Marketing Disabled Manhood

This chapter examines the efforts of businesses to market masculinity to disabled American veterans. Beginning with the Civil War—a conflict that left nearly a million ex-servicemen with war wounds permanent injuries—it shows how commercial interests from prosthetics makers to car companies, railroads, meat packers, and cigarette manufacturers have sought to capitalize on disabled veterans’ fears of diminished manhood. Thus, in war’s wake, advertisers have either tended to capitalize on disabled veterans’ fears of diminished manhood or to develop a narrative of disabled men’s successful triumphs over their physical and mental impairments. In both cases, fears and triumphs have served to shape images of veterans’ masculinity.

Art · Disabled people · Masculinity · Narrative · Political science · Psychiatry · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Medicine · Military history and social perspectives · Psychology