South Park, Blue Men, Anality, and Market Masculinity

Abstract

Two popular entertainments, the South Park cartoon show and The Blue Man Group theatrical performance, are analyzed as symptomatic of a new configuration of masculinity in the contemporary United States. This masculinity is shaped by young men's ambivalent resistance and accommodation to the consumer culture. It manifests itself in an expulsive anality unlike the bourgeois character traits described by Freud or the polymorphously sensual scatology that Bakhtin ascribes to folk culture. Not the breadwinner masculinity of the post-World War II era, this market masculinity is simultaneously childish, creative, homoerotic, homophobic, racist, cynical, and paranoid. It reflects young men's difficulties in maintaining individual autonomy both against the impersonal authority of the law of the father and against the more seductive power of corporate advertising, which might be called the market of the mother. This analysis furthers feminist efforts toward socially contextualized, nondualistic understandings of masculinity.