This book is an antidote to the forms of American nationalism, masculinity, exceptionalism, and self-anointed prowess that are currently being flexed on the global stage. Through a fascinating combination of ethnographic research across seven US states and the application of postcolonial, anti-racist, feminist and poststructuralist theories, Land, God, and Guns reveals how time-honoured rites of passage associated with taken-for-granted notions of manhood in the American Heartland are constitutive of a constellation of colonial worldviews, capitalist logics, gender essentialisms, ethnocentric religious beliefs, jingoistic populism, racial animus, and embodied violence. A constellation that, within the US, upholds a heteropatriarchal and racist ordering of life that both privileges and ultimately damages its main proliferators - white settler men. This is a detailed work that at once unravels rural white settler masculinity and the US state at their roots, whilst demonstrating why any analysis of the cultural production and social practice of masculinity in the United States must take into account the country's historical trajectories of imperialism, land dispossession, nation-state building, enslavement, extractive accumulation and valorisation of masculinist assertions of dominance.

Book Information
ISBN 9781786996367
Author Levi Gahman
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Zed Books Ltd
Publisher Zed Books Ltd