Gender Studies

Critical Bottoming: Repositioning Male Effeminacy and its Racialization

By John Paul Stadler

Nguyen Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press, 2014. 287 pp.

The figure of the gay, Asian bottom is often misunderstood. His racial, gender, and sexual identities are typically conflated and maligned for being too submissive and effeminate. This, at least, is the opening contention of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation.
» Read the rest

Spectral Places, Subjectivities and Politics

By Juliana Martínez

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. 569 pp.

With an all-star Table of Contents that includes Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Baer, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, The Spectralities Reader compiles the founding texts of what the editors call the “spectral turn,” as well as the more salient critiques that have fuelled one of the more productive debates in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts over the last twenty-five years.
» Read the rest

Breeding ‘Post-Imperial’ Nations

By Leslie Allin

Nadine Attewell. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. University of Toronto Press, 2013. 324 pp. 

This work is a refreshing and timely intervention in the ongoing process that nation states formerly part of the British Empire use to determine who belongs within a political community. Nadine Attewell’s Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire investigates how ideas about British and settler citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries are forged through the policing and politics of reproduction.
» Read the rest

The Strategies of White American Masculinity

By Fenn Stewart

Hamilton Carroll. Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Duke University Press, 2011. 221 pp.

In Affirmative Reaction, Hamilton Carroll examines the “devices and strategies” through which “white masculinist privilege” is currently being “reorient[ed],” and thus maintained, in a “posthegemonic” context (2). Responding to widespread claims that masculinity is in crisis, Carroll suggests that, in the wake of “broad transformations that have radically altered the landscape of labor and opportunity in the United States,” white masculinity recuperates itself through a transformation from the universal to the particular (for instance, queer, Irish, “white trash,” working class) “whereby the particular becomes a location from which privilege can be recouped” (6).
» Read the rest