Synopses & Reviews
Get ready for takeoff. The life of the flight attendant, a.k.a., stewardess, was supposedly once one of glamour, exotic travel and sexual freedom, as recently depicted in such films as
Catch Me If You Can and
View From the Top. The nostalgia for the beautiful, carefree and ever helpful stewardess perhaps reveals a yearning for simpler times, but nonetheless does not square with the difficult, demanding and sometimes dangerous job of today's flight attendants. Based on interviews with over sixty flight attendants, both female and male labor leaders, and and drawing upon his observations while flying across the country and overseas, Drew Whitelegg reveals a much more complicated profession, one that in many ways is the quintessential job of the modern age where life moves at record speeds and all that is solid seems up in the air.
Containing lively portraits of flight attendants, both current and retired, this book is the first to show the intimate, illuminating, funny, and sometimes dangerous behind-the-scenes stories of daily life for the flight attendant. Going behind the curtain, Whitelegg ventures into first-class, coach, the cabin, and life on call for these men and women who spend week in and week out in foreign cities, sleeping in hotel rooms miles from home. Working the Skies also elucidates the contemporary work and labor issues that confront the modern worker: the demands of full-time work and parenthood; the downsizing of corporate America and the resulting labor lockouts; decreasing wages and hours worked; job insecurity; and the emotional toll of a high stress job. Given the events of 9/11, flight attendants now have an especially poignant set of stressful concerns to manage, both for their own safety as well as for those they serve, the passengers. Flight attendants, originally registered nurses charged with attending to passengers' medical needs, now find themselves wearing the hats of therapist, security guard and undercover agent. This last set of tasks pushing some, as Whitelegg shows, out of the business altogether.
Review
"Murdering Masculinities makes a sophisticated, substantial contribution to contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. It pays closer, more intelligent, and more sustained attention to the crime novels it considers than has been paid them before, and it not only engages an impressive range of psychoanalytic thinkers, but contributes significantly to the development and refinement of psychoanalytic theory."-Tim Dean,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Review
"Sumptuous, elegant, nuanced, and accessible, Greg Forter's Murdering Masculinities helps us to remember what language can do. But Forter minces more than words in this provocative new book. He offers a transformative reading of American crime fiction, arguing that it is not to high modernism that we should look for the reinvention of gender, but rather to the 'low' works of authors like James Cain, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and William Faulkner."-Kaja Silverman,
Review
“Debunks popular myths that portray the profession as glamorous, exotic, and sexually freeing by taking readers through a typical journey; with interviews and profiles of flight attendants.”
-Foreword,
Review
“In Working the Skies, Whitelegg takes the interviews and study of a multitude of flight attendants and creates a readable, enjoyable tale of the perils and possibilities flight attendants face.”
-Feminist Review,
Review
“But mythological ‘stews—young women living a life of sex, drugs and never-ending voyage—is a far cry from the well documented realities presented in Whiteleggs new book. . . . Using a series of interviews and focus groups with flight attendants of all ages, Whitelegg charts the arc of a profession barely seven decades old.”
-Dallas Morning News,
Review
“A balanced inquiry into the lives of these long-overlooked professionals. . . . Sharing a wealth of interesting, entertaining, and dramatic anecdotes...Rich enough to satisfy the most curious reader.”
-Booklist,
Review
“While also providing some history, Whitelegg mostly takes a contemporary look at the lives of flight attendants, drawn from interviews with over 60 current and former flight attendants and other airline workers. . . . Whiteleggs observations and use of candid, day-in-the-life snapshots are interesting.”
-Library Journal,
Synopsis
Though American crime novels are often derided for containing misogynistic attitudes and limiting ideas of masculinity, Greg Forter maintains that they are instead psychologically complex and sophisticated works that demand closer attention. Eschewing the synthetic methodologies of earlier work on crime fiction,
Murdering Masculinities argues that the crime novel does not provide a consolidated and stable notion of masculinity. Rather, it demands that male readers take responsibility for the desires they project on to these novels.
Forter examines the narrative strategies of five novels--Hammett's The Glass Key, Cain's Serenade, Faulkner's Sanctuary, Thompson's Pop. 1280, and Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol--in conjunction with their treatment of bodily metaphors of smell, vision, and voice. In the process, Forter unearths a "generic unconscious" that reveals things Freud both discovered and sought to repress.
Synopsis
"Sumptuous, elegant, nuanced, and accessible, Greg Forter helps us to remember what language can do. But Forter minces more than words in Murdering Masculinities. He offers a transformative reading of American crime fiction, arguing that it is not to high modernism that we should look for the reinvention of gender, but rather to authors like James Cain, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and in particular William Faulkner."
--Kaja Silverman
Though American crime novels are often derided for containing misogynistic attitudes and limiting ideas of masculinity, Greg Forter maintains that they are instead psychologically complex and sophisticated works that demand closer attention. Eschewing the synthetic methodologies of earlier work on crime fiction, Murdering Masculinities argues that the crime novel does not provide a consolidated and stable notion of masculinity. Rather, it demands that male readers take responsibility for the desires they project on to these novels.
Forter examines the narrative strategies of five novels--Hammett's The Glass Key, Cain's Serenade, Faulkner's Sanctuary, Thompson's Pop. 1280, and Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol--in conjunction with their treatment of bodily metaphors of smell, vision, and voice. In the process, Forter unearths a "generic unconscious" that reveals things Freud both discovered and sought to repress.
About the Author
Drew Whitelegg is Director of Special Projects at the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL).