Tracing the roots of toxic masculinity.

Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Author K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity. Here, Hammer is joined in conversation with Kale Bantigue Fajardo. This episode was recorded in late fall of 2023.

K. Allison Hammer (they/them) is assistant professor and coordinator of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Southern Illinois University. Hammer is author of Masculinity in Transition.

Kale Bantigue Fajardo (he/him) is associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Fajardo is author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization.

REFERENCES:

The Politics of Friendship / Jacques Derrida

The Feeling of Kinship / David Eng

Men in Place / Miriam J. Abelson

True Sex / Emily Skidmore

Masculinities in Theory / Todd Reeser

Gertrude Stein

Female Masculinity / Jack Halberstam

Sons of the Movement / Bobby Noble

The Future of Whiteness / Linda Martín Alcoff

Disturbing Attachments / Kadji Amin

Emily Dickinson

Willa Cather

Stone Butch Blues / Leslie Feinberg

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Andrea Gibson

Reinaldo Arenas

Marlon Riggs

Presidential masculinity (Reagan, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden)

The Color Pynk / Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Nao Bustamante

Judith Butler

The Crying Game (film, 1992)

Disclosure (film, 2020)

Buddhism

Care Work / Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Trans Care / Hil Malatino

Normal Life / Dean Spade

Mutual Aid / Dean Spade

Workers in Industrial America / David Brody

Masculinity in Transition and Filipino Crosscurrents are available from University of Minnesota Press.

MORE: Listen to more talks with K. Allison Hammer on the University of Minnesota Press YouTube page (with Greta Olson and Christopher Breu), the Gender Stories podcast, and on In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer.

"A major intervention into masculinities studies, Masculinity in Transition brilliantly and consistently pushes the field toward a critical understanding of masculinity as a complex gender formation."
—Christopher Breu, author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities

"How might we understand masculinity if we turn toward culture rather than biology? K. Allison Hammer uncover(s) remakings of masculinity that center care, porosity, and unruly alliances—uplifting models for the precarious now."
—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance