The Boys' Club
The Many Worlds of Male Power
Acclaimed Québec feminist Martine Delvaux turns her sharp eye and even sharper pen on the history of gentlemen's clubs and male fraternity in this wide-reaching study of patriarchy. Delvaux lays bare the brazen misogyny of boys’ clubs across many fields, including politics, entertainment, technology, law enforcement, architecture, and the military. Examining popular media produced by men about men, The Boys’ Club exposes a culture of consumption which profits off female experiences while disregarding female voices.
The Boys’ Club is both an activist text and a work of cultural scholarship deeply informed by Delvaux’s long engagement with the work of feminist scholars, film critics, historians, writers, and journalists. Identifying a pattern of contempt, exclusion, and patriarchal violence, Delvaux names misogyny’s circular, self-propagating systems, undermining social, cultural, economic, and political mechanisms in order to break up the boys’ club.
Novelist and essayist Martine Delvaux is a central figure in Québec literary feminism. She is the author of five novels, including Thelma, Louise & moi, which was shortlisted for the Prix des libraires, and nine books of non-fiction, the most recent of which is Pompières et pyromanes. Le boys club won the Grand prix du livre de Montréal. Five of Delvaux’s works have been translated into English, including Blanc dehors, translated as White Out by Katia Grubisic.
Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator whose work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications. Her collection What if red ran out was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and won the 2009 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book. Her translations of David Clerson’s Brothers and Alina Dumitrescu’s A Cemetery for Bees were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation.
