Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives

This book comprises a collection of eighteen essays that address topics ranging from feminism to issues on masculinity, from prose to poetry, from written literature to the cinema. The arrangement of the essays in three differentiated parts should be viewed from a certain ironic angle: the feminine and the masculine interconnect, fuse, and collide often in life and in text, and no selection of critical topics can avoid the permanent bouncing of gender and sexual marks. The first two sections tend towards the hybrid of the third part, into an open territory of ideological and body conflicts, of emotion and matter, race and religion, issues that continue to exert a powerful influence on our current performances as human beings.