Alpha Masculinity

“In this book, Eric Louis Russell waltzes through the alpha male’s symbolic territory with analytical finesse and methodological rigour. This book is an indispensable source for anyone interested in understanding how alpha males speak and how to counter the gender stereotypes that uphold them.” - Professor Rodrigo Borba, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
“In a richly researched, insightful study, Eric Louis Russell moves us through a granular examination of language and the semiotics of gender towards a close understanding of the terms of alpha masculinity today. Far from just a label tossed around to make some men feel good about their performatives, alpha masculinity invokes realities with very real consequences on bodies, enacted violences and political machinations. If you want to understand the dynamics of gender today, you must read this book.”- Professor Michelle A. Marzullo, California Instituteof Integral Studies, USA  
This book examines the linguistic and discursive mechanisms that realize the mythological American Alpha Male. Providing an in-depth dissection of corpora from an online socio-commercial community, a pop-psychology guru, and fictional gay erotica, it unravels the ways language, gender, and hegemony play out in this ideological figure of neopositive, essentialist masculinity. Through a detailed, multi-level analysis, Russell shows how the Alpha figure combines elements of dominance, normativity, and androcentrism and how these forces intersect with neoliberal and pseudoscientific discourses to establish a uniquely hybridized male hegemony, one that is familiar to most, but whose internal mechanisms remain largely unquestioned and unexamined. This book will be of interest to academic scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, cultural studies, and gender and sexualities studies.
Eric Louis Russell is a Professor in the Department of French & Italian and affiliated with the Department of Linguistics and the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. His research looks at the linguistic foundations and discursive practices of masculinities, sexualities, and sociocultural animus.