Placing man in the New West: Masculinities of The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show does not fall within the genre of the Western, yet the cinematic narrative mourns the loss of the iconic Westerner — a man — and the passing of his home places that constitute the Old West. This paper is concerned with the ways in which this man and his places are transformed along with the embryonic but inexorable emergence of the New West — and its attendant demand for recognition of hitherto unheard voices (e.g., women, Latinos) — that accompanied significant social, cultural and political shifts that were beginning to emerge within the country as a whole in the represented early 1950s. His represented sites of contestation are found within the frame of the small west Texas town of Anarene, created by Larry McMurtry's novel of the same name as the film, both of which reflect contexts of the era in which they were constructed — the mid 1960s to early 1970s. We suggest that the film shows a great sensitivity to the ways in which particular masculinities are constituted in specific places, to the tensions that arise from the changing nature and definitions of masculinity as they are linked to these places, and with his sense of nostalgia and loss that accompanies his inevitable decline. But there is no clear and empowered place for women in these new places, only a recontextualized form of a patriarchal order which is not relational and which still maintains essentialist assumptions of gender. The Old West has taken new shape, much to the chagrin of man, but it is hardly a New West, with its emerging and representative voices. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

‘I want to take risks,like my mother’: Memory,affect, and Vietnamese masculinities – the legacy of gendered variations in socio-economic mobility during Ðổi mới

Young Vietnamese men who witnessed their mother's changing economic and labour market situations through the early years of Ð?i m?i (the policy of economic liberalization in Vietnam after 1986) have developed conceptions of masculinity that are ambivalent to notions of male power and authority within what is often termed the ‘traditional’ neo-Confucian family. On the basis of the life narratives of a small group of men in their early twenties, the author suggests that the value young men place on their mother's work and familial influence during Ð?i m?i contrasts with the findings of much gender scholarship on women's social and economic (im) mobility in the 1990s in Vietnam and on young men's own masculinist narratives. Most gender-sensitive research in this area has suggested that Vietnamese women remained curtailed in the early 1990s by a resurgence of male-oriented kinship systems and patriarchal structures at household level. However, the author discusses the young men as being equivocal. While invoking broad Confucian tropes, these men remember their mothers as economically dynamic relative to their fathers. This led to the informants citing their mother's histories of economic risk-taking as exemplifying free-market capability. Further, the finding suggests that Vietnamese women's social and economic mobility in the 1990s strongly affected young men's contemporary ideas and practices related to masculinity.     

Negotiating Multiple Positionalities in the Interview Setting: Researching Across Gender and Generational Boundaries

This article explores the multiple positionalities that were negotiated during qualitative interviews conducted with older British men who are grandfathers, by a young female early career researcher. Gender and other methodological challenges negotiated by researchers of men and masculinities have been critiqued, but negotiations of age and generational differences in the field remain scant, despite recognition that age also structures socially constructed and spatially experienced identities. Including reflections on personal research experiences, the article outlines the need for explicit critical attention by geographers to the influence of the fluid intersectional identities of the researcher and researched on research experiences in the field and research outcomes.