Boys Don't Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. (review)

This collection of eleven scholarly essays successfully combines a cultural history of male emotion with detailed readings of male-authored texts, both fictional and non-fictional, from the era of the U.S. founding fathers to American culture of the 1990s. The essays are based primarily upon a critical interrogation of the melodramatic trope of "beset manhood," which pervades American literature and culture, and the many inconsistencies and contradictions that have traditionally inhabited constructions of U. S. masculinity and complicated its relationship to emotional self-expression. Shamir and Travis's collection discovers male emotionality to be far more intricate than many facile equations of masculine subjectivity with paranoid self-containment, emotional illiteracy, or self-alienation are inclined to allow for. In their introduction Shamir and Travis make a useful distinction between "sentiment" as the conventional and socially acceptable range of affective display, on the one hand, and "emotion" as the authentic, spontaneous and "raw" upsurge and outpouring of feeling, on the other. It is the interplay between the two, as well as the intrinsic complexities of the latter, that the contributors seem most preoccupied with: what does it mean for men to get in touch with their emotions? And, with regard to the issue of effective ideological subversion and resistance, as well as the feminist telos of men's eventual post-patriarchal emancipation from gender-specific constraints, is male emotional release always the best modus operandi?

The question whether "white, middle-class masculine emotion [can ever] remake existing forms of power, or [whether it will] necessarily reinforce them" (9) features prominently in this volume, thus problematizing the issue of masculine reconstruction in response to feminism, as well as opening up the curious ambivalence of the term "reconstruction" per se: does it mean deconstruction and renewal, or does it in fact denote a reconsolidation of the old behavioral ideals and imperatives in a new, less easily impeachable guise? Many of the contributors find this problem of men's rejection or retention of power intimately entwined with the degree of men's habitual dis/avowal of emotion. As Tom Lutz, the acclaimed author of Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, explains in his essay, not only is men's display of emotion forever open to strategic manipulation—both ideologically and by the individual male himself—it also remains ultimately contentious "whether crying itself is a sign of arousal or recovery and thus whether it signals distress . . . or the cessation of distress" (187). Put differently, men's tears do not necessarily initiate a breakdown, or liberatory breaking up, of the old (self-) oppressive structures; it might be just as conceivable that they embody an expression of overwhelming relief at the eventual rehabilitation of the old gender roles and paradigms as signaled, for instance, by the predilection of Hollywood "weepies" for conclusively "taming" their heroic male truants and rebels, or for effectively inducing the prodigal son in the end to see sense, "grow up," and return home.

Far from desultory or disparate, the essays collected by Shamir and Travis project a carefully devised trajectory. Organized chronologically, they compound, clarify and progressively elucidate each other's findings. Thus, the opening essay by Evan Carton constitutes an exposition of the collection's central effort to treat affect and emotion as elemental forces in the constitution of a "new," unmistakably American masculinity. Carton presents the eighteenth-century project of shaping the "wild" colony into a civilized nation as a spiritual effort, which was accompanied by the emotional challenge of engendering a new masculine self within a hitherto virtually uncharted world. Carton's essay is followed by one of the collection's most captivating pieces: Elizabeth Barnes's exploration of familicide, which identifies early American manhood as precariously empowered by its obedient subjection to a patriarchal...