Abstract
Masculinity in Transition examines masculinity as a complex gender formation tied to diverse embodiments, subjectivities, identities and identifications, sexualities, and ideologies. The book is an important and exceptionally urgent push to queer and trans critical studies on men and masculinities. Masculinity in Transition is intentionally interdisciplinary in scope and will find audiences among students and scholars of trans studies, queer theory, gender and sexualities studies, critical studies on men and masculinities, as well as political theory. Hammer’s argument and provocation is based on a nuanced and interdisciplinary analysis of shifting relationships to masculinity within both canonical twentieth-century film and literature as well as twenty-first-century performances, media, and what they call “transgender poetics.” Published during a cultural moment in which Hammer argues that “toxic masculinity” is “normative masculinity,” Hammer documents the ways that normative masculinity is also inherently fragile, subject to historically recycling sets of contradictions and ruptures.
Masculinity in Transition attempts to interdisciplinarily respond to the question of how white masculinity sees itself in relation to “the other.” Hammer traces the ways that bonds between (white) men gave rise to configurations of political fraternity that are vital in explaining the consolidation of power over time. The book makes the impassioned argument that critiques of masculinity must always also engage in the critique of white supremacy and capitalism because the latter have historically shaped the ways that masculinity came into being. Alongside their analysis, Hammer shows how desires for profit and the psychological wages of dominance are fundamental features of contemporary configurations of masculinity.
But Masculinity in Transition is also politically and theoretically optimistic as Hammer examines the ways constructions of masculinity with histories of capitalistic, white supremacist, heteronormative, and patriarchal are not fixed. Indeed, a good deal of the book focuses on their conceptualization of what they term “unruly alliances”—texts, discourses, identities, and ideologies that both explicitly reject these configurations of gender while simultaneously providing novel queer and trans egalitarian reimaginings of what it means to be “masculine” in the first place.
Hammer’s theorization and use of “unruly alliances” was my favorite part of this text. The concept will be of great use to scholars within critical studies on men and masculinities who study masculinities beyond cis, straight, white male embodiments. For instance, in a chapter on feminist masculinities, Hammer analyzes the evolution of “the Western” as a genre of American film and television showing that Westerns help “reveal the malleability of normative masculinity” (p. 130). They argue, “Feminist masculinity is instrumental for divesting white male individualism of its unique hold on the American imagination” (pp. 130–131). Subsequently, in a chapter examining the work of Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather, Hammer examines the ways that “Cather and Stein use literature itself to call attention to the failures of normative masculinity and assigned male phallogocentrism” (p. 162). While both writers were feminists, neither show any stable or linear form of progress in their feminist politics or writing over the course of their lives. Rather, Hammer relies of what they call “queer time” to analyze the unruly alliances between both authors that help collectively reimagine normative masculinities and relations of power, dominance, and inequality.
The theorization of unruly alliances is useful, in part, because Hammer’s conceptualization transcends the limits of identitarian thinking on masculinity, and helps us more closely interrogate moments where conditions are perhaps not ideal, but structurally and culturally suitable for unlikely collaborations that foster reimaginings of what masculinity might mean or be. Dislocating masculinity from white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism is challenging to imagine. But, through a nuanced cultural analysis of collections of unruly alliances, Hammer shows that such a project is and has been underway for some time.
Masculinity in Transition provides new language and theory to help us make new sense of challenges of masculinity, documenting that normative modes of masculinity not only can change, but that they will change as masculinities are always already in transition. This is a fascinating and important new book helping us make sense of the contemporary (re)emergence of discourses of (white) masculinity as “in crisis.” Scholars studying gender transformations intersectionally and interdisciplinarily will find this text of great value. Hammer shows that being able to see and appreciate the wide range of masculinities that are possible both is and always was vital. Masculinity in Transition provides an analysis documenting ways “cultural forms can play a role in collective efforts to make masculinity more mobile across embodiments and more intent on refusing the seductive lie of gender stasis” (p. 253).