Narratives of Contemporary Male Crisis: The (Re)production of a National Discourse

Abstract

This article examines contemporary narratives of male crisis, including two recent books on masculinity—Susan Faludi's Stiffed (1999) and Lionel Tiger's The Decline of Males (1999)—as well as two recent films—John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1993) and Warren Beatty's Bulworth (1998). I examine these narratives as cultural expressions that implicitly recuperate Euro-American middle-class male authority. Faludi and Tiger's narratives of the crisis of masculinity reinscribe white middle-class men at the center of a national narrative by erasing cultural, economic, and sexual difference and by offering an 19th century narrative of “national manhood” based on the ideal of the producer. Beatty and Guare also reinscribe this ideal of the male producer through their narrative of sublimity. Both use the trope of “the other” as a way of inducing sublimity that results in the reinscription of white male authority.