Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US: Between Bodies and Systems; Kevin Floyd and Stefan Horlacher -- Modern Day Mercenaries? Cowboys, Grey Men, and the Emotional Habitus; Paul Higate -- Rugged Individualists and Systemic Coups: Imagining Mercenary Masculinities in The Dogs of War (1974); Charity Fox -- Privileged Crises in the Wake of 9/11: Universalizing Masculinity in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center; Elahe Haschemi Yekani -- Does the Body Politic Have No Genitals? The Thick of It and the Phallic Nature of the Political Arena; Wieland Schwanebeck -- The Use of Celebrity Men in Anti-Trafficking and Ending Demand Interventions: Observations on the “Real men don’t buy girls” Public Service Campaign; Sarah L. Steele and Tyler Shores -- “Stand It Like a Man”: The Performance of Masculinities in Deadwood; Brigitte Georgi-Findlay -- The Tragic “Complexity of Manhood”: Masculinity Formations and Performances in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Velina Manolova -- “Guys Like Me Are a Dying Breed”: The Politics of Irish-American Masculinity in Recent Movies and TV Series; Alexandra Schein -- White Supremacists, or the Emasculation of the American White Man; Michael Kimmel -- Law, Language, and Post-Patriarchal Malaise in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own; Katja Kanzler -- Wall Street and Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Film and Fiction; Ulfried Reichardt -- Index -- .This book is about ways to understand masculinity as systemic and corporeal, structural and performative all at once. It argues that the tension between an understanding of “masculinity” in the singular and “masculinities” in the plural poses a problem that can better be understood in relation to a concomitant tension: between systems on the one hand, and bodies on the other - between abstract structures such as patriarchy, kinship or even language, and the various concrete forms taken by gendered, individuated corporeality. The contributions collected here investigate how masculinities become apparent, how they take shape and what systemic functions they have. What, they ask, are the relations between the abstract and corporeal, metaphorical and metonymic manifestations of masculinity? How are we to understand masculinity as a simultaneously systemic and corporeal, performative concept? .