Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-Century Man in Popular Culture ed. by Elwood Watson and Marc E. Shaw (review)

Writing in 2005, sociologist and pioneering scholar of masculinity studies Michael S. Kimmel remarked, “When we say ‘gender’ we hear ‘women.’ That gender remains invisible to men is a political process.”¹ Notwithstanding the 1990s take-downs of the so-called masculinity crisis by Kimmel, alongside feminist critics such as Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, only in the past decade have cultural studies scholars intently scrutinized what (else) it is we talk about when we talk about gender. From Peter Lehman’s compelling exploration of screen representations of the male body to recent collections examining masculinity in contemporary cinema from perspectives global (Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema) and local (Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema), to multiple volumes devoted to masculinity’s intersections with race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and nation, within academic media studies we might regard the 2000s as the “men decade.”² Insofar as any substantive examination of oppression and exclusion requires a detailed analysis of power and privilege, this turn to considerations of masculinity is both a long time coming and—given the martial, economic, and cultural wars of the twenty-first century to date—highly timely.

Into this minefield Performing American Masculinities steps and, given its expansive scope of inquiry (ranging from Seinfeld [NBC, 1989–1998] to Obama), attempts to cover a lot of ground. An admirable (and still, even in cultural studies, all-too-rare) ambition to map representational through-lines across textual forms and to address both fictional performances and real embodiments of American masculinity, it also risks too diffuse a focus and structure. The decision to bisect the volume into sections titled “Masculinities and the Market: Late Capitalism and Corporate Influence on Gender Processes” and “Beyond Gender Alone: Defining Multidimensional Masculinities” cleanly and valuably signals its contributors’ consensus on contemporary American masculinity’s chief determinants: money and multidimensionality. For a Marxist-intersectionalist like myself, such a framework sounds pitch perfect, simultaneously acknowledging (as the editors do in their introduction) “how varied, open, relative, contradictory, and fluid masculinities can be” and not overlooking the ongoing supremacy of the almighty dollar.³

The first essay, C. Wesley Buerkle’s discussion of the famed Seinfeld episode “The Contest,” immediately establishes itself as the one to beat. The chapter is a bravura performance of nimble analysis, with the lucidity, wit, and revelatory richness that characterizes the best of academic prose. Using the 1992 episode in which Seinfeld’s late-capitalist quartet enter into a gentlemen’s (plus Elaine) agreement to abstain from self-pleasuring for as long as possible, Buerkle gives an account of how America’s transformation from industrialized to neoliberal consumerist economy remolds today’s men into narcissistic, materialistic “masters of their domain.”⁴ Our rebooted model for postindustrial American masculinity practices privatized (self-)regulation and gratification through consumption, with the nonproductive but socially sanctioned indulgence of masturbation as the contemporary sine qua non of “industrial capitalism’s pervasiveness in producing sexuality in a manner consistent with economic concerns.”⁵ Unlike the guys and gal of Seinfeld, Buerkle never falters in his firm wrangling of Foucauldian accounts of disciplinary power structures, historical accounts of the American economy’s deregulation and deindustrialization, (quasi-)medical accounts of onanism, Seinfeldian accounts of the eternal struggle between self-love and self-hate, and (for good measure) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s (NBC, 2003–2007) extravagant exaltation of metrosexuality as a means to “safeguard the reproductive logics of capitalism.”⁶

Buerkle sets a pace that the rest of the volume, though comprising solid essays, cannot quite match, which gets me thinking that the recent push for professors to be able to compile anthologies à la carte is a good idea in these imperiled times for publishing. The problem has largely to do with the collection’s overall composition seeming uneven: its essays vary substantially in length, some incorporating leisurely reviews...