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.
Summary:
"This study examines the figure of the anxious 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 day. It offers a compelling analysis of gender dynamics - staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic - and of the legacy of this often sexually troubled figure in the works of other American dramatists right up to the present day. The book then proceeds to examine this same figure as he appears in the plays of Tennessee Williams, and then in the later 20th century writers Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, August Wilson and Sam Shepard, who reposition him in more racially and economically marginalized settings. From there it turns to the work of Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and the collaborators Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, who shift their focus to the children who seek to free themselves from his clutches and forge their own, gleefully queer identities. Finally, the last chapter concerns the 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. Threaded throughout the book is the argument that the gendered anxieties exhibited by the anxious male breadwinner are the very ones invoked with such success by Donald Trump"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.