American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film: Up Close Behind the Mask

Sara Martin's book explores how 21st-century documentaries represent American men and masculinity, highlighting the contradictions inherent in patriarchy and the vulnerability of disempowered men before the abuses of the patriarchal system. It emphasizes the resilience of masculine and the good American man.

Format: Hardback
Length: 252 pages
Publication date: 09 May 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Most documentaries focus on men, but what do they really say about masculinity? In this groundbreaking volume, Sara Martín delves into over forty 21st-century documentaries to explore how they represent American men and masculinity.

From Jennifer Siebel Newsom's The Mask You Live In to Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro, this volume explores sixteen distinct faces of American masculinity: the good man, the activist, the politician, the whistleblower, the criminal, the sexual abuser, the wrongly accused, the dependent man, the soldier, the capitalist, the adventurer, the sportsman, the architect, the photographer, the musician, and the writer. The collective portrait drawn by these documentaries reveals a firm critical stance against the contradictions inherent in patriarchy, which makes American men promises of empowerment that it cannot fulfill. The filmmakers' view of American masculinity emphasizes the vulnerability of disempowered men before the abuses of the patriarchal system run by hegemonic men and a loss of bearings about how to be a man after the impact of feminism, accompanied nonetheless by a celebration of resilient masculinity and of the good American man.

Firmly positioning documentaries as an immensely flexible, relevant tool to understand 21st-century American men and masculinity, their past, present, and future, this book will interest students and scholars of film studies, documentary film, American cultural studies, gender, and masculinity.

Weight: 650g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032420523