Marianne Kac-Vergne Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future

Abstract

636 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) ecological emergency, and Idema does a great service in highlighting their work, summarizing it clearly and elegantly, and juxtaposing it with the sf texts that are his main concern. All in all, Stages of Transmutation is a valuable book, not only for its new readings of important sf texts, but also for the way that it restores the importance of scientific speculation in sf without privileging the reductionist dogmas of oldschool “hard sf.” My hope is that the concept of environmental posthumanism will gain wider currency, both in terms of theoretical understandings and as a way to approach other (and less-well-known sf texts). Idema can be faulted for saying almost nothing about how recent speculative fiction has so powerfully and innovatively dealt with issues of race, gender, and sexual minorities, alongside the financial logic of capital; but I strongly believe that a future, posthumanist science fiction worthy of the name needs to incorporate the biological and environmental concerns addressed here alongside these more obviously political concerns. One concluding note: this is no fault of the author, but I cannot forbear mentioning that the price of the volume is way too high for a book that is less than two hundred pages long and written in accessible prose.—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University Hegemonic Masculinity is Back. Marianne Kac-Vergne. Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. x+246 pp. $95 hc. Here in the early twenty-first century, studies of masculinities in sf action cinema are both necessary and pressing. Due to recent trends in Hollywood action cinema—the increasing number of male action heroes over 50 years old, the increase in female superheroes, and diverse casts that include people of color (and, if sf cinema continues to trend toward more representational content, LGBTQ+ characters)—the sf blockbuster may have entered a new era. But before we start parsing out the significance of these shifts in filmmaking, it will be helpful to reconsider the sf action heroes of the last 35 years or so. Marianne Kac-Vergne, an associate professor at the Université de Picardie in France, brings us up to speed on contemporary action stars in sf cinema. In Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, her focus is largely on the men and women who punch and kick and shoot their way through their stories (with a few exceptions). Kac-Vergne assembles films from Hollywood’s sf action cycle from the 1980s to 2014 and places them in conversation with one another to produce a readable and well-researched addition to the field of masculinities studies and cinema, as developed by scholars such as Yvonne Tasker in Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (1993). Moreover, KacVergne ’s interrogation of the sf action hero marks her study as an original contribution to an understudied area. Raewyn Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity” (see Gender & Society 19.6 [2005]: 829–859) more or less dominates the Cultural Studies approach to understanding masculinities, and Kac-Vergne follows this tradition. By doing so, she provides a clear foundation for her study: Hollywood’s sf blockbusters attempt to present the white hard-bodied male as the embodiment of a universal Man that 637 BOOKS IN REVIEW stands in for “humanity as a whole” (5). Beginning with this problem of hegemonic masculinity allows Kac-Vergne to assess a variety of topics in contemporary sf cinema: depictions of hypermasculinity in the 1980s and 1990s, the “sidelined” women, black masculinities (particularly Will Smith’s vehicles), and masculinity crises in the post-Clinton era. The author’s aim, however, is not to articulate the means by which Hollywood unabashedly creates characters who either do or do not neatly fit hegemonic masculinity, but “to deuniversalise white men and uncover the specific and changeable sets of norms embodied by male science fiction heroes” (5). According to the author, an attempt to literalize hegemonic masculinity in the form of a science-fiction action hero inevitably undermines itself by virtue of the untenable conception of monolithic masculinity. After a short introduction that outlines the scope and stakes of the book...