Marketing / Reading Males

While pondering different lines of approach for a review of two collections of essays on the implications of “(male) feminist criticism” and on the “gender(ed)” construction of canonical male writers, I stare at the front covers of each. The title Engendering Men—on a black background in sharp, white script, the letters of MEN in bold print, with the subtitle under and slightly alongside MEN, in much smaller, uniform blue print—contrasts with the Claridge/Langland cover: a wide band of gray on the left and a thin band of gray on the right border a central strip in pink hue containing the same photograph twice, at top and at bottom. Within and across the top of the upper left rectangle, next to the word “OUT,” are the black letters “OF BOUNDS,” under which, in thinner black letters on the pink background, is the subtitle Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. As for the cover illustrations on each, over one-third of the cover above the names “Boone and Cadden” shows a reproduction of a painting by Joaquin Sorolla entitled Children at the Beach. The subject, three naked boys lying on their stomachs, legs spread and buttocks exposed, on wet sand and in extremely shallow water, is a scene of youthful repose that contrasts with the images on Out of Bounds: the photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, reproduced twice and overlaid with a pink hue, depicts the right body profile of a naked, muscular male climbing (or descending) a barely visible ladder, with a fully loaded bricklayer’s basket weighing down heavily on the right shoulder and its pole extending vertically downward along the body beyond the bottom of the photo.

My contemplation of these “packages” relates not only to the strategies of these editions themselves, but also to the act of reviewing collections on (en)gender(ed) males and their criticism within the “cyberspace” of PMC. Assuming my role as electronic pitchman, I wish to re-view these texts in terms of their valence as products of the marketplace, to draw on overlaps and interweaves between the projects, to locate dissonances within and between them, in short, to study these collections as assembled productions. The Boone/Cadden title relates directly to marketing strategies announced in the introduction: with momentum provided by a “friendly push from Elaine Showalter, an established feminist critic who had the savvy to recognize a good opportunity for her less experienced colleagues” (1), the editors’ goal is “to make more visible the efforts of all those individual men throughout the academy who have already begun the task . . . of reconceptualizing themselves as men and hence as critics of the literary and cultural texts that we have inherited and are in the process of recreating. In engendering ourselves, in making visible our textual/sexual bodies, we thus acknowledge our part in a movement whose time, we hope, has come” (7). In form and content, then, this title is explicit about seizing the time and need for the product, and the cover illustration emphasizes this move: boys nakedly displayed and bonding in enjoyable (perhaps even productive) repose. Furthermore, inside facing the title page is another painting in black, white and gray tones (George Platte Lynes’s Charles Nielson with J. Ogle (behind glass)) presenting a rear view of a naked standing male figure, the right arm slightly bent and touching a translucent glass. Behind this, facing the first naked male is a second; his left hand meets the first male’s right on the glass in a mirror effect, and the male gaze that we can see is trained directly at the face opposite him, the other gaze remaining invisible to the viewer.

Mirror images, male bonding, bodies and gazes reaching yet separate, in confident repose yet prepared for activity—the package enveloping and preceding Engendering Men relates directly to the contributors’ stance vis-a-vis feminism as articulated by the editors: “Feminism...