Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man’s identity and a man’s right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evident links to physicality, identity, and power. In Masculinities without Men? Jean Bobby Noble explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, resulting in a permanent rupture in the sex/gender system, and how masculinity became an unstable category, altered across time, region, social class, and ethnicity.

Bobby Noble (PhD, York University) is an Assistant Professor of sexuality, gender, trans-gender studies and popular culture in the Women's Studies department of the University of Victoria.

Jean Bobby Noble's profile page

• Winner, Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Masculinities Without Men? is a richly theoretical text, explicating intricate socio-cultural phenomena with meticulous finesse. It approaches important literary and filmic texts and key areas of gender and sexuality studies in a thoughtful manner. Its thorough theoretical context makes it an important resource for scholars invested in gender theory. Jean Bobby Noble is clearly in the process of staking out a provocative and cutting-edge terrain within gender studies.

Canadian Woman Studies, Winter/Spring 2005

Attentive to the detailed narrative work of prose fiction writers and the interpretive responses they provoke, Noble engages complex masculinities with analytical subtlety and ethical sensitivity ... Masculinities Without Men? provides openings through which to envision gender transformations as mutually constitutive, without denying their respective struggles and integrities. It is here that this book provides a bridge between queer studies, gender studies and feminist studies that is extremely valuable

TOPIA 15, July 2006