Derek A. Burrill

Suffering from «manopause» and «Low T», underemployed and unwilling to grow up, «the other guy» has emerged as an important figure in modern media masculinity. From the films of Judd Apatow to sitcoms and popular music, this new breed of man is desperately attempting to change with the times, but is often unable (or unwilling) to understand the new landscape. Avoiding rhetorics of victimization, Derek A. Burrill charts and analyzes the other guy in order to understand how men see themselves, in media and in culture at large.

Suffering from «manopause» and «Low T», underemployed and unwilling to grow up, «the other guy» has emerged as an important figure in modern media masculinity. From the films of Judd Apatow to sitcoms and popular music, this new breed of man is desperately attempting to change with the times, but is often unable (or unwilling) to understand the new landscape. Avoiding rhetorics of victimization, Derek A. Burrill charts and analyzes the other guy in order to understand how men see themselves, in media and in culture at large.

Die Tryin’ traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by – and produces – a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.

Die Tryin’ traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by – and produces – a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.