Virtual book launch – Starring Tom Cruise, Edited Sean Redmond. 15 April, 3pm

Starring Tom Cruise Virtual Book Launch

Join us for a virtual program to celebrate the publication of Starring Tom Cruise edited by Sean Redmond. Join Sean Redmond and contributors, Glen Donnar, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Justin Rawlins, Alex Wade, and Brenda R. Weber for a lively conversation on this complex Hollywood figure. Starring Tom Cruise examines how Tom Cruise’s star image moves across genres and forms as a type of commercial product that offers viewers certain pleasures and expectations and shows how important star studies is not just to understanding the ideological, commercial, and cultural significance of one star but to seeing how masculinity, ethnicity, sexuality, and commodity relations function in contemporary society. The discussion will be introduced by Marie Sweetman, Acquisition Editor at Wayne State University Press.

Reviews

Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Tom Cruise has been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for a long time. As such, he deserves serious scholarly attention, and this book provides it with fifteen smart essays that adroitly address just about every imaginable facet of the star’s cultural, sexual, and symbolic resonance.

– Gaylyn Studlar, author of This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age

Sean Redmond’s first-rate edited collection offers detailed consideration of the most important roles in Cruise’s successful decades-long career. This wide-ranging volume also covers essential new ground for the analysis of contemporary Hollywood stardom. Its insightful cross-disciplinary examination of the star’s perpetual border crossing makes this book an unmissable read. Stars like Tom Cruise never seem to lose their shine. This book enables us to understand why.

– Virginia Luzón-Aguado, Harrison Ford: Masculinity and Stardom in Hollywood

The contributors analyze Cruise’s appearance, his affect, the surrounding discourses, and films’ presentation of the actor in ways that illuminate the various aspects of his stardom and the society and industry that have made him a star for forty years.

– Cynthia Baron, author of Denzel Washington

This is a book that star studies has wanted, even if we didn’t know it—a wide-ranging set of reflections on the desirability, authenticity, and dogged agelessness of contemporary Hollywood’s ubiquitous genre king. As equally attuned to the white, masculine normativity of Tom Cruise as to his performative excess, sexual indeterminacy, and spiritual eccentricity, this book advances star studies by elucidating a changing Hollywood landscape through the cultural continuity of its most tenacious star.

– Misha Kavka, professor of cross-media culture, University of Amsterdam