Chinatown Black Tigers: Black Masculinity and Chinese Heroism in Frank Chin\u27s Gunga Din Highway

Images of ominous villains and asexual heroes in literature and mainstream American culture tend to relegate Asian American men to limited expressions of masculinity. These emasculating images deny Asian American men elements of traditional masculinity, including agency and strength. Many recognize the efforts of Frank Chin, a Chinese American novelist, to confront, expose, and revise such images by relying on a tradition of Chinese heroism. In Gunga Din Highway (1994), however, Chin creates an Asian American masculinity based on elements of both the Chinese heroic tradition and a distinct brand of African American masculinity manifested in the work of Ishmael Reed, an African American novelist and essayist known for his outspoken style.^1 Rather than transforming traditional masculinity to include Asian American manhood, Chin\u27s images of men represent an appropriation of elements from two ethnic sources that Chin uses to underscore those of Asian Americans. While deconstructing the reductive images advocated by the dominant culture, Chin critiques the very black masculinity he adopts. Ultimately he fails to envision modes of masculinity not based on dominance, yet Chin\u27s approach also can be read as the ultimate expression of Asian American individualism

vinegar soup improved his womb : Food, Appetite, and the Redefining of Asian American Masculinity in Kingston\u27s China Men

This paper examines the connection between food, appetite, and gender identity in Maxine Hong Kingston\u27s China Men. Specifically, I argue that Kingston\u27s use of food in China Men reconstructs traditional norms of masculinity. Food, appetite, consumption, and foodways are thus a crucial component in Kingston\u27s larger project of redefining Chinese American masculinity. Drawing off of recent studies regarding the role of food and gender in Asian American literature, my analysis focuses on the characters Tang Ao, Kingston\u27s father and the uncles from the New York laundry, Ah Goong, and Kingston\u27s brother from the Vietnam War. These characters\u27 consumption practices and various relationships with food work to redefine masculinity within the text

Dead Broets Society: Masculinity in Walt Whitman’s War Verse

There are two images of masculinity in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, his collection of wartime poetry: one, the strong, hardened soldier, the image of manliness, and the other the boyish, rosy-cheeked recruit. Whitman’s sexuality, while not the Victorian social norm, was no secret, and he wrote openly of the hospitalized soldiers during his time as a Union nurse with admiration, affection, and love. Some critics, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, castigated Whitman’s queer themes to be overwhelming, distractingly sensual, and unmanly, while others, like William Sloane Kennedy, dissented, arguing instead that the overt sexuality present in Whitman’s work was precisely what contributed to its masculinity, whether its desires were traditional or not. Whitman’s work, Drum-Taps included, certainly does overflow with themes of gender and sex with hardly any mention of women. How, then, did the poet find himself in a crossroads of contradicting ideas of masculinity, and what are the implications of this dichotomy? [excerpt

“I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in \u3ci\u3eStorage Wars\u3c/i\u3e

This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine is assimilated into the male body or represented as its Other, we contend that the expressions of masculinity in Storage Wars render women obsolete and subjugated in the marketplaces of the 21st-century economy and contribute to the mediation of the contemporary crisis in masculinity

Relationships between sex role, empathy and anxiety

Recently Sandra Bem, a psychologist at Stanford University has written about the importance of developing a conception of mental health which is free from culturally imposed definitions of masculinity and femininity. She believes that defining certain behaviors as appropriate only for women and other behaviors as only appropriate for men is restricting and debilitating for both sexes. This sex-typing of behaviors has led to masculinity being associated with assertiveness and dominance, pragmatism, problem solving and task orientation, and a concern for one\u27s individuality, whereas femininity is associated with emotional sensitivity and concern for the welfare of others, the seeking of harmony between oneself and others, and passivity. This study looks at the relationships between masculinity, femininity, anxiety and empathy. Specifically of concern is whether “Androgyny”, a new sex role, seems to be less debilitating and restricting than the traditional “Masculine” and “Feminine” roles as measured by anxiety and empathy scores. The sex role categories of Bem which are used in this study are derived from the Bem Sex Role Inventory. The categories are: 1) “Masculine referring to someone scoring high in masculinity and low in femininity, 2) “Feminine” referring to someone scoring high in femininity and low in masculinity, 3) “Androgynous” referring to someone scoring high in both masculinity and femininity, and 4) “Undifferentiated” referring to someone scoring low in both masculinity and femininity. All the masculine-feminine (M-F) scales referred to in the following studies give measures corresponding to Bem\u27s categories of “Feminine” and “Masculine”. In traditional M-F scales scoring high in femininity is equivalent to a “Feminine” sex role and scoring high in masculinity is equivalent to a Masculine sex role. The reason for this is that traditional M-F scales are structured so that masculinity and femininity are opposite poles on the same dimension and therefore as one moves toward greater femininity one also moves away from masculinity and vice versa. Bem’s inventory, however, is constructed so that masculinity and femininity are orthogonal dimensions. This allows for the development of two other possible sex roles: “Androgynous” and “Undifferentiated”. No predictions will be made about the latter category

Girls' jobs for the boys? Men, masculinity and non-traditional occupations

Occupational segregation by sex remains the most pervasive aspect of the labour market. In the past, most research on this topic has concentrated on explanations of women’s segregation into low paid and low status occupations, or investigations of women who have crossed gender boundaries into men’s jobs, and the potential impact on them and the occupations. In contrast, this article reports on a small scale, qualitative study of ten men who have crossed into what are generally defined as ‘women’s jobs’. In doing so, one of the impacts on them has been that they have experienced challenges to their masculine identity from various sources and in a variety of ways. The men’s reactions to these challenges, and their strategies for developing and accommodating their masculinity in light of these challenges are illuminating. They either attempted to maintain a traditional masculinity by distancing themselves from female colleagues, and/or partially (re)constructed a different masculinity by identifying with their non-traditional occupations. This they did as often as they deemed necessary as a response to different forms of challenge to their gender identities from both men and women. Finally, the article argues that these responses work to maintain the men as the dominant gender, even in these traditionally defined ‘women’s jobs’

Men, Masculinities and Water Powers in Irrigation

The aim of this article is to provide an informed plea for more explicitly identifying, naming and unravelling the linkages between water control and gender in irrigation. The fact that power, expertise and status in irrigation tend to have a strong masculine connotation is by now quite well established, and underlies calls for more women in water decision making, engineering education and professions. Yet, the questions of how and why water control, status and expertise are linked to masculinity, and of whether and how such links work to legitimize the exercise of power, are seldom asked. To date, associations between masculinity and professional water performance have largely been taken for granted and remained unexamined. The resulting perceived normalcy makes mechanisms of (gendered) power and politics in water appear self-evident, unchangeable, and indeed gender-neutral. The article reviews examples of the masculinity of irrigation in different domains to argue that exposing and challenging such hitherto hidden dimensions of (gendered) power is important for the identification of new avenues of gender progressive change, and for shedding a new and interesting light on the workings of power in water. KEYWORDS: Irrigation, water, gender, politics, masculinities, engineer

Prime beef cuts : culinary images for thinking 'men'

The paper contributes to scholarship theorising the sociality of the brand in terms of subject positions it makes possible through drawing upon the generative context of circulating discourses, in this case of masculinity, cuisine and celebrity. Specifically, it discusses masculinity as a socially constructed gender practice (Bristor and Fischer, 1993), examining materialisations of such practice in the form of visualisations of social relations as resources for 'thinking gender' or 'doing gender'. The transformative potential of the visualisations is illuminated by exploring the narrative content choreographed within a series of photographic images positioning the market appeal of a celebrity chef through the medium of a contemporary lifestyle cookery book. We consider how images of men 'doing masculinity'are not only channelled into reproducing existing gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality in the service of commercial ends, but also into disrupting such enduring stereotyping through subtle reframing. We acknowledge that masculinity is already inscribed within conventionalised representations of culinary culture. In this case we consider how traces of masculinity are exploited and reinscribed through contemporary images that generate resources for rethinking masculine roles and identities, especially when viewed through the lens of stereotypically feminised pursuits such as shopping, food preparation, cooking, and the communal intimacy of food sharing. We identify unsettling tensions within the compositions, arguing that they relate to discursive spaces between the gendered positions written into the images and the popular imagination they feed off. Set against landscapes of culinary culture, we argue that the images invoke a brand of naively roughish "laddishness" or "blokishness", rendering it in domesticated form not only as benign and containable, but fashionable, pliable and, importantly, desirable. We conclude that although the images draw on stereotypical premeditated notions of a feral, boisterous and untamed heterosexual masculinity, they also set in motion gender-blending narratives