Revealing Male Bodies

The five editors (four males and a female) deliver everything implied by their book's provocative title in these 13 essays addressing an absence of male embodiment in feminist literature. Their five-year-long collaborative effort legitimizes itself as scholarly by having produced and elicited works grounded mainly in philosophical concepts of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Lacan. Arranged in four principal parts—The Phallus and the Penis, Masculine Myths and Male Bodies, Constructing Male Space, and Ethical Significance of Male Bodies—the essays reflect their authors' diverse backgrounds in philosophy, theology, sociology, religious studies, intercultural studies, literacy, language, rhetoric, literary studies, English, and architecture. The bounty of this team's clarity and persistence is incisive exploration into myths and concepts of masculinity and the lived male experience. Themes, for example, concern the ways that race, sex and sexuality, gender, identity, power, and space impact socially, politically, and personally as well as ethically and spiritually. This is a book that one recommends but does not lend, peruses and returns to, and that will prompt one to finish that journal article or register for that course of study. It surely will stimulate any reader. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels and collections.

-- G. D. Claiborne * University of Maryland University College , 2003mar CHOI