In a 1907 lecture to Harvard undergraduates, Theodore Roosevelt warned against becoming "too fastidious, too sensitive to take part in the rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the world." Roosevelt asserted that colleges should never "turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men," and cautioned that "the weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community." A paradigm of ineffectuality and weakness, the mollycoddle was "all inner life," whereas his opposite, the "red blood," was a man of action. Kevin P. Murphy reveals how the popular ideals of American masculinity coalesced around these two distinct categories. Because of its similarity to the emergent "homosexual" type, the mollycoddle became a powerful rhetorical figure, often used to marginalize and stigmatize certain political actors. Issues of masculinity not only penetrated the realm of the elite, however. Murphy's history follows the redefinition of manhood across a variety of classes, especially in the work of late nineteenth-century reformers, who trumpeted the virility of the laboring classes. By highlighting this cross-class appropriation, Murphy challenges the oppositional model commonly used to characterize the relationship between political "machines" and social and municipal reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. He also revolutionizes our understanding of the gendered and sexual meanings attached to political and ideological positions of the Progressive Era.

This book presents a unique analysis of the effects of individuals' gendered personality traits on their political attitudes and behavior. The empirical analyses demonstrate that, regardless of biological sex, individuals' levels of masculine and feminine personality traits help to determine their party identification, vote choice, ideology, and political engagement.

Political institutions and practices such as the state, parliament, citizenship and nationality, the vote, the military, and the making and implementation of laws have traditionally been treated as if they were un-gendered and guided exclusively by objective reasoning and rationality. Rationality and reason, though, have been habitually ascribed to masculinity, a fact which has often been ignored in favour of the apparent gender-inclusiveness of the realm of politics. In contrast to this view, this book explores the interdependence of the construction of masculinities, on the one hand, and the emerging, maintenance, and modification of concepts such as the state, citizenship, nationality and nationalism, democracy and militarism on the other. Illustrating the great amount of research activity in the field of political masculinities, the book offers many perspectives in its attempt to shed light on different modes of representing and constructing political masculinities across time and space. Findings from the fields of political science, history, media studies, literature, and film studies, as well as cultural studies, encourage an interdisciplinary debate of political masculinities in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Men with assault rifles, balaclavas and Hawaiian shirts pulled over bulletproof vests. Horned warriors with painted faces and fur headdresses draped over their naked torsos. The storming of the Capitol brought together men who had previously come across one another only online in the Manosphere. These were men with a common interest, followers of a male-supremacist ideology, who rioted in order to fight for their privilege. Before then, the world had looked on as devastating attacks were carried out by incels: those who seek to gain unfettered access to women’s bodies by redrawing the hierarchy of the sexes in order to ensure the subjugation of women. For all of these men, masculinity is a political project, and the events at the Capitol were one episode in a growing movement. From the US and Canada to New Zealand, from Poland to Brazil, right-wing extremists, religious fundamentalists and male supremacists are coming together in order to translate their reactionary dreams of male domination into politics, underscoring the masculine roots of the authoritarian backlash.

This volume explores the role that republican political participation played in forging elite Roman masculinity. It situates familiarly "manly" traits like militarism, aggressive sexuality, and the pursuit of power within a political system based on power sharing and cooperation. In deliberations in the Senate, at social gatherings, and on military campaign, displays of consensus with other men greased the wheels of social discourse and built elite comradery. Through literary sources and inscriptions that offer censorious or affirmative appraisal of male behavior from the Middle and Late Republic (ca. 300–31 BCE) to the Principate or Early Empire (ca. 100 CE), this book shows how the vir bonus, or "good man," the Roman persona of male aristocratic excellence, modulated imperatives for personal distinction and military and sexual violence with political cooperation and moral exemplarity. While the advent of one-man rule in the Empire transformed political power relations, ideals forged in the Republic adapted to the new climate and provided a coherent model of masculinity for emperor and senator alike. Scholars often paint a picture of Republic and Principate as distinct landscapes, but enduring ideals of male self-fashioning constitute an important continuity. Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire provides a fascinating insight into the intertwined nature of masculinity and political power for anyone interested in Roman political and social history, and those working on gender in the ancient world more broadly.

The ideologies and practices of various populist movements are centered on issues of gender, especially idealized notions of masculinity. Offering cultural, political, and historical approaches from a range of interdisciplinary and international perspectives, The Culture and Politics of Populist Masculinities analyzes articulations and performances that link populism to masculinity. In particular, the collection studies political participation in the form of public debates, media, and popular culture. The authors emphasize that in order to understand what can be defined as populism, we need to look at the culture that it inhabits and the efforts to claim, challenge, and reclaim the popular. Writing from a wide range of international contexts, the contributors to The Culture and Politics of Populist Masculinities explore how populist masculinities are articulated and performed, whether there is something problematic about a specifically masculine populism, and whether there is hope for a pluralist, inclusive, even progressive form of masculine populism. Culture and Politics of Populist Masculinities’ international range of contributors explore how populist masculinities are articulated and performed, whether there is something problematic about a specifically masculine populism, and whether there is hope for a pluralist, inclusive, even progressive form of masculine populism.

For the last fifteen years, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in Omaha, Nebraska, steadily compiling a lyrical, if equivocal, response to the American Heartland. In loosely-collaged spreads that reproduce his construction-paper sketchbooks, Halpern takes pleasure in cognitive dissonance and unexpected harmonies, playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place. Omaha Sketchbook is ultimately a meditation on America, on the men and boys who inhabit it, and on the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power.