The recent 2016 presidential campaign season and subsequent presidency has created a context in which the general public is looking deeper into the “behind the scenes” influences on the media. Of particular interest has been “fake news” and the biases of various news media outlets. These “behind the scenes” actions occur at production (the encoded ideological meanings and narratives, the material structures, the people involved, and global political economy of media), distribution (marketing strategies, gatekeeping practices, laws and policies, and media-industry customs), and consumption (reception and interpretation by media audiences). In this introduction to our special issue, we outline the relevance of examining these extra-representational processes of racialized media, particularly in today’s climate.

Now months into the already turbulent presidency of Donald Trump, and in the wake of both the Obama presidency and Moonlight’s awkward ceremonial win for “Best Picture” at the 2017 Academy Awards, what are the meanings of Moonlight? We contend that the film’s polysemy both reproduces and challenges the continuing fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer; racial; class; and gender equality and representational struggles of marginalized peoples on the silver screen. With complexity, the film trades in and tests racial stereotypes and understandings of black families; relishes in the heterogeneity of black and Latinx identities; displays cultural contradictions at the heart of racism, heteronormativity, and hegemonic masculinity; and refuses to shy away from topics of love, lust, and loss. Together, the film is an epic—a sweeping homage to social transformation and to the nobility and negativity of the human condition.

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pornography (chapter 4), and violence and spectacle (chapter 5). These chapters, rather than simply being case studies, are used to continue the theoretical work from the opening two chapters. These case studies, thus, deepen and enrich the arguments made earlier. The closing chapter concludes by bringing masculinity back to the fore and seeking to integrate the theoretical work from throughout the book and pushes the thinking further toward labor and reworking masculinity. While the book develops its theoretical thinking substantially, working through these cases, it struggles with balance at points. While the prose is clean, the varied sets of literatures covered can make for challenging reading at points. The book seeks to cover expansive theoretical ground, which opens up a number of lacunae. These gaps are partly unavoidable simply based on the scope of the book, but, at the same time, it is something that has an impact on the arguments put forth. From a gender perspective on nature, a notable absence is its lack of engagement with Sherry Ortner's "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture." This chapter could have further substantiated and complicated Garlick's claims regarding his foundational thesis on nature. More disconcerting than this is the book's lack of engagement with the substantive set of scholars in the field of new materialism. Missing are the key figures such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and Manuel DeLanda; similarly missing are the two prominent edited collections on new materialisms. For any gaps in the literature covered, what is most crucial is that the book does not shy away from theory and risks diving into diverse and dense literature. It is this, in particular, that the author must be commended for. For all of the advances in writing and thinking on men and masculinity, there is often a dramatic paucity of engagement with thinking theoretically through the most fundamental and crucial concepts of the field. It is this type of deep theoretical engagement that is crucial for scholars in this field to continue working through. Unafraid of a challenge, Garlick has pushed the field to think with new scholars and theories, a difficult and necessary thrust that we all can benefit from.