Manipulating Masculinity

Manipulating Masculinity uses literature from World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq wars to argue that when a society labels broadly human traits "feminine," that society can more easily manipulate men to war. All men are bound to detect some of those traits in themselves—and then fear that they have strayed into a feminine, inferior realm. If a society convinces men that fighting is essentially manly, it entices men to war simply to prove that they are not their sisters (sissy, wimp, wuss). Western cultural attitudes toward sex also fuel wars by encouraging the displacement of sexuality into violence, by fostering titillation in combination with guilt and its accompanying need for self-punishment (which war abundantly supplies), and by defining sexual orientations so as to provoke self-doubt in everyone.

A study of masculinity and literature.

Kathy J. Phillips is a Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i. Her most recent books are Virginia Woolf against Empire (1994) and This Isn't a Picture I'm Holding: Kuan Yin (2004). She has published some twenty essays in such journals as Twentieth Century Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics.