This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular cinema by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in contemporary genre movies. In so doing, the project builds on existing scholarship and cinema theory. Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within contemporary cinema as examples of experimentation and change towards narratives that feature more egalitarian and less essentialist constructions of gender.