Bonnie J. Mann, “Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror” (OUP, 2014)

In the aftermath of 9/11, the American political landscape and its discourses took a peculiar turn. America’s national sovereignty-conceived as the expression of its indomitable masculinity-had been challenged. Its mythical invulnerability had been crushed. The response of the United States to these events was both disturbing and enlightening. It revealed the darker underbelly of the American mythos, and revealed the highly gendered nature of American politics. Making use of gender testimony and other widely-shared cultural phenomena that arose during the ‘War on Terror’, Bonnie J. Mann constructs a notion of gender as bound up with the political. Listen in to our discussion of Dr. Mann’s new book Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2014).

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