Representations Of Working Class Masculinities In Post War British Culture

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 Posting the Male written by Daniel Lea and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in Posting the Male examine representations of masculinity in post-war and contemporary British literature, focussing on the works of writers as diverse as John Osborne, Joe Orton, James Kelman, Ian Rankin, Carol Ann Duffy, Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Jackie Kay. The collection seeks to capture the current historical moment of 'crisis', at which masculinity loses its universal transparency and becomes visible as a performative gender construct. Rather than denoting just one fixed, polarised point on a hierarchised axis of strictly segregated gender binaries, masculinity is revealed to oscillate within a virtually limitless spectrum of gender identities, characterised not by purity and self-containment but by difference and alterity. As the contributors demonstrate, rather than a gender 'in crisis' millennial manhood is a gender 'in transition'. Patriarchal strategies of man-making are gradually being replaced by less exclusionary patterns of self-identification inspired by feminism. Men have begun to recognise themselves as gendered beings and, as a result, masculinity has been set in motion.

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 Posting the Male written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in Posting the Male examine representations of masculinity in post-war and contemporary British literature, focussing on the works of writers as diverse as John Osborne, Joe Orton, James Kelman, Ian Rankin, Carol Ann Duffy, Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Jackie Kay. The collection seeks to capture the current historical moment of ‘crisis’, at which masculinity loses its universal transparency and becomes visible as a performative gender construct. Rather than denoting just one fixed, polarised point on a hierarchised axis of strictly segregated gender binaries, masculinity is revealed to oscillate within a virtually limitless spectrum of gender identities, characterised not by purity and self-containment but by difference and alterity. As the contributors demonstrate, rather than a gender ‘in crisis’ millennial manhood is a gender ‘in transition’. Patriarchal strategies of man-making are gradually being replaced by less exclusionary patterns of self-identification inspired by feminism. Men have begun to recognise themselves as gendered beings and, as a result, masculinity has been set in motion.

Download or read book Men, Masculinities and Male Culture in the Second World War written by Linsey Robb and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection brings together cutting-edge research on British masculinities and male culture, considering the myriad ways British men experienced, understood and remembered their exploits during the Second World War, as active combatants, prisoners and as civilian workers. It examines male identities, roles and representations in the armed forces, with particular focus on the RAF, army, volunteers for dangerous duties and prisoners of war, and on the home front, with case studies of reserved occupations and Bletchley Park, and examines the ways such roles have been remembered in post-war years in memoirs, film and memorials. As such this analysis of previously underexplored male experiences makes a major contribution to the historiography of Britain in the Second World War, as well as to socio-cultural history, cultural studies and gender studies.

Download or read book The Autobiography of a Nation written by Becky Conekin and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional book is the first full-length study on the 1951 Festival of Britain. As a consciously constructed cultural and educational event, or rather series of events, the Festival provides an opportunity to see a society and a government struggling to recast national identity after the experience of World War II. Primarily an examination of how Britain and Britishness were portrayed in the 1951 Festival’s exhibitions and events, Becky E. Conekin considers the Festival’s history and historiography, its purpose, its representations of the future and the past, the role of London and the "local", the British Empire and finally its legacy.

Download or read book The 1950s written by Nick Bentley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1950s shape modern British fiction? As Britain emerged from the shadow of war into the new decade of the 1950s, the seeds of profound social change were being sown. Exploring the full range of fiction in the 1950s, this volume surveys the ways in which these changes were reflected in British culture. Chapters cover the rise of the 'Angry Young Men', an emerging youth culture and vivid new voices from immigrant and feminist writers. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Margery Allingham, Kingsley Amis, E. R. Braithwaite, Rodney Garland, Martyn Goff, Attia Hosain, George Lamming, Marghanita Laski, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Naomi Mitchison, V. S. Naipaul, Barbara Pym, Mary Renault, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, John Sommerfield, Muriel Spark, J. R. R. Tolkien, Angus Wilson and John Wyndham.