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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Masculinities without Men?

Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions

Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Masculinities without Men?

Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions

Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man’s identity and a man’s right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evident links to physicality, identity, and power. In Masculinities without Men? Jean Bobby Noble explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, resulting in a permanent rupture in the sex/gender system, and how masculinity became an unstable category, altered across time, region, social class, and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The New Men of 1998

1. Alibis of Essence and Enemies Within: At the Well of Obscenity

2. Passionate Fictions: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

3. Impressions of the Man: Sacred Countries and the Stone Butch Blues

4. Boys Do Cry: Hilary Swank and the Politics of a Pronoun

5. Postscript: Notes Toward a Radical (Re)Thinking of the Politics of Gender

Notes

References

Index

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