Masculinity in Film

Abstract

In film studies as in other disciplines and in cultures at large, masculinity remains a contested category, tied not only to dominant social values but also to marginal groups and practices, somehow understood as monolithic and stable but always multiple and fluctuating. Formative work on masculinity in film and cultural studies has sought both to establish the patterns involved in cinematic representation of men (usually adult men, and often with classical Hollywood cinema as the area of study) and also to disentangle cultural categories of masculinity and femininity from biological categories of male and female. (We can leave aside here the semantic problem that, in film studies as in English-language usage generally, the term “gender” has come to mean male or female, with “sex” designating only sexual activity.) As an outgrowth of 1970s feminist film studies, studies of film masculinity were initially (and often remain) concerned with the politics of representation, linking screen images and narratives to conditions in historical reality while often simultaneously theorizing men and masculinity in terms of psychoanalytic models derived from Sigmund Freud (b. 1856–d. 1939), Jacques Lacan (b. 1901–d. 1981), Louis Althusser (b. 1918–d. 1990), and others. Relatedly, Marxism, poststructuralism, and other models of ideological critique have been used to understand film masculinity’s position in political and social structures of power. Much scholarship on film masculinity approaches the subject from multiple vantage points. Considerations of the body routinely involve discussions of sexuality or race, for example, and approaches to masculinity in genre films often involve claims about cultural contexts. Section commentaries here thus include considerable if not exhaustive cross-referencing. The plurality of categories considered in individual works reflects the emerging nature of masculinity studies in film. Some consensus has arisen about what terms and categories deserve attention, and the area of scholarship has not yet fragmented into discrete subspecializations focused narrowly on single categories. Indeed, masculinity is tied into so many other categories—gender at large; the practices and politics of representation; myriad cultural and historical contexts; questions of sexuality, psychology, anthropology, and sociology; and more—that efforts to limit the scope of masculinity studies would invariably close off essential contexts. Studies of film masculinity began in part as a way to extend feminist film studies’ fruitful investigations of spectatorship and representation. Work in the subject has subsequently illuminated virtually all areas of cinema and media scholarship.