Damaged Men, Desiring Women

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Revision with unchanged content. Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of novels by Australian women (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The novels explored in this book share two preoccupations. Firstly, they present male characters' bodies as damaged or suffering, secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters' bodies and female characters' gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. This book is addressed to scholars interested in feminism, masculinity studies, visual theory and/or Australian literary and cultural studies.