The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"Dr. Susan Mooney's narrative explorations in The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities are not only visionary but critically ground-breaking. This trailblazing study makes an innovative contribution to transnational BIPOC literary studies focused on the complex subject matter of gender and masculinity."
--Gary L. Lemons, Professor of English, University of South Florida

"The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities is a broad-ranging taxonomy of masculinity as a relational and ethical phenomenon, exploring virtually every social and literary role a male character could be expected to assume in the modern and postmodern eras. So what, exactly, is Mooney doing here? Nothing less than reevaluating masculinity in global film and literature. She starts with the most obvious manifestation of patriarchal masculinity (paternity), but quickly juxtaposes it with that other classic masculine narrative pattern (the hero story) that appears to require its protagonist to be self-contained, independent, and all but unencumbered by filial ties. This is a book of remarkable ambition; even more remarkable is how well Mooney achieves what she sets out to do."
--Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University

"The study makes an innovative contribution to the field, as it brings together masculinity studies and affect theory, especially through the lens of gendered ethics . [It] makes a case that, despite white male privilege, both literature and film question how male-identifying people confront their split subjectivity, their sense of lack and agency, and their relationship with the other. In so doing, this book brilliantly illustrates how authors of color, Black authors, and Indigenous authors have written narratives exploring men's marginalized positions in relation to hegemonic masculinity, thus questioning patriarchy, too."
--Josep M. Armengol, Professor of US Literature and Gender Studies, University of Castilla-La Mancha

"Mooney's gendered approach to twentieth- and twenty-first-century male narratives demonstrates, through an impressively varied global range of authors, that the presumed monolith of Western culture-the Patriarchal Order-is fully porous. Just as something meaningful persists outside the significance of language, something uncanny, mythic, matrixial, operates with an affective power all around the presumably foreclosed fortress of the masculine subject. With admirable dexterity, Mooney blends affect studies, psychoanalysis and feminist narratology (to name only a few) into an astonishing anatomization of the anguished yearning between, among and beyond all the fathers and sons stuck in the amber of our totalized and totalizing understanding of 'masculinity'."
--Garry Leonard, Professor of English, University of Toronto