Boys Will Be Men and Other Consequences

Prevailing approaches to the study of US American masculinity insist that men are in crisis. Either the world no longer works for them, or they no longer work for the world. “Boys Will Be Men and Other Consequences” argues this problem belongs to a distinct genre of US American masculinity—a genre operative at least since the beginning of the twentieth century with the outbreak of World War I. The dissertation shows that this genre of masculinity is, in-and-of-itself, productive of this crisis, and it requires that crisis in order to persist. Further, its narratives, scripts, and performances carry expectations that reproduce and necessitate crises found throughout the aesthetic, social, and political registers of contemporary American life.

This social genre of masculinity principally shares its form with a literary one: the conventional coming-of-age genre. Consequently, an enduring national solution to this supposed crisis of masculinity has been both teleological and reactionary: boys must become men again. Challenging this notion, the dissertation insists that the failures of American masculinity are not necessarily the result of a contemporary crisis in content—be it the presence of women in the corporate suite, rising unemployment and surging immigration, a feminist withholding of sex and attention, or men’s seemingly diminished role as head of the household. This purportedly stunted becoming in American boys is neither cause nor effect but, rather, a structural ploy. The American masculinity traced here presents more precisely as a crisis in form—a crisis-form which requires the very failures it promises to solve and offers violence as the means to resolve it.

“Boys Will Be Men” traces the structural consequences of this generic masculinity across literary fictions reflective of both the actual lives of everyday young men and the marginalized subjects who get in their way. But the methodological intervention of the project is in its direct application of literary critical and dramaturgical tools to read contemporary cultural residues. These range from the manifestos of involuntary celibates (incels) to the initiation rituals of the Proud Boys to the autographed firearms of school shooters. Moving methodologically between literary theory and performance studies, the dissertation reads these objects for the stories men tell about themselves, what they see as the undesirable narratives in which they find themselves socially emplotted, for their now habitual complaint about the illegitimate achievements of others, and the violent performances they enact to break out of the stories they think they don’t deserve.