With this book, Eric Anderson is now poised to move us to the next generation of masculinity scholarship. Respectfully building upon the groundbreaking works of Connell, Messner, Kimmel and Sabo, Anderson demonstrates how the lessening of homohysteria frees up the expression of masculinities to include previously stigmatized forms. Anderson's unorthodox but impressively expansive research has taken him into more and diverse a range of settings than most ethnographers get to in a life time. This is a very important work because it argues through a lens of combined and uneven gender development. As a result, this is simultaneously a bold and nuanced work... It will, in short order, become a benchmark for studies of masculinity.
-Professor Alan Klein, author of Little Big Men: Body Building Subculture and Gender Construction
Gender stereotypes tend to portray male athletes and fraternity members as among the most homophobic of men, perhaps as over-compensation for the amount of intensely physical contact they have with each other. Eric Anderson's deft ethnographies enable him to see something else stirring in those locker rooms, something genuinely inclusive. And this becomes the basis for a new theoretical understanding of masculinities-at once compelling and provocative. This is an astonishing book-one rich with insights and suffused with hope.
-Professor Michael S. Kimmel, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Guys Become Men.
'While there is growing evidence that homophobia is declining in social life, few people expected to find evidence of this in, of all places, fraternities and men's sports. Set against well-known critiques of these homosocial realms as sites for the reproduction of male hierarchies, Eric Anderson's research gives us some cause for (dare I say it?) optimism.'
-Professor Michael A. Messner, author of It's all for the kids: Gender, Families and Youth Sports.
Eric Anderson's latest book is a touchstone for readers to rethink their assumptions about men and masculinities in sport and the contemporary culture. He taps qualitative data to speculate about emerging changes in young men's relationships, emotions, and identities.
-Don Sabo, Ph.D., Professor of Health Policy, D'Youville College
In this intriguing work, Anderson (policy and social sciences, Univ. of Bath, UK) delivers an ethnographic study of the changing contours of British and US manhood....Recommended.
- Choice, February 2010
