This is an extensively researched, theoretically adroit and deftly argued critique of the performance of crisis across theatre, live art, film and television. Walsh deploys the crisis of masculinity of the 1990s to account for ‘emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, victimization, and corporeal im/penetrability’ in contemporary male performance (pp. 178–9). For Walsh, these instances do not ‘trouble’ hegemonic masculinity but, rather, secure male identity, often by confirming misogynistic assumptions about female abjection. His case studies for proximities between crisis and masculinity in performance include Mark Ravenhill, Mark O'Rowe, Ron Athey and Franko B. Each is critiqued vehemently, and charged with failing to redeem the ‘male trouble’ of the title. While heteronormative masculinity is a familiar target for liberal critique, Walsh tightens his assault into an admitted ‘deadlock’, in which gay men are also deemed problematic throughout the ‘normative-queer continuum’ (p. 10). In fact, homosexuality is frequently demonized in his accounts, both as a patriarchal sign of the ‘durability of the male body’ (p. 141), and also as victimizing, emasculated and narcissistic (p. 139). Moreover, gay men for him stage ‘overdetermined relationship[s] to jouissance’ (p. 107), represent capitalist dysfunction (p. 88), and demean women through our weakness for drag (p. 114).

Walsh flirts with a paranoid overestimation of masculinity, rendered infinitely supple in its power to redeem the male subject and demean its ‘others’. If all masculinities are tools of phallic authority that ‘control deviant desire and stabilize male subjectivity’ (p. 179), what would a progressive performance of male subjectivity look like? Indeed, in a seemingly fatalistic theoretical turn, Walsh struggles to find a male body that is not hopelessly maligned. And yet, he argues, ‘male trouble should be considered as a conglomeration of performative practices with no easily measured relationship to the reality of male experience or masculine ontology’ (p. 11). This sleight of hand compromises the political efficacy of his critique, and, despite the caveat, masculinity emerges as an ontologically troubled category. Walsh glimpses an enigmatic sparkle of redemption only in Taylor Mac, a sequinned, ukulele-playing Downtown clown act.

One of the most troubling effects of Male Trouble is its characterization of Ron Athey, depicted as a ‘self-mutilating’ (sic) victim in paradoxically ‘masterful control of his abject others’ (p. 116). Because Athey (and Franko B) survive their ordeals in performance, they are described as ‘unkillable’ (p. 142) and therefore regressive: as though the progressive solution would be for the artists to die in performance, or, perhaps, not to perform at all. As with all Walsh's main case studies, Athey is demolished in the course of his polemic. As such, Walsh effectively revives the far Right's crusade against Athey from the 1990s, which sought to protect culture from a destabilizing influence. In the face of this outcome, the political difference seems rather slight. It would have been salutary to acknowledge the needs of specific audiences for which Athey's work has collectivizing (as well as polarizing) effects. Instead, Walsh mows down convenient straw men, in the hope of ‘fragilization’, which risks functioning as merely a codeword for innocuous politics and apologetic performances.