This chapter explores the process of learning to become a good Muslim, analyzing the boundary community and relations that enabled former gang leader Oruç Fatih to move beyond gang involvement and religious radicalization. The chapter combines practice research with mo(ve)ment ethnography to explore mo(ve)ments beyond gang involvement. We analyze how expansive learning emerges through engagements with Islam and a Muslim community. The dialectics of boundary community relations and transformative movements is analyzed over time and across different spaces, including a high security prison, a forensic psychiatric ward, and a Muslim community that Oruç Fatih becomes part of. Our analysis of the differentiated and transformative process of learning in his movement beyond radicalization and gang involvement challenges dominating Danish political discourses on crossover from gang involvement to radicalized Islamic practice – especially the common belief that Islam has a negative and radicalizing influence on formerly criminalized youth.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Theodoret of Cyrrhus appropriated discourses of Roman masculinity in his Historia religiosa (ca. 440–444 CE), with the purpose of making the monks more acceptable, more marketable, to his would-be readers. Masculinity was a tactical appropriation that signified social worth. The study analyses four discourses related to masculinity in the Historia religiosa, all functioning with the purpose of showcasing the interior struggle between the soul and body of the monk. These discourses are warfare, athletics, slavery and medical discourse (health and illness). All function to show the superiority of the souls of the monks. By proving that the souls of the monks have universally dominated their bodies, they are also qualified to exercise external social, political and religious control. Hence, because of their total inner domination, Theodoret’s masculine monks can show dominance against foreign armies and raiders, generals and governors, and even an emperor. As literary characters, they become quite marketable to more reserved and conservative would-be readers.

A man to whom God grants that he may return will be greatly honoured in this world. Whoever has loved well in his country should preserve the memory of it wherever he goes. And may God allow me to enjoy the best lady, so that I might find her in life and health, when God has completed his business!

The concept of crusading is inextricably linked with men, both in medieval sources and in modern imaginations. The quote above, from an anonymous twelfth-century Anglo-Norman crusade recruitment song, extols the benefits gained by a returning crusader. It links crusading with the manly pursuit of honour, encouraging men to take the cross as a devotional sacrifice, leaving behind women and love. Returning to ‘the best lady’ was the crusader’s reward for completing ‘God’s business’. The idea that crusades were for men, and not for women, was probably widespread at the end of the twelfth century. Crusading had been conceived of and promoted by the medieval Church as a manly endeavour since the preaching of the First Crusade.

This chapter shifts the setting to New England, where on October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy travels to Amherst College to dedicate the Robert Frost Library. Kennedy’s visit to campus is covered in part in the student newspaper by a sophomore named Marshall Bloom.

A creative, brilliant, quirky, and effeminate young man, Bloom had grown up in a male-dominated culture in Colorado. He had gotten the journalism bug in high school and yearned to be a writer of significance. Bloom is part of a polite protest at Amherst that greets President Kennedy with signs urging him to recommit to civil rights. The topic is gathering interest at the time on this overwhelmingly white campus.

Kennedy arrives at Amherst by helicopter, then travels across campus in an open-air limousine. He then delivers an eloquent speech that focuses not on civil rights or politics, per se, but on the critical role played by artists. Sometimes, Kennedy acknowledges, a great artist must “sail against the currents of his time.”

This chapter examines how the Pan-European Union marketed itself as a feminine political outlet, while also trying to recast heroism/masculinity in a manner that was compatible with its antiwar objectives. Additionally, this chapter delves into women’s experiences in the German government more broadly to establish why PEU members argued governments needed a complete transformation. Despite gaining the right to vote, women involved in Weimar politics faced insurmountable obstacles and hostility. The PEU tried to appeal to politically active women by inviting them to join their movement, where their “unique skills and character” were vital to their success. Rather than being ostracized and shut out because of their sex, the PEU suggested women who supported European federalism would be honored and placed in positions of leadership.

The Introduction examines the emergence of the psychopath, situating his literary, scientific, popular, and legal representations within a conceptual genealogy of monstrosity in order to frame the interanimating relationship between the form of persons and the form of novels. As a hitherto unrecognized extension of this genealogy, the psychopath marks the impact of a historically specific set of anxieties about white masculinity on more abstract conceptions of the human. The chapters of the book pair masculinity’s others – women, children, black men, queer men, and white men themselves – against a variety of mid-century representational debates about the novel.

War writing during the Cold War era begins under the shadow of the atomic bomb and ends on the eve of the First Persian Gulf War. During these decades, millions of American soldiers participated in the operations in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other locations. Literature written by veterans and civilians alike portrays a common allegiance to Cold War mindsets while revealing a deep alienation from military and political authorities. The Cold War paradigm of dualism between “us” and “them” is thus both rehearsed and repeatedly undermined in many of these writings, including works by Richard Matheson, James Salter, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Ron Kovic, and Gustav Hasford. This chapter will examine how the Cold War produced a wide range of disenchanted war fiction and poetry that navigated the binary ideology of the time often by blurring the distinction between the two poles and questioning some myths while holding onto others.

The introduction presents the main concept of the book, the genre of unemployment, and lays out some of the contemporary developments that have helped push unemployment to the forefront of the cultural attention in the United States and United Kingdom.

Martin Amis’s first three fictional works both embody and illuminate his complicated relationship and attitude to genre. In all three – The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success – Amis appropriates existing genres or genre tropes while eluding many of their strictures. He does so by employing distinctly postmodern narrative strategies (unreliable narrators, intertextuality, metafictional asides, parody, pastiche) that emphasise the subjective nature of reality and destabilise traditional ideas of identity and agency. The resulting hybrid fictions blur boundaries not only between genres but between individuals and the cultural discourses that shape their consciousness.

This chapter uses Amis’s memoir Experience and his final novel Inside Story to examine rhetorical conventions about autobiography and autofiction. It surveys broader themes of authenticity and affectation in the works through more localised issues of identity construction. Both books extend identity across a spectrum that spans bodily, performative, and affective selves. Using ideas from genre history, queer theory, affect theory, and masculinity studies, the chapter answers the investigative question of why Amis, at the end of his long, distinguished career, didn’t write another memoir but opted instead for autofiction.

This chapter outlines the history of conscription in the United States and argues that the draft can be used as a tool to decipher public understandings of religion, race, gender, obligation, and the role of government in each historical moment and over time. The answers to the questions of who was included, who was left out, and most importantly, why, reflect larger trends in American society and politics and constitute a clear field of inquiry for the war and society approach to history. The study of conscription is critical to understanding how war radiated out to all levels of American society and how the complex stew of American liberal individualism, republican notions of obligation, gendered and racial hierarchies, and personal psychology impacted American warfighting. In other words, the draft provides a roadmap to Americans’ relationship with and to war.

This article reflects on the state of war and society scholarship in the context of current global conflicts. It argues for bridging the gap between traditional military history and the war and society school to gain a deeper understanding of war's complexities. It uses examples from contemporary conflicts and historical analyses to explore themes such as comradeship, gender, memory, and culture, demonstrating their relevance in interpreting modern warfare. In emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in examining war's multifaceted impact on societies and individuals, it calls for war and society scholars to engage more directly with contemporary issues, applying their insights to foster a more nuanced comprehension of the roots and implications of war.