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Brutes in Suits

Name: Brutes in Suits
Brand: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9781421407647
Price: 86.99 AUD
Availability: InStock

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9781421407647

Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920

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By John Pettegrew
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: December 14, 2012
Format: PAPERBACK
Pages: 424

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Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over women and vie against one another endlessly? These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources, Pettegrew argues that traditionally held beliefs about masculinity developed largely through language and cultural habitand that these same tools can be employed to break through the myth that brutishness is an inherently male trait.A major re-synthesis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manhood, Brutes in Suits develops ambitious lines of research into the social science of sexual difference and professional history's celebration of rugged individualism; the hunting-and-killing genre of popular men's literature; that master text of hypermasculinity: college football; military culture, war making, and finding pleasure in killing; and patriarchy, sexual jealousy, and the law. This timely assessment of the evolution of masculine culture will be welcomed and debated by social and intellectual historians for years to come.

Preface
Introduction: The De-Evolutionary Turn in U.S. Masculinity
Darwin and Evolutionary Psychology, Then and Now
John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, and Masculinity as a Habit of Mind
""The Caveman within Us"" and the Masculinist Culture of Mimicry
1. Rugged Individualism
Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis: Origins, Composition, and Meanings
Turner's Influence on the Social Psychology of the City
Radical Individualism: Masculinist Art, Angst, and Alienation in the City
Dudism, Cowgirl Feminism, and the Search for Authenticity in the ""Old West""
2. Brute Fictions
The American Literary Genre of Hunting and Killing
Reading for Plot: Call of the Wild, The Virginian, and the New Male Readership
Irony, Atavism, and Other Variations on the De-Evolutionary Theme
3. College Football
Thorstein Veblen and the Rise of ""Exotic Ferocity"" in American College Football
Victor Turner, Stanford Football, and Hypermasculine Liminal Subjects
Clifford Geertz at the Big Game: ""Thick Description"" of Football as the Cultural Equivalent of War
4. War in the Head
Civil War Memory, Blood Sacrifice, and Modern American Fighting Spirit
Of Rough Riders, Blood Brothers, and Roosevelt the Berserker
War as Sport for Doughboys, Golden Boys, and Slackers
Postscript: Marine Corps Spirit and the U.S. Warrior Class, 19412003
5. Laws of Sexual Selection
Race, Lynch Law, and the Manly Provocation
Marriage, Cultural Defense in The People v. Chen, and the Heat-of-Passion Defense in Texas
Compulsory Heterosexuality, the Charles Atlas Muscle-Beach Fable, and Sexual Dimorphism Unbound
Epilogue: Irony, Instinct, and War
Irony, Sam Fussell's Muscle, and Masculinity as a ""Parodic Tableau Vivant""
Instinct, Deep Masculinity, and the Decline of Males
The Iraq War, Hypermasculinity, and the Metaphor of Disease
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

""This fascinating and ambitious study explores how an aggressive 'de-evolutionary' model of masculinity was woven into a broad range of American institutions... Pettegrew brings together feminist theory, 'an anthropological ironist perspective' and a wealth of gender studies scholarship to investigate the development of a pervasive mindset of brutish masculinity within a rich selection of archival and popular cultural materials... This well-researched and engaging volume will certainly enrich the ever-growing field of men's studies.""

Brutes in Suits

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