KENMOFFATT, Troubled Masculinities: Reimagining Urban Men. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012, xviii + 210 p.

Troubled Masculinities: Reimagining Urban Men (2012) is an edited collection by Ken Moffatt. Readers are introduced to masculinities performed, practiced, and perspectived in various off-grid social enclaves, visual arts arenas, and theatrical spaces. Eleven authors stop short of confessional culture to articulate visually reinforced autoethnographic accounts of the wearing and workings out of day-to-day masculinities. The authors interrogate conventional notions. Guys, queers, drags, a Mestizo, male-friends secrete-ing silence, and a cross-dresser exhibit the negotiation of gendered identities. The authors are academics with diverse backgrounds (social work, education, theater) who reflexively document masculinity as plural, layered, and contested. Existential manhood is (re)presented as (de)valued, (un)settled, (in)complete, and at times difficult to (ex)press. Narratives reflect how race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability, and transnational (im)mobility can (inter)penetrate and (potentially) expunge the emblematic potency of hegemonic masculinity. Vivid description grounds a fusion of theoretical constructs from feminist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, and dramaturgical traditions. Self-labeled advocates of inclusion, social reform, and empowerment; the scholarly contributors to Troubled Masculinities share their reflexive interpretations of structurally embedded masculinities “in becoming.” The courage to tell all is a unifying theme, which grows louder as the transformative journey is traced from opening through closing chapters. In “The Mestizo Refuses to Confess” (chapter one), Henry Parada uses the art of Vincent and Feria as metaphor to examine masculinity from the standpoint of a refugee-immigrant being stereotyped “machismo” in Toronto. Parada embraces Foucault's concept parrhesia, “the act of telling all through plain speaking, and speaking openly” (p. 23) then retreats from anticipated catharsis. Drawing on an El Salvadorian custom, the “veil of distrust” (p. 36), Parada instead voices opposition toward the healing narrative as clinical tool. Themes of trust, silence, tension, and masculinity as constraint continue in the second entry, “Yearning to Break Silence.” Frank Sirotich, Sean Martin, Steven Ruhinda, Joseph Vaz, and Moffatt (photography by Eugenio Salas) draw on Foucault's four technologies—production, sign systems, power, and self. Support group dialogue illustrates how self-disclosure is structured by masculinity in academic workplaces and other hybrid spaces. The authors step out from behind any “veil of objectivity and distance in research” (p. 44) to examine men's felt experiences of the unsettling choice, between silence or being pushed to the margins due to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. “Instruction in the Art of the Masculine” (Moffatt) interprets Daryl Vocat's art-as-social-commentary. Using “image disruption,” Vocat affixes counterhegemonic images onto clothing, patches, quilt, and photography to defuse the regulatory influence of “pervasive dominant images” that commerce promotes as “codes” of (accepted) identity practice in advertising that litters Toronto's streetscape and penetrate psyches and interpersonal relations (p. 62). Vocat enlists peoples’ everyday lives as wandering emblems that “gender and sexuality are constructed, and reproduced through social and cultural productions” (p. 63). “Troubling Role Models” (Carl James, chapter four), “Keeping it Real” (Philip Lortie, chapter six), and “Queering Asian Masculinities” (Gordon Pon, chapter five) focus the gaze on youth interacting in school (James and Lortie) and retail settings (Pon) where masculinities are emerged, performed, regulated, contradicted, and resisted. James interrogates mentorship programs and presents narrative evidence that the estrangement and disaffection of black youth is an outcome of systemically preserved racism, which mentoring programs actually reproduce rather than resolve. Actor-teacher Lortie reflects on the matter of boys in schools being regulated differently by school authorities based on observable characteristics indicating (in)eligibility for entry and acceptance into hegemonic privilege castes. Gordon Pon, drawing on interviews with heterosexual and homosexual youth, examines suburban Toronto's bubble tea houses where young, transnational Asian men can subversively resist psychic castration while reconciling their unresolved struggles of embodied (under)confidence. “Dancing without a Floor” (chapter seven) brings Moffatt together with artists Michael Comeau and Will Munro to (re)present an insider view of Toronto's club scene. Munro's “Vazaleen,” a queer theater arts project, transforms Toronto's El Mocambo (a rock-and-roll venue) into a place where queer and straight folks overlook the boundaries, if only for a moment. A second club scene is opened for view in “Boy to the Power of Three” (chapter eight). Female-to-male transgender person Bobby Noble frames detailed accounts of Toronto's three drag king “waves.” On stage, the kings use irony and ambivalence to (re)constitute whiteness masculinity, diminishing male virility while magnifying vaginal proclivity. The final chapter departs these public performance spaces and shifts from prose to poetry. Comforting readers into a private inside-self realm, “Eyes of Excess” contrasts sharply with Parada's curbed catharsis that opened the collection of narratives. Perhaps explained by where Irving's at in his academic and personal life, Irving's catharsis is unbridled. He recounts how wearing his women's negligée is his way of encountering and enjoying his masculinity and is in no way anchored in or reflective of any pathology. Drawing on a fluency of their existential selves, the authors elucidate the messy problem of intersections. Boundaries are blurring. Crevices are crossed. Reimagining urban masculinity in Toronto adds to what R.W. Connell (2005:35) calls the “unsettled paradigm” of gender studies. Some scholars may find occasion to critique the conceptual management of empirical information. Others may discount both the scholarly relevance and empirical validity, if reliance on autoethnography is felt to deviate uncomfortably far from customary methodological rigor. Some readers may find objection with the critical voice (e.g., Parada's angst of healing narratives, James’ contempt for “corrective agents”). The book is relevant to interdisciplinary domains of gender studies, masculinity studies, queer studies, embodied sociology, and political science, as well as clinician and activist circles. I also recommend the book for social (in)justice training with frontline workers in settings where disrupted/disrupting masculinities are (en)countered and (mis)perceived.

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