White Guys: Studies in Post-Modern Domination and Difference

What do men - white straight men in particular - want? In a series of provocative investigations of American popular culture, this book exposes the contradictions in the construction of white heterosexual masculinity over the last 15 years. From the rock 'n' roll bodies of Bruce Springsteen, Axl Rose and the late Kurt Cobain, the male-rampage films Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, and the sensitive transformation movies that followed in their wake, through to Fred Pfeil's humorous observations of the men's movement: Pfeil considers white, mainstream masculinity through direct participation in its rituals and practices firsthand. The author's aim is to reveal the ambiguity and flux in a social category too often assumed to be monolithic and unchanging. The book invites its readers to consider the shifts in mainstream masculinity's representations, in relation to the general emergence of postmodern tribalisms and in the context of changes in both contemporary feminism and the global economy.