SOURCE: Radavich, David. “Man among Men: David Mamet's Homosocial Order.” In Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy, pp. 123-36. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Radavich examines Mamet's male characters in works such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, and others. Radavich asserts that many of Mamet's male characters portray a fear of both homosexuality and women.

Apart from C. W. E. Bigsby's booklength study (1985), curiously little scholarly attention has been paid to the insistent masculinity of David Mamet's plays. Published in editions frequently bedecked by the author's tauntingly phallic photo-portrait with cigar, the major plays either totally exclude or marginalize women, concentrating instead on myriad variations of homosocial male order. Mamet's dramatic world is both self-consciously and half-consciously male, with references to homosexuality, fear of violation by other men, insistent desire for male...