Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis

`Innovative in its Butler inflected, psychoanalytically informed, queer approach to a diverse range of work from Mark Ravenhill to Franko B, Walsh's book is a must for those engaged in cultural and performative studies of "male trouble". The study takes the masculinity in crisis discourse from the nineties and beyond to new theoretical heights.`---Elaine Aston, Professor of Contemporary Performance, Lancaster University, UK, and co-editor of Staging International Feminisms and Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory

`Of all the books published on men and masculinities in the new millennium, Fintan Walsh's is the most perceptive and persuasive. Impressive in its range and justified in its claims, Male Trouble is psychoanalytically inflected cultural studies of the highest order.`---Calvin Thomas, Professor of English, Georgia State University, USA, and author of Male Matters and Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory

Male Trouble explores how Western masculinity has increasingly appeared as a troubled gender category in recent times. Cross-disciplinary in scope, the book focuses on a variety of performative case studies in drama, theatre, live art, guerilla performance, public spectacle, and film. Moreover, the study analyses work that dialogues with discourses of masculinity in crisis principally drawn from American, British, and Irish contexts to challenge the sacrificial terms by which male trouble is typically articulated, while ultimately arguing for an ethic of fragilization in order to move beyond this deadlock in subjectivity and relationality

Fintan Walsh is IRCHSS Government of Ireland Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Drama at the School of Drama, Film and Music at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is co-editor of Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture