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Book Review
| I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. By Steve Estes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii, 239 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2929-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5593-6.)
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| Steve Estes's I Am a Man!, the first monograph to explore the impact of the civil rights movement on notions of manhood, is a well-conceptualized and engagingly written narrative study of the subject. Each of the book's main chapters, which can be read together or individually, explores a discrete topic pertaining to a period in the civil rights struggle, from World War II to the rise of the Black Panther party. Much of the material covered in the book will be familiar to civil rights specialists, especially the chapters on World War II, Freedom Summer, and Malcolm X. Estes's primary interest is gendered language. The book examines how both black and white men deployed "masculinist" rhetoric to assert male power, to court potential allies, and to stigmatize adversaries as an inferior class of men. |
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