Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781496828576)

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres--including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns--author Glen Donnar examines the impact of "terror-Others," from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil.

Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood's attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting.

Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

Author: Glen Donnar
ISBN-10: 1496828577
ISBN-13: 9781496828576
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Language: English
Published: 07/23/2020
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2021