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Hitchcock Annual (1994) - Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema

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Review of "Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema" edited by Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (ISBN 0415077591)

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Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds. London & New York: Routledge, 1993. 272 pages. $49.95 doth. $15.95 paper.

Reviewed by COREY K. CREEKMUR

Screening the Male arrives amidst a testosterone surge of critical studies of male stars and the cinematic representation of masculinity, alongside Dennis Bingham's Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (Rutgers, 1994); Susan Jeffords's Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers, 1993); Peter Lehman's Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Temple, 1993); Graham McCann's Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean (Rutgers, 1993); Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992); Robert Sklar's City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Carfield (Princeton, 1992); Paul Smith's Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota, 1993); Yvonne Tasker's Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (Routledge, 1993); as well as two similar anthologies, Male Trouble, edited by Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minnesota, 1993), and You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (St. Martin's Press, 1994).

This astonishing proliferation of academic work on male actors (Bingham, Sklar, and McCann even suggest a subgenre of the tri-star study), contemporary male genres, and the visual representation of the male body is certainly a "post-feminist" phenomenon, even if that controversial designation merely indicates chronology. As a specific inquiry generated by the progressive transformation of feminism into gender studies, alongside th...

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Corey K. Creekmur is an Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University, where he teaches courses in film and cultural studies. He is co-editor (with Alexander Doty) of Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian & Queer Essays on Popular Culture, forthcoming from Duke University Press.