Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction: White Masculinities and the Politics of Representation  1

Part I. 9-11/24-7 Affective Time and the War on Terror  

1. Jack Bauer's Extraordinary Rendition: Neoliberal Melodrama and the Ethics of Torture  27

2. Future Perfect: "Everyday Heroes" and the New Exceptionalism  49

Part II. Embodying Difference Whiteness, Class, and the Postindustrial Subject  

3. Men's Soaps: Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary Working-Class Masculinities  77

4. "My Skin Is It Startin' to Work in My Benefit Now?": Eminem's White Trash Aesthetic  101

Part III. Daddy's Home Family Melodrama and the Fictions of State  

5. The Fighting Irish: Ethnic Whiteness and Million Dollar Baby  131

6. Romancing the Nation: Family Melodrama and the Sentimental Logics of Neoliberalism  157

Notes  181

Bibliography  201

Index  213

“Carroll’s work makes a valuable contribution to literature on contemporary masculinity and its discontents. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.”—D. E. Magill, Choice

“Carroll offers a theoretically sophisticated account of some novel recent manoeuvres of white masculine identity, which provides a powerful framework for the critical interrogation of the texts he explores, and many others.”—James Zborowski, Journal of Gender Studies

“I found Carroll’s reading coherent, convincing and resonant in many respects with the ethnographies and qualitative interviewing projects on American whiteness with which I am more familiar. Addressing whiteness as contingent, heterogeneous and rooted in cultural, political and economic shifts is a project in which a number of scholars are already engaged, and Carroll’s text is a very welcome contribution to this field.”—Steve Garner, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“[An] eclectic and informative study. . . . Carroll’s book is a fascinating example of scholarly tangential thinking, which nonetheless carefully interweaves its themes and preoccupations to admirable effect.”—Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World

“Affirmative Reaction does a good job of critiquing privileged media archetypes. . . . This book will help forward an important dialogue about the contemporary status of white ethnicity, the masculinisation of class and nation, and the development of identity politics in the United States. . . .”—Timothy Laurie, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies

“Carroll’s text and the breadth of his analysis are impressive. With relative ease, he is able to illustrate how a theme in one of the chosen texts illustrates white masculinity’s efforts to reclaim its relatively privileged position.”—Andrew Irwin-Smiler, Teachers College Record

“The incisive arguments put forth in Affirmative Reaction will be useful for scholars seeking ideological readings of media texts produced in our current “postracial” moment, particularly televisual texts that center on white male crisis in the post-Civil Rights era.”—Shelleen Green, The Journal of Popular Culture

“Carroll’s work makes a valuable contribution to literature on contemporary masculinity and its discontents. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.”—D. E. Magill, Choice

“Carroll offers a theoretically sophisticated account of some novel recent manoeuvres of white masculine identity, which provides a powerful framework for the critical interrogation of the texts he explores, and many others.”—James Zborowski, Journal of Gender Studies

“I found Carroll’s reading coherent, convincing and resonant in many respects with the ethnographies and qualitative interviewing projects on American whiteness with which I am more familiar. Addressing whiteness as contingent, heterogeneous and rooted in cultural, political and economic shifts is a project in which a number of scholars are already engaged, and Carroll’s text is a very welcome contribution to this field.”—Steve Garner, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“[An] eclectic and informative study. . . . Carroll’s book is a fascinating example of scholarly tangential thinking, which nonetheless carefully interweaves its themes and preoccupations to admirable effect.”—Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World

“Affirmative Reaction does a good job of critiquing privileged media archetypes. . . . This book will help forward an important dialogue about the contemporary status of white ethnicity, the masculinisation of class and nation, and the development of identity politics in the United States. . . .”—Timothy Laurie, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies

“Carroll’s text and the breadth of his analysis are impressive. With relative ease, he is able to illustrate how a theme in one of the chosen texts illustrates white masculinity’s efforts to reclaim its relatively privileged position.”—Andrew Irwin-Smiler, Teachers College Record

“The incisive arguments put forth in Affirmative Reaction will be useful for scholars seeking ideological readings of media texts produced in our current “postracial” moment, particularly televisual texts that center on white male crisis in the post-Civil Rights era.”—Shelleen Green, The Journal of Popular Culture

“Affirmative Reaction is a remarkable transvaluation of the terms by which we currently understand post-Fordist white masculinist hegemony. Not an unmarked norm but a particularized, and particularly abject, new identity category, white maleness is here submitted to fresh, riveting, lucid, and eye-opening analysis. An exemplary account of recent U.S. mediascapes.”—Eric Lott, author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual

“In analyses that move deftly across economic, political, and affective registers, Hamilton Carroll draws out the dynamics of early-twenty-first-century backlash that have produced the popularity of texts as different as Brokeback Mountain and American Chopper, and draws our attention to the nuances to be found in unexpected places such as comic-book responses to 9/11. Affirmative Reaction can be read as a set of smart, related essays on a common theme, but it is also a tight, cohesive argument about recent developments in white U.S. masculinity. It will be welcomed by specialists in cultural studies, film studies, and gender studies, and it intervenes in the research conversation about the constitution of whiteness that continues in and across several fields and disciplines.”—Glenn Hendler, Director of the American Studies Program, Fordham University

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