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American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. $35.00 he. 549 pp. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. $55.00 he. $25.00 sc. 482 pp. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. American Literature's Aesthetic Dimen-sions.

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the \"white Negro\" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. InTaking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies likeRamboandTwister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Manprovocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

Gloria Anzaldúa, prematuramente fallecida en la primavera de 2004, dice en Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, remodelando una conocida cita de Virginia Woolf donde la británica reivindica que \"como mujer, [su] patria es el mundo entero\": Como mestiza, no tengo patria, mi nación me expuM; sin embargo, pertenezco a cualquier país porque soy la hermana o h amante potencial de todas las mujeres. También nos habla Martirio de su gusto por los juguetes sexuales, otro gran tabú que ha generado múltiples controversias en el ámbito de los estudios gays y lesbianos;-' o de su promiscuidad sexual, que le ha llevado a tener, según ella misma confiesa, \"cientos de relaciones\" de las que no se avergüenza. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory New York: Columbia University Press.

\"Journal of a UFO Investigator\" is intricate and subversive, a book not easily understood. On the manifest level - peshat, in the Jewish interpretative tradition - it is a touching and engrossing coming-of-age novel composed in a simple style, a voyage of discovery starring an unhappy teenager named [Danny Shapiro] who finds refuge in UFO research and flights of fantasy: sightings, abductions, conspiracies, the whole generic megillah. (His mantra is a line from \"The Bbok of the Damned,\" «a classic American study of paranormal phenomena: \"Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things.\") Danny's mother is an invalid with a heart condition. His father seethes with quiet anger, often directed at Danny, his only child. The book is set in a Philadelphia suburb between 1963 and 1966 - the \"distant days,\" as the author reveals in his acknowledgments, \"when I was myself a teenage UFO investigator.\" The book is called \"The Case for the UFO\" and is written by Morris K. Jessup (a classic in its field, published in 1955.) The fictional Danny gets hold of a copy with cryptic marginalia inscribed by Gypsies, and clings to it for dear life as he is pursued in Florida by three men in black, transported toward the moon inside a huge fluorescent red disk, ensnared by clawed creatures in a putrid lake and plunged deep into the Well of Souls, beneath the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, prior to the story's climax in a still-divided Jerusalem. There, on the Arab side, he hooks up with Rochelle Perlmann, his half-Episcopalian teenage friend from Philadelphia, who declares: \"Myths are real... They have to be real. Otherwise they wouldn't stay around for centuries. They'd vanish like last year's top tunes.\" Along the way, Danny steps on a sharp bone, and injures his foot ([Ezekiel] meets Oedipus), and afterward - the aliens call this \"the seeding\" -he sires a sickly female star-child who may or may not be destined to save the world. And he also wins a trip to Israel, for an essay he wrote called \"Passage of Time in the Book of Job.\" In the Well of Souls, Danny meets his pious maternal grandfather, who died when Danny was 4 years old. He shows his grandfather the UFO book: \"Like the old Hebrew books you used to read. There's text here, and there's commentary, and the commentary is more important than the text.\" Danny reads aloud a Gypsy complaint about non-Gypsies: \"Such fools [they] are! They call us Alien, when all the time we are within them, Bone of their Bone and flesh of their flesh.\" One doesn't need a secret decoder ring to realize that this is about death and the Holocaust. In Jordanian Jerusalem, conspiracy theories abound. \"Here the three men in black are Zionists,\" Rochelle tells Danny.

To this ethos Mr. Halperin, like the figure on the Heisman Trophy, raises his hand in rebuff: \"For all its undeniable benefits, gay pride is now preventing us from knowing ourselves.\" [...]his class examined why Madonna, midcentury modern furniture and Mini Coopers, to name merely three things, came to matter so much to so many gay men.

Taken a step further -- and why not, given how much of our time is spend daydreaming? -- the approach gives us someone waiting at a traffic light in a reverie about former lovers, or sprawling in front of the TV, imagining an alternate life as a pro shortstop. [...] during his senescence, the Soviet Union falls and communism is replaced by a kind of mafia capitalism.

The American Family Association is doing everything in its power to get the University of Michigan to remove the course entitled \"How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.\" University officials are so far standing behind the gay professor teaching the course, David M. Halperin.

Queer studies professor of University of Michigan David Halperin is interviewed. He speaks about the opposition of antigay crusader Gary Glenn against his new class: \"How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.\"

[David M. Halperin] is an openly gay University of Michigan professor who achieved notoriety in 2000 when his class \"How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation\" was included in the school's online-course catalog.