Performing American Masculinities offers a series of essays on representations of masculinity across a range of contemporary popular cultural texts. The essays in the collection assess a broad range of cultural artifacts all produced in a relatively short time frame (roughly 1990–2010). Following a brief introduction in which the editors set out the terrain of the volume and introduce the individual essays, the book is then divided into two sections. The first, “Masculinities and the Market: Late Capitalism and Corporate Influence on Gender Processes,” contains four essays, each of which situates contemporary American masculinities in relation to current modes of capital accumulation as they appear in a variety of popular cultural texts: the long-running television show Seinfeld, the films of Neil LaBute, the genre of the “office movie,” and the media/marketing phenomenon of the metrosexual. The book's second section, entitled “Beyond Gender Alone: Defining Multidimensional Masculinities,” consists of five essays that offer readings of masculinity in relation to other forms of identity across a range of subjects: the O. J. Simpson trial and the film Amistad, Barack Obama's raced masculinity, disability in Hollywood cinema, dating-based reality television shows, and, in the book's final essay, visual representations of female-to-male transgender embodiment. In their choices of primary objects, the essays in the collection tend to focus (but do not do so exclusively) on well-known popular cultural texts, many of which have already received some degree of academic attention.

All of the essays offer sustained close readings of the cultural texts/formations that constitute their primary objects. These readings are, more often than not, thorough and engaging. In almost every instance, the value of the cultural objects under study to the subject of contemporary masculinities is apparent. In this, the volume provides a useful introduction to the contemporary cultural formations of masculinity. However, many of the essays do not do enough to situate their critical and analytical interventions in relation to the (by now extensive) body of critical work in the fields to which the volume wishes to contribute. As a book that is wholly academic in its scope, this seems a problematic omission. The volume's sparse engagement with ongoing academic discussions is apparent in the introduction, in which the editors suggest that “the study of masculinity as an academic endeavor found a high point during the ’90 s”(1), and go on to cite the groundbreaking work of R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel. While this observation may be true of the study of masculinity tout court, it ignores the extensive body of writing produced in the last decade or so that has already begun to complicate masculinity in its relations to other forms of identitarian subjectivity. There is, for example, little mention in any of these essays of academic work on whiteness, on disability, or on class, and the focus on gender and sexuality is, with one notable exception, largely confined to Judith Butler's early – albeit seminal – work in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter.

The collection's lack of theoretical or conceptual nuance is most clearly manifested, perhaps, in the use of the term “performing” in its title. Performance is not adequately defined or conceptualized in the introduction and there is little attention paid in many of the essays to performativity as a mode of subject construction. Such omissions mean that a number of the essays in the volume seem to be covering already well-trodden ground. There is one exception to this: Michel J. Boucher's interesting and theoretically rigorous essay “Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Real Man,” on visual representations of female-to-male transgendered subjects. The fact that this stimulating essay closes out the collection (and is almost double the length of many of the others) leaves the reader with a sense of the opportunities that seem to have been missed in what comes before it. Nor is there any sustained engagement in any of the essays with live performance (despite the editors’ claims to the contrary in the introduction, the only mention of theatre is one essay's passing observation that Neil LaBute's early films were based on his own stage plays). As such, performance appears in these pages as neither an object of study nor a critical method. As such, and despite its other strengths, the volume might disappoint scholars already well versed in the subjects it examines.