feminized, masochistic, and victimized American white male of today. Noting the differing social and power status of men and women, Savran argues persuasively that white masculinity has been a casualty in the battles fought by the Civil Rights and women's movements. His well-written, scholarly study is for academic and larger public library cultural studies collections.AMichael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Libs., IN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
well researched and thoughtfully argued,
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This review is from: Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Paperback)
The book proposes, as the editorial blurb above says, to examine the contradictory construction of white masculinity in America, and I think it does a good job.While I am not wholly satisfied with some of Savran's arguments -- I generally dislike Freudian discourse as an analytic tool, and the discussion of economic factors (military-industrial capitalism, etc.) seems to me to be lacking (a proper analysis would be beyond the scope of the work) -- there's enough cogent analysis most of the time to outweigh the few instances that I don't find convincing. Those who have read Susan Faludi's _Stiffed_ will find many parallels between the two books, though this one is targetted at a more academic audience. Some familiarity with psychoanalytic and poststructuralist thought will be beneficial. Savran refers on several occassions to Judith Butler, so having read _Gender Trouble_ can be useful background.
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