ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the historical moment men find themselves in the postmillennium era. The sociocultural context represents the culmination of social and identity movements revolutionizing racial, sexual, gender, and class relations, all the while challenging the hegemonic status of heterosexual masculinity. Toxic masculinity no longer gets a pass as “boys being boys.” The authors pose the question of how men come to learn their masculinities and argue that it represents a form of literacy, with which conventional cultural studies scholarship has not engaged in this area. The authors argue literacy as reading and writing the text of one’s individual and collective bodies helps advance an understanding of how men shape and are shaped by forces all around them.
