Roya Yaghoubi - Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, Roudehen, Iran

Masculinity is a changing phenomenon, it is fluid, and it is something ever changing and in movement. This paper endeavors to analyze how emasculation, effeminacy and female masculinity are staged as threats to the performance of dominative hegemonic masculinity in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1978), a family play, and therefore takes into its ambit Australian sociologist R.W. Connell’s view of hegemonic masculinity and Todd W. Reeser’s outlook on configurations of masculinity. Buried Child delineates the male characters that are effeminate or threatened to be emasculated and female characters that are masculine during the play’s processes of action. It deals with men who desire to behave according to the principles of traditional hegemonic masculinity, that is, to be tough, stable, reliable, aggressive, violent and dominant in position but they cannot adhere to these principles since they become emasculated by the people around them male or female

Hegemonic Masculinity, Configurations of Masculinity, R.W. Connell, Todd W. Reeser