What is the queer connection between Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and Robert Bly's Iron John? What do football and anal sex have in common? Why is Tom Cruise unable to leave his baseball bat alone in A Few Good Men? And why do Marky Mark's pants keep falling down?
In this section of scandalous essays on the representation of men in popular culture, Mark Simpson tosses a firecracker into the men's movement's earnest sweat-lodge and, following on from Freud, argues for the vital centrality of homoeroticism and narcissism in any understanding of the fraught phenomenon of modern masculinity.
These 'unmanly' desires are hidden and yet exploited in the portrayal of manliness; Simpson demonstrates how homophobia and misogyny are a consequence of the need to keep this mechanism secret in order to preserve its virile power.
From Laurel and Hardy to shaving adverts, rock and roll to war movies, Male Impersonators offers wit and reader-friendly theory in equal measure in a coruscating review of the greatest show on Earth -- the performance of masculinity.