This collection highlights the fluidity of masculinity in American popular culture at the turn of the new millennium and beyond by examining possibilities for male identity formation. Each chapter mines American popular culture—theatre, film, literature, music, advertising, internet content, television, photography, and current events—to pose questions about the process of gender creation and the contestation of masculinities as constantly changing political forms. The first section explores masculinities within late capitalism and includes studies of Seinfeld, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and reality television. The second section addresses identity when masculinity intersects with race, religion, disability, and sexuality, including chapters on Barack Obama, the O.J. trial, and popular movies.

Introduction: from Seinfeld to Obama: millennial masculinities in contemporary American culture / Marc E. Shaw and Elwood Watson -- Masculinities and the market: late capitalism and corporate influence on gender processes. Masters of their domain: Seinfeld and the discipline of mediated men's sexual economy / C. Wesley Buerkle -- Sexually suspect: masculine anxiety in the films of Neil LaBute / Brenda Boudreau -- The might of the metrosexual: how a mere marketing tool challenges hegemonic masculinity / Margaret C. Ervin -- Fathers, sons, and business in the Hollywood "office movie" / Latham Hunter -- Beyond gender alone: defining multidimensional masculinities. Popular memory, racial construction, and the visual illusion of freedom: the re-mediation of O.J. and Cinque / John Kille -- Obama's masculinities: a landscape of essential contradictions / Marc E. Shaw and Elwood Watson -- The male Rapunzel in film: the intersections of disability, gender, race, and sexuality / Johnson Cheu and Carolyn Tyjewski -- Masculinities in dating relationships: reality and representation at the intersection of race, class, and sexual orientation / Jimmie Manning -- "Do you have what it takes to be a real man?": female-to-male transgender embodiment and the politics of the "real" in A boy named Sue and body alchemy / Michel J. Boucher.