Male matters

by Thomas, Calvin

The contemporary straight white male finds himself, if he finds himself at all, in dilemmas too numerous to mention. Torn between the just charges of feminism, made keenly aware of his heterosexism and his privilege, feeling psycho-analyzed and pilloried and scrutinized to a fare-thee-well, how should he handle his anxiety? According to Calvin Thomas, maybe he shouldn't. Maybe he should embrace his abjection - his cast-off, humiliated, and discounted status - as a way of renegotiating his identity and of interrupting the historical displacement of that status onto the feminine, or the marginalized other. This embrace of abjection, says Thomas, begins as a confrontation with the issue of the male body. The straight man, unfamiliar and unfriendly and uncomfortable with his body - the excretory, urinary, and seminal aspects of his body in particular - will find that Thomas's Male Matters explores the complicated relationships between masculinity and the male body, revealing the act and pr