Theresa Iker

“Men’s rights” is a hazy concept, associated today with the online manosphere, Trumpist politics, and an increasingly global far right. “Making America Male Again” traces the American men’s rights movement back to its surprising origins in the early 1960s. Its adherents have argued that men’s legal rights and social privileges have been lost or even stolen—seized by power-hungry feminists and a corrupt state. Yet for decades these same activists were overwhelmingly male, white, and straight. This project interrogates the paradox of a powerful group proclaiming its powerlessness, a claim to grievance and redress that has reshaped twenty-first century politics. “Making America Male Again” traces the men’s rights movement’s trajectory from the margins of politics and culture to the center of the Trumpist Right in the 2010s, a place it still holds today.