Men's Soaps

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the Discovery Channel's reality-based automotive show American Chopper produces a recuperative blue-collar masculinity that attenuates the putative losses suffered by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy of the contemporary United States. In its on-screen presentation of blue-collar work, American Chopper valorizes a form of working-class manual labor at precisely the moment when such labor has all but disappeared in the United States. In its presentation of a world of masculine labor and fraternal affect, American Chopper constructs a nostalgic world of blue-collar work in which the skilled manual laborer—always understood to be male—still reigns supreme, untroubled by the supposed defeats suffered by hegemonic masculinity in the post-civil rights era. By celebrating neoliberal consumer capital and the traditional consumption of the American dream as coterminous discourses of celebrity identity, the show elides the still vast gaps in opportunity and remuneration in the contemporary United States.