Masculinity And The English Working Class

Download or read book Masculinity and the English Working Class written by Ying Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes. The book also maps the relationship between two trends: the early nineteenth-century efflorescence of published working-class autobiographies (in which working men construct their identities for a broad readership); and a contemporaneous surge of public interest in "the lower orders" that finds reflection in the depiction of working-class characters in popular novels by middle-class authors. The book mimics this point of convergence by pairing three working-class autobiographies with three middle-class novels. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of work: domestic service, manual (not artisanal) labour, and literary labour (and the opportunities it offers for social advancement). Ying considers the specific ways in which classed and gendered consciousness emerges autobiographically and its significance in the writing of working-class subjectivity for public consumption. Then mainstream novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley are re-read from the perspective of these autobiographical pressure points.

Download or read book Young Working-Class Men in Transition written by Steven Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young Working Class Men in Transition uses a unique blend of concepts from the sociologies of youth and masculinity combined with Bourdieusian social theory to investigate British young working-class men’s transition to adulthood. Indeed, utilising data from biographical interviews as well as an ethnographic observation of social media activity, this volume provides novel insights by following young men across a seven-year time period. Against the grain of prominent popular discourses that position young working-class men as in ‘crisis’ or as adhering to negative forms of traditional masculinity, this book consequently documents subtle yet positive shifts in the performance of masculinity among this generation. Underpinned by a commitment to a much more expansive array of emotionality than has previously been revealed in such studies, young men are shown to be engaged in school, open to so called ‘women’s work’ in the service sector, and committed to relatively egalitarian divisions of labour in the family home. Despite this, class inequalities inflect their transition to adulthood with the ‘toxicity’ of neoliberalism - rather than toxic masculinity - being core to this reality. Problematising how working-class masculinity is often represented, Young Working Class Men in Transition both demonstrates and challenges the portrayal of working class masculinity as a repository of homophobia, sexism and anti-feminine acting. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as youth studies, masculinity studies, gender studies, sociology of education and sociology of work.

Download or read book Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism written by Charlie Walker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has reshaped the lives of working-class men around the world. It focuses on the effects of employment change and of new forms of governmentality on men’s experiences of both public and private life. The book presents a range of international studies—from the US, UK, and Australia to Western and Northern Europe, Russia, and Nigeria—that move beyond discourses positing a ‘masculinity crisis’ or pathologizing working-class men. Instead, the authors look at the active ways men have dealt with forms of economic and symbolic marginalization and the barriers they have faced in doing so. While the focus of the volume is employment change, it covers a range of topics from consumption and leisure to education and family.

Download or read book The Struggle for the Breeches written by Anna Clark and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-04-18 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In its analysis of gender and class relations and their political forms, in giving voice to the many who have left only a fleeting trace in the historical record, Clark's study is a pioneering classic. . . . It also has a salience for many of our present social and political dilemmas."—Leonore Davidoff, Editor, Gender and History "Deeply researched, scholarly, serious, important. This is a big book that develops a significant new line of inquiry on a classic story in modern history—the making of the English working class. Clark shows in great and persuasive detail how we might read this tale through the lens of gender."—Thomas Laqueur, author of Making Sex

Download or read book A Man's Place written by John Tosh and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: divDomesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions. Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts this with the lives of the late Victorian generation. He finds that the first group of men placed a new value on the home as a reaction to the disorienting experience of urbanization and as a response to the teachings of Evangelical Christianity. Domesticity still proved problematic in practice, however, because most men were likely to be absent from home for most of the day, and the role of father began to acquire its modern indeterminacy. By the 1870s, men were becoming less enchanted with the pleasures of home. Once the rights of wives were extended by law and society, marriage seemed less attractive, and the bachelor world of clubland flourished as never before. The Victorians declared that to be fully human and fully masculine, men must be active participants in domestic life. In exposing the contradictions in this ideal, they defined the climate for gender politics in the next century. /DIV

Download or read book Representations of Working-Class Masculinities in Post-War British Culture written by Matthew Crowley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an analysis of representations of white, heterosexual, working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989 to trace the development of the sociocultural and material conditions that shaped the masculinities which are helping to shape contemporary culture. This book seeks to fan the ‘spark of hope’ in the past that informs our present. The period which saw the establishment of the welfare state and the construction and breakdown of the post-war consensus in British politics was of great significance in the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities and their correspondent representations. The author engages with a variety of cultural texts across various modes and media including films (Alfie), plays (Don’t Look Back in Anger), television (Boys from the Blackstuff), and music (The Beatles), and employs the analysis of the representation of working-class masculinities as a lens through which to examine a range of historical and cultural moments. This book reinstates class as a central precept in the study of British cultural representations and offers a timely intervention in ongoing debates around class and gender identities in Britain. The book will be key reading for students and researchers with interests in twentieth-century social and cultural British history, masculinities and gender studies, twentieth-century British literature, British television, and cultural studies more broadly.

Download or read book A Small Man's England written by Tommy Sissons and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of white working-class English men, showing how and why some have been captured by the far-right and what the left can do about it. IS THE WHITE WORKING CLASS RIGHT-WING? AND IS IT RIGHT-WING TO EVEN SPEAK OF A "WHITE WORKING CLASS"? In recent decades, as class consciousness has been suppressed and eroded, many white working-class men have turned their backs on the left in favour of the right and the far-right. Why is this? A Small Man's England is a polemic aimed at the structures of hierarchy that ceaselessly maintain power across Britain and elsewhere, and a call for multicultural solidarity amongst the working class. In analysing the roles that class, race, masculinity and nationality play in neoliberal Britain, Sissons offers a solution to the indoctrination of white working-class English men by the right and the far-right, and explores how working-class people can collectively shape a "Common England" -- a country based on equality and justice for all.