Tough Gynes

In Borderline, Stan Goff unpacked the association of masculinity with war. In Tough Gynes, using an incisive and often darkly humorous study of nine films featuring violent female leads, he untangles the confusion about ""masculinity constructed as violence"" when our popular stories feature women as violent protagonists. Whether read individually or with a group, Tough Gynes raises compelling questions about gender and violence, with a few provisional answers. Plus, you get to watch movies as you read it.

""Reading this book made me deeply uncomfortable in all the very best ways. From space operas to zombies to westerns, Goff explores the way our popular entertainment--even, and especially, entertainment packaged for women as ""empowering""--is subtly driven by a patriarchal narrative. Just as The Beauty Myth made me uncomfortably aware of how much my self-invention was driven by an oppressive mythos marketed to women to limit our freedom as persons, Tough Gynes opened my eyes to the ways entertainment can reinforce patterns of oppression and violence. I've long believed that liberation from patriarchy needs to be a co-ed activity, and the voices of the men who are honestly examining their own complicity (instead of mansplaining) are crucial in the polyphony of redemption. This book gives you access to one of these voices.""
--Rebecca Bratten Weiss, writer, farmer, activist, and author of the Patheos blog ""Suspended in Her Jar""

""Here is a book to break hearts. It explodes the myth embedded in the national psyche of the virtue of violence and deftly turns our liberal feminist fantasies to ashes.""
--Esther Acolatse, Knox College, Toronto

""Long before G.I. Jane, the equation of masculinity with violence was a troubling connection for both Christian and non-Christian alike. In this lively collection, Stan Goff explores the ways in which this connection between being manly and being violent has proliferated in some of the best-loved cinema of the modern era. We are in debt to his keen eye and to the light he sheds here.""
--Myles Werntz, Logsdon Seminary, Hardin-Simmons University

Stan Goff is a profeminist Roman Catholic writer living in southeast Michigan. He is the author of Borderline: Reflections on War, Sex, and Church (Wipf and Stock, 2015) and Mammon's Ecololgy: Metaphysic of an Empty Sign (Wipf and Stock, forthcoming).