Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities (review)

Much of the scholarship to date that explicitly interrogates folklore and gender has focused on women—their communities, creativity, and negotiations of power often within patriarchal social structures. Though people use folklore to reflect, interpret, construct, critique, revise, resist, rebel against, or otherwise engage with the tangled webs of meaning surrounding notions of masculinity in various groups, many folklorists have been slow to join in the growing scholarly discourse in this area. Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities, edited by Simon J. Bronner, is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on gender and folklore and to cross-disciplinary scholarship on this topic.

The thirteen contributing authors examine genres of folklore associated with particular groups of men to explore ways in which masculinity is defined, constructed, and valued in the contemporary United States. Contributors cover a range of genres, including dance, contemporary legends, folktales, music, jokes, occupational lore, and material culture. The communities studied are diverse; for example, the book includes chapters on African American college fraternities by Tom Mould, Latino masculinity in South Texas by Norma E. Cantú, Japanese American taiko performers by Hideyo Konagaya, a gay male community (mostly white and Latino) that gathers annually for parties in "the circuit" by Mickey Weems, and the jokes told by white "mountain men" in the Ozarks and Appalachians by W. K. McNeil.

Though the breadth of the materials covered in this volume promises insight into the many forms of gendered identities in the United States, the book's overall tone reveals a contradiction that emerges in the introduction and the chapter entitled "Menfolk," both by Bronner. On the one hand, Bronner claims that the book addresses the complexities of male experience in the contemporary United States, a social context in which gender is a visible and contested social category. Bronner offers some promising statements, such as "the approach here shows that gender display is not a simple binary relationship but a range of identities variously expressed and negotiated" (p. xii). On the other hand, Bronner establishes a very narrow definition of masculinity—encapsulated in his use of the term "manliness"—that comprises the stereotypically male traits of "toughness, aggressiveness, independence, competitiveness, egotism, and dominance" (p. 4), in addition to outward signs of rugged muscularity and the size and functioning of penises. A number of the contributors to the volume follow his narrow definition. This emphasis on "manliness" negates the idea of multiple masculinities and the spectrum of gender identities to which Bronner nods in his introduction, and it also neglects qualities that define masculinity in many communities in the United States, such as respect, success, skill, responsibility for families, and so on. By embracing such a narrow definition, some of the contributors ignore the vastly differing ways in which men identify as men based on their individual personalities or on their membership in differing classes, occupations, ethnicities, ages, races, religions, regions, sexual orientations, and marital/relationship statuses. Furthermore, many of the chapters detail ways in which "manliness" is rooted in folklore forms without interrogating the implications of this narrow definition, even for the men participating in the groups studied.

Gary Alan Fine, for example, implies that that all boys and men, regardless of their individual personalities or the nature of their communities, engage in the "pleasant, expressive diversion" of sexualized humor and language— even though his chapter discusses such diverse groups as little league baseball teams, fantasy gamers, restaurant kitchen employees, mushroom collectors, high school debate teams, and weather forecasters (p. 64). In his arguments about who must accommodate whom when women enter what once were all-male leisure or occupational spaces, Fine ignores the possibility that the often misogynist and homophobic humor he presents does not dominate all male groups and that not all men in groups where this humor does occur necessarily share the same values or definitions of masculinity. He does not consider that this humor might be problematic...