Based on two years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews, we analyze mixed martial arts fighters' fears, how they managed them, and how they adopted intimidating personas to evoke fear in opponents. We conceptualize this process as ''managing emotional manhood,'' which refers to emotion management that signifies, in the dramaturgical sense, masculine selves. Our study aims to deepen our understanding of how men's emotion work is gendered and, more generally, to bring together two lines of research: studies of gendered emotion management and studies of emotional identity work. We further propose that managing emotional manhood is a dynamic and trans-situational process that can be explored in diverse settings.While fighters in the locker room prepared for combat in the cage, two men from the previous fight staggered in. Juan 1 -the victor-had shiny contusions under both eyes and made it to a folding chair where he sat staring into space. As two paramedics tried to keep him conscious, he cracked a smile with swollen lips and tried unsuccessfully to communicate meaningfully. As the paramedics carried Juan off on a stretcher, Mikehis opponent-leaned against a wall and talked with his trainer. As blood flowed from his nose and mouth, Mike began to sob. His trainer handed him a towel, which he brought to his face with shaking hands. When asked if he was upset about Juan, he pulled away the bloodied towel and said, ''I don't like losing.'' Juan and Mike's post-fight experiences highlight what competitors of mixed martial arts (MMA) most often say they fear: injury and losing. Competitions generally occur in a locked cage and fighters wear thin, open-fingered gloves and are allowed to punch, kick, wrestle, and use martial arts techniques. Fights are broken into rounds and end when one fighter submits

Based on a yearlong observational study of participants in a "Live Action Role Playing" group called "Dagorhir," using the manhood acts perspective, we focus on how masculinity is constructed among low-status, subordinate men who selfdefine as "nerds." We demonstrate that through fantasy role-playing, men are given opportunities to increase their group status, while women are typically relegated to subordinate positions. Increasing status in Dagorhir involved a type of selfenhancement strategy that we termed "epic glory," which positioned men as social dominants. Epic glory was earned through training activities, at Dagorhir events, and through simulating dramatic death scenes. Such actions served as a performance of masculinity that was not possible for these men outside the role-playing experience. Importantly, women were excluded from many of the opportunities to enact epic glory, which helped reproduce inequalities both among males and between males and females participating in the events.

New developments in the critical study of men and masculinity, known as the manhood acts perspective, have focused attention on the ways that males collectively and individually engage in identity work to present themselves as men (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009). This review unpacks two central processes through which males use the body to put on a convincing manhood act. First, I review research on institutions and culture in order to explain how various discourses on male bodies provide resources to signify manhood. Second, I demonstrate how males are socialized to use their bodies to symbolize manhood. Overall, I demonstrate how the manhood acts perspective provides a potentially fruitful theoretical framework for understanding previous research on manhood and the body.

The importance of friendship networks and drug sharing is a well-documented feature of marijuana use. Recent studies show an increased role of acquiring marijuana through friends, especially in settings with rather punitive drug policy.

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self-narratives that signify membership in the category "man" and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self-narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture-especially "bitch" imagery and sometimes racialized discourse-to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre-making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.