MALE IMPERSONATORS, MEN PERFORMING MASCULINITY Cassell, 1994 (UK); Routledge (US)

What is the queer connection between Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and Robert Bly's Iron John? What if anything do football and anal sex have in common? Why is Tom Cruise unable to leave his baseball bat alone in A Few Good Men and who is his real love-interest in Top Gun? And why oh why do Marky Mark's pants keep falling down?

In this selection of highly influential, prophetic and entertaining essays from 1994 on the representation of men in popular culture Mark Simpson tosses a firecracker into the men's movement's earnest sweat-lodge and, following Freud, argues for the vital centrality of homoeroticism and narcissism in any understanding of the fraught phenomenon of modern masculinity - in particular the way they dominate in the personality of the glossy, mediatised male that has supplanted the 'real' variety. Male Impersonators examines the 'crisis of masculinity' as a crisis of 'looked-at-ness' - in which masculinity has become passive, exhibitionistic and not a little tarty.

From Laurel and Hardy to shaving ads, rock and roll to war movies, pornography to bodybuilding, Male Impersonators offers wit and reader-friendly theory in equal measure in a coruscating review of the greatest show on Earth - the performance of masculinity.