Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Demon warrior puppets, sword-wielding Taoist priests, spirit mediums lacerating their bodies with spikes and blades-these are among the most dramatic images in Chinese religion. Usually linked to the propitiation of plague gods and the worship of popular military deities, such ritual practices have an obvious but previously unexamined kinship with the traditional Chinese martial arts.The long and durable history of martial arts iconography and ritual in Chinese religion suggests something far deeper than mere historical coincidence. Avron Boretz argues that martial arts gestures and movements are so deeply embedded in the ritual repertoire in part because they iconify masculine qualities of violence, aggressivity, and physical prowess, the implicit core of Chinese patriliny and patriarchy. At the same time, for actors and audience alike, martial arts gestures evoke the mythos of the jianghu, a shadowy, often violent realm of vagabonds, outlaws, and masters of martial and magic arts. Through the direct bodily practice of martial arts movement and creative rendering of jianghu narratives, martial ritual practitioners are able to identify and represent themselves, however briefly and incompletely, as men of prowess, a reward otherwise denied those confined to the lower limits of this deeply patriarchal society.Based on fieldwork in China and Taiwan spanning nearly two decades, Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves-mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs-convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society. This work is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese ritual and religion, the history and sociology of Chinese underworld, the history and anthropology of the martial arts, and the anthropology of masculinity.

Masculinity --- Violence --- Martial arts --- Religious aspects.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What do novels such Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, and Jayne Anne Phillips' MotherKind have in common with films such as Smoke and Mrs Doubtfire? This study explores the intersection of masculinity and domesticity in contemporary film and literature. It argues that these texts, produced since the 1990s, address with some urgency the notion of "new fatherhood" in the United States. They offer explorations of the idea that American father...

Masculinity in literature. --- Housekeeping in literature. --- Kinship in literature. --- Masculinity (Psychology) in literature

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

From the publisher. Brooks explores the psychopathology of men's everyday lives and the maladaptive strategies that men use to maintain a traditional male role that has increasingly come under assault. He then delves into the related question of why men overwhelmingly reject psychotherapy at a time when they need it the most. The key to engaging men in therapy, Brooks argues, is devising a male-friendly therapy, involving flexibility, consciousness-raising in men's groups and other out-of-office settings, and the therapist's emphasis on an authentic empathetic bond with the troubled male client to discover meaning in the client's relational pressures and problems at work, with loved ones, and, most of all, with himself. Standard therapeutic models don't work for men, Brooks argues, so therapists must be eclectic and transtheoretical in negotiating therapeutic goals and tasks with their troubled male clients. The central tenets of multicultural counseling and therapy figure prominently in the transtheoretical model, as they allow the therapist to separate out and tackle peculiarly male problems that span different cultural and socioeconomic contexts. Inclusive cultural empathy and the transtheoretical model's stages-of-change framework can sustain men'+s initial interest in the therapeutic option and, beyond that, in a transformative relationship. In such a way, Brooks concludes, the transtheoretical model advances a hesitant male client from the level of consciousness-raising and awareness of gender role strain to the level of action and change, as the locus of therapeutic agency shifts from the therapist to the client himself.

Masculinity --- Men --- Men --- Men --- Psychotherapy --- Masculinity --- Counseling of --- Mental health --- psychology --- methods

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book of the Japanese hegemonic salaryman masculinity demonstrates the way in which the participants construct their masculinities through their life course. Their narratives reveal their contradictions, doubts, dilemmas, anxieties and resignation behind the façade of their confidence and pride.

Men --- White collar workers --- Masculinity --- Social conditions --- Identity

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Masculinity --- Men --- Men --- White collar workers --- Identity --- Social conditions