Explores the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States

Affirmative Reaction explores the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States. Through close readings of texts ranging from the popular television drama 24 to the Marvel Comics miniseries The Call of Duty, and from the reality show American Chopper to the movie Million Dollar Baby, Hamilton Carroll argues that the true privilege of white masculinity—and its defining strategy—is not to be unmarked, universal, or invisible, but to be mobile and mutable. He describes how, in response to the perceived erosions of privilege produced by post–civil rights era identity politics, white masculinity has come to rely on the very discourses of difference that unsettled its claims on the universal; it has redefined itself as a marginalized identity.

Throughout Affirmative Reaction, Carroll examines the kinds of difference white masculinity claims for itself as it attempts to hold onto or maintain majority privilege. Whether these are traditional sites of minority difference—such as Irishness, white trash, or domestic melodrama—or reworked sites of masculinist investment—including laboring bodies, public-sphere politics, and vigilantism—the outcome is the same: the foregrounding of white masculinity over and against women, people of color, and the non-heteronormative. By revealing the strategies through which white masculinity is produced as a formal difference, Carroll sheds new light on the ways that privilege is accrued and maintained.

"“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. . . .”" - Critical Race and Whiteness Studies

"“Carroll is at his best when he is drawing out the substance of his multifarious analyses in order to do some theory making about contemporary white masculinity. The most powerful moments of critical insight come when he skillfully jumps from Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in 24 to George W. Bush’s speeches on the War on Terror to Judith Butler and back to Bauer again, underscoring the connections between ideas that are neither obvious nor simple.” " - Men and Masculinities

"“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.”" - Journal of Gender Studies

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

"“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.”" - Ethnic and Racial Studies