Abstract
Times of cultural upheaval are often framed as distinctly male crisis narratives by relinking hegemonic masculinity with notions of universality. Haschemi Yekani challenges this abstract conceptual (re)linking of masculinity and crisis with universality by analyzing cultural artifacts that have been produced in the wake of 9/11 in both the UK and the US. Focusing on Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and Oliver Stone’s film World Trade Center (2006), the chapter shows that despite their different aesthetic strategies—Stone’s seemingly straightforward male action drama versus McEwan’s reflections on the more abstract notion of terror—crisis emerges once more as a privileged cultural mode of representing masculinities in both. Consequently, regarding methodologies prevalent in masculinity studies, Haschemi Yekani cautions against positing crisis as a concept inherent to masculinity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Parts of the theoretical framing of this paper and a much shorter reading of the novel Saturday have been published previously in Haschemi Yekani (2011).
- 2.
Male hegemony is not a simple, dominant discourse reproduced by cultural artifacts. Narrative patterns create textual effects, which in turn produce inconsistencies and ambivalences.
- 3.
Sabine Mehlmann (2008) describes this paradoxical construction of modern men as simultaneously belonging to ‘the superior sex’ while also being seen as the ‘gender-neutral representative of universal mankind’ with reference to sexological, biological, and psychological writings around 1900 (cf. 37).
- 4.
As Halberstam’s influential book Female Masculinity (1998) has underlined, we need to be aware that masculinity is not a male prerogative. The diversification of male and female masculinities and the resulting severing of the seemingly unquestioned link between sex and gender can also be seen as one of the reasons why there is a rise in the discourse of a crisis of masculinity at the end of the twentieth century.
- 5.
- 6.
Peter Hühn (2011) also criticizes the exclusion of social/political dimensions of terrorism by focusing so much on the terror endangering the nuclear family. However, in his reading of Saturday and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown he, problematically, frames terrorism as conflicts of “archaic” and modern practices (108). As Homi K. Bhabha (1991) had cautioned in his essay “Race, Time, and the Revision of Modernity”, it is the contemporaneity of radically different world views that gives rise to cultural conflict (and, in the worst case, terrorist violence) rather than a colonial lag.
- 7.
For an elaborate reading of the intertextuality between Arnold and McEwan, cf. Lars Eckstein (2011) who reads McEwan’s recourse to Arnold with Paul Gilroy as a form of “imperial melancholy”.
- 8.
Rebecca Carpenter (2011) offers an insightful reading of how Saturday contrasts US and British masculinities (in disavowal of Muslim masculinities) and the way Bush’s and Blair’s politics were regarded in the context of Britain’s and the USA’s foreign policies in the post-9/11 era.
- 9.
Magali Cornier Michael (2009) also parallels Perowne’s withdrawal to the private sphere to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and argues that men now take on the position of refuge in light of their sense of loss of power, which has increased after 9/11.
- 10.
As the feminist biologist and science historian Donna Haraway (1997) has elaborated, this follows a reductive opposition of nature versus culture: “To be a construct does NOT mean to be unreal or made up; quite the opposite” (129), and she continues, “the body is simultaneously a historical, natural, technical, discursive, and material entity” (209).
- 11.
Works Cited
Banerjee, Mita. “Postethnicity and Postcommunism in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift and Salman Rushdie’s Fury.” Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition. Eds. Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. 309–324.
———. “‘Whiteness of a Different Color’? Racial Profiling in John Updike’s Terrorist.” Neohelicon 35.2 (2008): 13–28.
Bhabha, Homi K. “Race, Time, and the Revision of Modernity.” Oxford Literary Review 13.1 (1991): 193–219.
Boehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonial Writing and Terror.” Wasafiri 22.2 (2007): 4–7.
Brown, Richard. “Politics, the Domestic and the Uncanny Effects of the Everyday in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Critical Survey 20.1 (2008): 80–93.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
Carpenter, Rebecca. “‘We’re Not a Friggin’ Girl Band’: September 11, Masculinity, and the British-American Relationship in David Hare’s Stuff Happens and Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Literature after 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2011. 143–160.
Däwes, Birgit. “Celluloid Recoveries: Cinematic Transformations of Ground Zero.” Transnational American Memories. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 285–309.
Dunst, Alexander. “After Trauma: Time and Affect in American Culture Beyond 9/11.” Parallax 18.2 (2012): 56–71.
Eaglestone, Robert. “‘The Age of Reason is Over…an Age of Fury was Dawning’: Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction and Terror.” Wasafiri 22.2 (2007): 19–22.
Eckstein, Lars. “Saturday on Dover Beach: Ian McEwan, Matthew Arnold, and Post-9/11 Melancholia.” Hard Times 89.1 (2011): 6–10.
Erhart, Walter. “Das zweite Geschlecht: ‘Männlichkeit’, interdisziplinär.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 30.2 (2005): 156–232.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006.
Frank, Michael C., and Kirsten Mahlke. “Kultur und Terror. Zur Einleitung.” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1 (2010): 7–16.
Grunwald, Henning, and Manfred Pfister. “Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien.” Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. Eds. Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister. München: Fink, 2007. 7–20.
Grusin, Richard A. Premediation. Affect and Mediality after 9/11. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Haschemi Yekani, E. The Privilege of Crisis. Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011.
———. “Humanism Versus Humour: Representing Terrorism after 7/7 in London River and Four Lions.” Deconstructing Terrorism. 9/11, 7/7 and Contemporary Culture. Eds. Jürgen Kamm, Jürgen Kramer, and Bernd Lenz. Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz, 2013. 209–226.
Hühn, Peter. “‘All in the Family’: Die Thematisierung des Terrorismus in Ian McEwans Saturday und Salman Rushdies Shalimar the Clown.” Lesarten des Terrorismus. Eds. Norbert Greiner and Felix Sprang. Trier: WVT, 2011. 91–109.
Hillard, Molly Clark. “‘When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight’: Re-Reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.1 (2008): 181–206.
McEwan, Ian. Saturday. 2005. London: Vintage, 2006.
Mehlmann, Sabine. “Das sexu(alis)ierte Individuum—Zur paradoxen Konstruktionslogik moderner Männlichkeit.” Männlichkeiten und Moderne. Geschlecht in den Wissenskulturen um 1900. Eds. Ulrike Brunotte and Rainer Herrn. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. 37–55.
Michael, Magali Cornier. “Writing Fiction in the Post-9/11 World: Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” From Solidarity to Schisms. 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US. Ed. Cara Cilano. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 25–51.
Möller, Swantje. Coming to Terms with Crisis: Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011.
Nünning, Ansgar. “Narratologie der Krise: Wie aus einer Situation ein Plot und eine Krise (konstruiert) werden.” Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. Eds. Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister. München: Fink, 2007. 48–71.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
Rich, B. Ruby. “Out of the Rubble.” Sight & Sound 16.10 (2006): 14–18. Web. 20 March 2013. <http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49320>.
Robinson, Sally. Marked Men. White Masculinity in Crisis. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.
Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown. A Novel. 2005. New York: Random House, 2006.
Sielke, Sabine. “‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ Männlichkeit, Körper, Transdisziplinarität.” Väter, Soldaten, Liebhaber. Männer und Männlichkeiten in der Geschichte Nordamerikas. Ein Reader. Eds. Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007. 43–61.
Tanner, Laura E. “Holding On to 9/11: The Shifting Grounds of Materiality.” PMLA 127.1 (2012): 58–76.
Updike, John. Terrorist. 2006. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
Wachinger, Tobias A. Posing In-Between. Postcolonial Englishness and the Commodification of Hybridity. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003.
Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Studies in the Novel 39.4 (2007): 465–480.
Wells, Lynn. “The Ethical Otherworld: Ian McEwan’s Fiction.” British Fiction Today. Eds. Philip Tew and Rod Mengham. London: Continuum, 2006. 117–127.
World Trade Center. Dir. Oliver Stone. Paramount Pictures, 2006.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Haschemi Yekani, E. (2017). Privileged Crises in the Wake of 9/11: Universalizing Masculinity in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. In: Horlacher, S., Floyd, K. (eds) Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50819-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50820-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)