The Masculine Masquerade
Masculinity and Representation

This text explores often-ignored issues of masculinity in the visual arts as well as models and concepts of masculinity in literature, film and the mass media. They draw on the work of feminist and gay studies and the work being done in psychology, sociology, and gender studies.

Harry Brod traces the history of masculinity as masquerade, from classic conceptions of masquerade as distinctly feminine to contemporary theories of gender as performative. bell hooks investigates the historical definition of black male sex roles and the commodification of blackness through close readings of the films of Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee, among others. Simon Watney, writer, activist and critic, considers the current and changing impact of AIDS on the gay male community in "'Lifelike': Imagining the Bodies of People with AIDS". Glenn Ligon employs stereotypic images of black men constructed for white pleasure, drawn from 1970s pornographic magazines and explores the possibility of recovering and transforming these images into nonracist expressions of pleasure and desire.

Acknowledgements, Katy Kline
Masculinity as Masquerade, Harry Brod
The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity Represented in Recent Art, Helaine Posner
Pollock and Postwar Masculinity, Andrew Perchuk
The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit: Gender Performance and the Representation of Masculinity in North by Northwest, Steven Cohan
"Lifelike": Imagining the Bodies of People with AIDS, Simon Watney
Reconstructing Black Masculinity, bell hooks
A Feast of Scraps, Selected Works from the Exhibition, Checklist of the Exhibition, Artists' Biographies, Glenn Ligon
Masculinity: A Selective Bibliography of Print Materials in English, Michael Leininger
About the Contributors.