Manhood Acts Gender and the Practices of Domination [Hardcover]

In Manhood Acts Michael Schwalbe offers a new perspective on the social construction of manhood and its relationship to male domination. Schwalbe argues that study of masculinity has lost touch with its feminist roots and has been seduced by the politically safe notion of 'multiple masculinities'. Manhood Acts delineates the practices males use to construct 'women' and 'men' as unequal categories. Schwalbe reclaims the radical feminist insights that gender is a field of domination, not a field of play, and that manhood is fundamentally about exerting or resisting control. Manhood Acts arrives at the conclusion that abolishing gender as a system of oppression will require more than transgressive self-presentation. It will be necessary to end the exploitive economic relationships that necessitate manhood itself.Chapter 1 Schwalbe (North Carolina State Univ.) sets out to illustrate the mutually constitutive nature of masculinity and a range of social and economic forms of domination[.] He introduces a new concept manhood acts to fill theoretical gaps in men's studies literature and, simultaneously, facilitate an analysis of the relationship between masculinity and various social phenomena...This book pushes for a deeper understanding of what gender is so that people may collectively begin to imagine a world without it...Summing up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries.
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Manhood Acts is a must-read for students and scholars in mens studies. Michael
Schwalbe presents a valuable sociological analysis of masculinity and manhood. He uses
critical gender theory to deconstruct masculinity and its destructive outcomes, from
Auschwitz to drone morality. Taking issue with the current focus in mens studies on
multiple masculinities, Schwalbe argues that masculinity, as part of the hierarchical
gender order, is based on domination of women and less-valued men. He ends with a
radical feminist call for a gender-frelS-