Spanning the disciplines of sociology, history, media and cultural studies, and popular culture, this book offers a historical exploration of Australian masculine tropes and an examination of contemporary representations of masculinity in the media. With attention to a range of thematic issues, including race, gender, sexuality, mythmaking, media representation, class, and nationality, it draws on new qualitative research and interview material to investigate the ways in which everyday Australian men take up or reject such ideas. White Masculinity in Contemporary Australia thus explores the contradictory resistance to and adoration of ideals of masculinity, forms of Othering used to differentiate the practice of "good" masculinity from that of "bad" masculinity, the relationship between heterosexuality, masculinity and Australian sporting culture as central to ideals of masculinity, and the existence of differing pressures to be masculine. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender and sexuality, Australian studies, and contemporary popular culture.

This book explores navigations of contemporary masculinities amongst young, advantaged men living in Australia and Germany. Taking an intersectional approach, the book argues that more open, egalitarian forms of masculinity, such as caring masculinities, are fostered by marginalised groups. Elliott investigates ways in which privileged men can move towards this openness alongside ongoing expressions of more traditional or regressive masculinity. Drawing on interviews, the book explores these navigations and the ways in which they are bound up with themes such as work, mobility, relationships, the privileges and pressures of masculinities, and the contradictions and difficulties of masculinities under neoliberalism. What is revealed is the need for change at individual, collective and structural levels, with care and openness amongst men as a means of achieving this change. Young Men Navigating Contemporary Masculinities will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as sociology, gender studies, critical studies on men and masculinities, and cultural studies.

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, 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-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively 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 U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both 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. Taking It Like a Man provocatively 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. Discussing 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.

This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities, facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture. It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities. More generally, the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space. Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness, how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self. Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

This book is the first of its kind to investigate the ongoing significance of industrial craft in deindustrialising places such as Australia. Providing an alternative to the nostalgic trope of the redundant factory ‘craftsman’, this book introduces the intriguing and little-known trade of engineering patternmaking, where objects are brought to life through the handmade ‘originals’ required for mass production. Drawing on oral histories collected by the author, this book highlights the experiences of industrial craftspeople in Australian manufacturing, as they navigate precarious employment, retraining, gendered career pathways, creative expression and technological change. The book argues that digital fabrication technologies may modify or transform industrial craft, but should not obliterate it. Industrial craft is about more than the rudimentary production of everyday objects: it is about human creativity, material knowledge and meaningful work, and it will be key to human survival in the troubled times ahead.

This book explores how two generations of relatively privileged Australian men have navigated the complex terrain of same-gender friendship across their lives, to offer both empirically unique and theoretically significant insights into the mechanics of social change in masculinities. Applying a feminist poststructuralist lens to data from in-depth interviews with 14 pairs of fathers and sons, it details how masculinist discourses of emotion and intimacy have governed the participants’ friendship practices at three chronological timepoints: fathers’ early lives and later lives, and sons’ early lives. A clear but complicated shift emerges, such that the commitment to stoicism and self-reliance dominant in the fathers’ early lives has given way to a growing embrace of intimacy and emotional expression within their and their son's contemporary same-gender friendships. Engaging with key debates in the field of critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM), this book offers an alternative to the conceptualisation of this positive change as either representative of a holistic disintegration of hegemonic structures, or a superficial behavioural shift that is largely inconsequential to the gender order. Rather, it illustrates that the increasing influence of feminist, queer-inclusion and therapeutic discourse has destabilised masculinism in the context of men’s friendships, offering men an alternative subject position that allows care, expressiveness and intimacy. This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Masculinity Studies.