Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture [Paperback]

Pinks, Pansies, and Punkscharts the construction of masculinity within American literary culture from the 1930s to the 1970s. Penner documents the emergence of macho criticism, and explores how debates about hard and soft masculinity influenced the class struggles of the 1930s, anti-communism in the 1940s and 1950s, and the clash between the Old Left and the New Left in the 1960s. By extending literary culture to include not just novels, plays, and poetry, but diaries, journals, manifestos, screenplays, and essays on psychology and sociology, Penner unveils the multiplicity of gender attitudes that emerge in each of the decades he addresses.

A nice addition to the steadily lengthening shelf of literary gender studies, this perceptive, well-researched volume explores the period of American history between the Depression and the sexual revolution. Stretching from Thornton Wilder's supposed effeteness of the 1930s to Eldridge Cleaver's revived machismo of the late 1960s, the period encompasses a surprisingly rich record of diverse and consistently contested masculinities. Penner (Univ. of Puerto Rico) notes that while economic, social and class concerns of the 1930s-40s gave way to the revolutions of second-wave feminism and gay liberation in the 1960s-70s, the politics of American masculinity oscillated somewhat predictably between stereotypical notions of hard-shell manliness and overly sensitive softness. Relying on the theoretical supports of feminism, psychoanalysis, and queer studies, the author surveys a vast landscape of eclectic literary achievement: from hypermasculine warrior myths, anticommunist crusades, and the New Critics to Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs. For its ability to synthesize, organize, and complicate such a diverse slate of writers, Penner's study merits a long look. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice

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