Work That Body

Reviews / Votes

Jamie Hakim's Work that Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture is destined to become required reading for students of masculinities, sexuality and digital media cultures in the 21st century.

The book challenges commonsensical thinking about what the sexualized male body means and through thoughtful, detailed and perceptive analysis provides a corrective to the unquestioning application of theory derived from critical masculinity studies. It's rare to read a book where an author genuinely does make a distinctive and novel intervention that so timely as well as relevant across disciplines and fields of study but this is just such an example. -- John Mercer, Professor of Gender and Sexuality, Associate Director of Researcher Education and Development, Birmingham City University Engrossing, original and very smart, this book zooms in on the production of male bodies under neoliberalism without shying away from the affective ambiguities, elusive pleasures and resistant moments that this entails. Moving from celebrity male nude leaks to spornosexuals, to RuPaul's Drag Race and to chemsex, Work that Body represents contemporary cultural studies at its best. -- Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku Firmly rooted in interesting and contemporary cases, Hakim takes us on a sophisticated tour of how neoliberalism's successes and failures explicitly and implicitly transform us all into digital and/or sexualized bodies for consumption and compensation for the global elite. Using the nuanced methodology of conjunctural analysis, Hakim eloquently traces the historical trajectory of our cultural subjectivities and leaves us with policy implications and hope for the future ... Work that Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture will be attractive to a variety of multidisciplinary scholars interested in gender, masculinities, sexuality, embodiment, digitality, leisure, and cultural studies. -- Corey W. Johnson, Professor, Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, University of Waterloo In Work that Body Jamie Hakim provides us with an exquisitely written, essential guide for understanding the impact of these neoliberal times on shifting practices of masculinity and intimacy. His account of the paradoxical effects of digitally-mediated sexualised embodiment, especially in the feminization of the male body, is utterly compelling - making this a path-breaking text for all gender and queer scholars. -- Lynne Segal, author of "Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy"