Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Failed Heroes: Hypermasculinity In The Contemporary American Novel, Josef D. Benson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My study highlights a link of U.S. American hypermasculinity running through Cormac McCarthy's two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1960). My literary interpretations of these texts suggest that U.S. American hypermasculine man originated in the American frontier and transformed into a definition of hegemonic masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. These southern rural American men then concocted the myth of the black rapist in order to justify the mass murder of African American men after Reconstruction, inadvertently creating a figure more hypermasculine …

Performances Of Gender And Sexuality In Extreme Sports Culture, Carly Michelle Gieseler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to expose the strategies through which extreme sports constitute gender through exaggeration, parody, queering, resistance, and transcendence of normative gendered binaries. I interrogate how extreme sports operate on the margins of sport, gender, media, and lived experience to better understand the processes and performances that retain, reinforce, and resist our notions of normative gender, bodies, and sexuality. Starting with the claim that performance is constitutive of gender and culture, I will focus on how extreme sporting performances create significant commentaries on mainstream assumptions surrounding sporting gender, sexuality, and corporeality.

These commentaries function in extreme …