Pranking Peter Pans: Performing Playground Masculinities in Extreme Sports

Abstract

In this essay, I explore how extreme sporting athletes and reality prank programming stars perform adolescent masculinities that comply, resist, and transform traditional codes of masculinity. In the phenomenon I dub “pranktainment,” I analyze MTV's Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Nitro Circus to reveal how extreme stars use language, embody attitudes, and construct dramas in adolescent performances of masculinity. Even as the white, heterosexual, male pranktainers resist hegemonic masculinity, their mocking adolescent performances refuse to challenge the power and privilege assigned to their positions. In parodies mocking dominant masculinities, pranktainers sustain power at the expense of non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male identities.