White Cottage, White House examines how Classical Hollywood
cinema developed and deployed Irish American masculinities to
negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in
midcentury America. Largely confined to discriminatory stereotypes
during the silent era, Irish American male characters emerge as a
favored identity with the introduction of sound, positioned in a
variety of roles as mediators between the marginal and mainstream.
The book argues that such characters function to express hegemonic
whiteness as ethnicity, a socio-racial framing that kept immigrant
origins and normative American values in productive tension. It
traces key Irish American male types—the gangster, the priest, the
cop, the sports hero, and the returning immigrant—who navigated
these tensions in maintenance of an ethnic whiteness that was
nonetheless "at home" in America, transforming from James
Cagney's "public enemy" to John Wayne's "quiet man"
in the process. Whether as figures of Depression-era social
disruption, avatars of presidential patriarchy and national manhood,
or allegories of postwar white flight and the nuclear family, Irish
American masculinities occupied a distinctive and unrivaled
visibility and role in popular American film.