White Cottage, White House: Irish American Masculinities in Classical Hollywood Cinema (The Suny Series: Horizons of Cinema)

White Cottage, White House examines how Classical Hollywood cinema developed and deployed Irish American masculinities to negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in midcentury America. Largely confined to discriminatory stereotypes during the silent era, Irish American male characters emerge as a favored identity with the introduction of sound, positioned in a variety of roles as mediators between the marginal and mainstream. The book argues that such characters function to express hegemonic whiteness as ethnicity, a socio-racial framing that kept immigrant origins and normative American values in productive tension. It traces key Irish American male types--the gangster, the priest, the cop, the sports hero, and the returning immigrant--who navigated these tensions in maintenance of an ethnic whiteness that was nonetheless at home in America, transforming from James Cagney's public enemy to John Wayne's quiet man in the process. Whether as figures of Depression-era social disruption, avatars of presidential patriarchy and national manhood, or allegories of postwar white flight and the nuclear family, Irish American masculinities occupied a distinctive and unrivaled visibility and role in popular American film.