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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Prison-House of Gender
1. Strudel and the Single Man: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman
2. Witchcraft and the Weird: The Crucible and A View from the Bridge
3. Performing White Male Heteronormativity: A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
4. Playing Ball on the Margins: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Curse of the Starving Class
5. Queering a New Generation: Angels in America, How I Learned to Drive, Fun Home
6. Cakewalks and the White Gaze: Topdog/Underdog, Fairview, Slave Play
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Claire Gleitman is Professor of Dramatic Literature and Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Ithaca College, USA. She is the author of Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers, and Big Daddies (Bloomsbury, 2022). She has also published articles on Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Brian Friel and Tony Kushner, among others, which have appeared in such journals as Comparative Drama, Eire/Ireland, Modern Drama and the Arthur Miller Journal. At Ithaca College, she is also the director and co-founder of the On the Verge play-reading series and former coordinator of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Summary
Staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic—this study follows the male breadwinner as he is incarnated in Arthur Miller’s most celebrated plays and as he resurfaces in different guises throughout American drama, from the 1950s to the present.
Anxious Masculinity offers a compelling analysis of gender dynamics and the legacy of this figure as he stalks through the works of other American dramatists, and argues that the gendered anxieties exhibited by their characters are the very ones invoked with such success by Donald Trump.
Claire Gleitman examines this figure in the plays of Miller and Tennessee Williams, as well as later 20th-century writers Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard, who reposition him in more racially and economically marginalized settings. He reappears in the more recent work of playwrights Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and collaborators Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, who shift their focus to the next generation, which seeks to escape his clutches and forge new, often gleefully queer identities.
The final chapter concerns contemporary Black dramatists Suzan Lori-Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Jeremy O. Harris, whose plays move us from anxious masculinity to anxious whiteness and speak directly to the current moment.
Foreword
This is a wide-ranging study of anxious masculinity in American drama that begins with the works of Miller in the 1950s, takes in the work of his playwriting contemporaries and descendants and extends to the present day, concluding with plays by Jackie Sibblies Drury and Jeremy O. Harris.
Additional text
By connecting post-World War Two American containment to current polarizing gender politics and Trumpism, this book offers historical insight and current social commentary to illustrate how American drama continuously investigates and critiques the society for which it has been written. An excellent study of drama, gender, race and America itself.
