Troubling Masculinities

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres--including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns--author Glen Donnar examines the impact of "terror-Others," from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil.

Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood's attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively ext