Heteronormative Masculinity Research Articles

Patriarchal Confusion?

In this article I investigate the possible uses of Cynthia Enloe's idea of ‘patriarchal confusion’ in understanding gay and lesbian military identity. Through an analysis of military discourses surrounding the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the British military since 2000, and using original interview data with serving personnel, I examine the contradictory ways in which queer identity has been incorporated within a military dominated by heteronormative masculinity. By examining conflicting attitudes towards gay and lesbian soldiers' participation in Pride marches, I show how patriarchal understandings of military identity become ‘confused’ by both heterosexual and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender personnel. I argue for a move away from viewing the integration of non-traditional recruits through the dichotomous lens of subversion or co-option, and instead call for an engagement with the ambiguities and confusions that arise from that integration. Reading this confusion through Butler's concept of performativity, I demonstrate how even confused ideas about gender can reproduce patriarchy, and why patriarchy often simultaneously fails to reproduce itself. A performative reading of ‘patriarchal confusion’ therefore indicates the radically contingent character of the reproduction of patriarchal norms in the military and suggests that sites of confusion might be fertile grounds for feminist interventions.

Queer visual pleasures and the policing of male sexuality in responses to images of David Beckham

Since he stepped out in a sarong in 1998, David Beckham's sexuality and gendered image has been a popular topic of discussion in the media. He has also attracted academic attention for the expanded range of masculinities he seems to represent. Some academic studies of Beckham have employed ‘queer theory’ to analyse the destabilising of gender that his public presentations seem to embody but little attention has been paid to the specifically visual dynamics of images of Beckham. In this essay, I take Sam Taylor-Wood's David (2004) as a starting point to suggest the types of visual pleasure that images of Beckham might be seen to offer to both male and female audiences. For the remainder of the essay I focus on an Armani male underwear advertisement from the 2007–2008 campaign. Informed by discourse analysis and queer theory, I identify a set of ‘queer’ responses to the advertisement, suggesting they represent the ‘policing’ of male sexuality, which often accompanies potential signifiers of homoeroticism. I conclude by considering how and why Beckham has retained his status as a heteronormative masculine icon despite his continued appearance in homoerotic images.

Emo Angst, Masochism, and Masculinity in Crisis

Emo, a subculture consisting of white heterosexual boys, acts as a locale to challenge hegemonic masculinist identities. Emo masculinity crosses the boundaries of heteronormative masculinity, as the boys appropriate normatively feminine characteristics (such as emotional earnestness) and perform homosexual acts (for example, same-sex kissing). In this sense, the subculture confronts the limiting boundaries of gender and sexuality and can be quite empowering. At the same time, analyses of emo lyrics and online posts from emos in chat rooms suggest emo is a white male utopia where subculturalists nurture one another, while claiming victimization at the hands of girls. This work argues that emo privileges a masked hegemonic masculinity in which a fluid gender performance only serves heteronormative ends.

The Acceleration of the Masculine in Early‐Twentieth‐Century Berlin

In early-twentieth-century Berlin, agents of speed and industrialisation, such as the railway, contributed to the seemingly unbridled velocity of urban life. Doctors and cultural critics took an ambivalent stance toward the impact of speed and technology on the human body. Critics argued that these factors, in conjunction with sexual excess and prostitution, accelerated the sexual maturation of young men, thereby endangering ‘healthy’ male sexuality. This comparison of Hans Ostwald's socio-literary study Dunkle Winkel in Berlin (1904) with Georg Buschan's sexual education primer Vom Jüngling zum Mann (1911) queries the extent to which speed shaped the understanding of ‘the masculine’ in pre-World-War-I Germany. The essay thus examines Ostwald's and Buschan's arguments and postulates that speed in the city (Berlin) can be seen as a feminised, sexualised force that determined sex in the city. According to this reading, the homosexual urban dandy resisted the accelerated modernist urban tempo, whereas the heterosexual man and hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity yielded to speed. ‘“Das Verhältnis”’ became a fleeting, momentary alternative to stable marital relationships, which in turn contributed to the general ‘crisis’ of – and in– masculinity in early-twentieth-century Berlin.

Gendered Play and Evaluation of Computer Video Games by Young South Africans

This study investigates the preferences and attitudes of young South Africans who play and evaluate computer video games. The quantitative data reported here is part of a partially mixed concurrent quantitative/qualitative research design. Seventy-eight participants (14 to 24 years old) took part in game play workshops that lasted for five days, after which they answered a survey. Results show that young South African women and men like similar games, identify with female game characters, dislike cognitively challenging games, and rate their competitiveness in a similar way. It is argued that participants performed their gendered stereotypes based on prior social experiences in and expectations of the patriarchal and heteronormative masculine South African society. The study also discusses the implications for the use of games in the classroom.

Reclaiming authentic selves: Control, resistive humour and identity work in the office

This article analyses a study that reveals employees using humour to resist an organization’s normative control attempts via a ‘workplace justice’ program. In an interesting ‘doubling’, the program used excerpts from the television comedy The Office which were intended to provide clear examples of inappropriate workplace behaviour and foster consensual understanding. However, The Office can be read as a parody of the performativity of management, gender and political correctness, a reading that problematizes the organizational purposes and one exploited by employees to construct alternate interpretations. Analysis focuses on a number of intersecting areas centring on identity work and humour. Firstly, resistance to normative control and its presumed intrusions, with resistance manifest in the form of humour. Related to this are employee perceptions that the organization required the mere performance of ‘appropriate behaviour’ in conformance with politically correct, managerially fashionable and legalistically expedient expectations. This raises questions about performance, identity and authenticity. Secondly, identity work takes place within power, but operates through a series of plateaux: actions may act resistively in relation to a managerial/hierarchical plateau whilst at the same time acting to reproduce forms of heteronormative masculinity in a different, gender power plateau. Thirdly, the article examines the role of humour in the complexities of identity work and in relation to different frameworks of power. It further theorizes and illustrates the ambiguities of humour and its double-edged capacity to contribute to the maintenance of the status quo and the performance of power as well as its resistive and subversive potential.

Football's ‘Coming Out’: Soccer and Homophobia in England's Tabloid Press

This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the ‘hard man’, imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer players ‘coming out’, although expressed in supportive terms, may be decoded as an attempt to publicly reveal the deviant other. Such ambivalent representation is even evident in coverage of the Kick It Out anti-homophobia campaign. News releases from the campaign have been reinterpreted within media representation to fuel a perceived public interest in wanting to know which Premier League soccer players are gay. Accordingly, by employing a psychoanalytic and post-structuralist perspective on the instability of discursive constructions of heteronormative masculinity, the article considers soccer and its related media as a site of hegemonic contestation in which the dominant discourse of male heterosexuality is at once undergoing challenge and reinforcement.

Boys, Books and Homophobia: Exploring the practices and policies of masculinities in school

Disturbed by a proliferation of quick-fix literacy strategies to “help the boys” increase achievement levels in the midst of a policy shift that acknowledges gay, lesbian, bi and transgender, questioning (GLBTQ) youth, the author examines how masculinities are connected to literacy practices and negotiated through a safe school policy. He argues that specific literacy strategies recommended in recent support documents for teachers are limiting and restrictive because of a narrow view connecting gender and masculinity to literacy practices that reinscribe heteronormative masculinity in schools. He further argues that strategies to increase literacy achievement levels among boys run contrary to a more embracing school board policy aimed at acknowledging diverse multiple youth identities.

Gender in Context, Content, and Approach

I explore gender messages in Boy Scout and Girl Scout handbooks through an analysis of how gender is infused in the context and content of Scout activities as well as in instructions about how the Scouts are to approach these activities. I find that girls are offered more activities intended to be performed in group contexts than are boys. Boys are offered proportionately more activities with scientific content and proportionately fewer artistic activities than are girls. The girls’ handbook conveys messages about approaching activities with autonomous and critical thinking, whereas the boys’ handbook facilitates intellectual passivity through a reliance on organizational scripts. Taken together, girls’ messages promote an “up-to-date traditional woman” consistent with the Girl Scouts’ organizational roots; boys’ messages promote an assertive heteronormative masculinity that is offset by facilitating boys’ intellectual passivity.

Preface

Preface Philip Sicker and Moshe Gold In his 1982 “Preface” to the New and Revised Edition of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann observed that, working over the landmark biography in Joyce’s own spirit of “total candor,” he felt “all my affection for him renewed.” Amanda Sigler’s “Joyce’s Ellmann,” the opening essay in this volume of JSA, provides a meticulous history of the birth and development of Ellmann’s enduring affection and of the challenges he faced in candidly chronicling the life of an often elusive and contradictory subject. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished correspondence, Sigler locates the serendipitous “beginnings” of the biography in a conversation Ellmann had with Yeats’s widow shortly after World War II. Intrigued and “delighted” by the young Joyce’s arrogance in a now famous encounter with Yeats, Ellmann went on to fashion a portrait of the artist as a devoted family man whose rebellious pride was tempered by compassion and humility. In detailing the biographer’s research methods and interpretive choices, Sigler provides an engrossing account of Ellmann’s adventures, struggles, and breakthroughs: his multiple trips to European cities, efforts to maintain research funding, negotiations with publishers, interviews with obscure or recalcitrant interlocutors, and responses to contrasting accounts of incidents from Joyce’s life. While Sigler makes Joyce’s biographer a biographical subject, Peter Nohrnberg anchors his study of Irish masculinity and the cultural politics of sports in the autobiographical details of Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen’s political skepticism, Nohrnberg argues, is consistently revealed through his cunning self-removal from “the whirl of scrimmage.” As a boy at Clongowes, Stephen feigns participation in the Anglicized game of “gravel football,” but he later casts an equally dismissive eye on Davin’s (and the Gaelic Athletic Association’s) militant promotion of indigenous Irish sports as an expression of virility and nationhood. Extending his study of the gender politics of Irish sport to the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, Nohrnberg provides a compelling [End Page xi] and original reading of Bloom’s encounter with the shot-putting citizen (modeled on G.A.A. founder Michael Cusack) through the lens of Gaelic athletics. While Bloom promotes the self-improving benefits of such activities as tennis and Sandow’s exercises, his antagonist insists that traditional Irish sports alone can serve the more vital purpose of “building up the nation.” Boxing, as Nohrnberg demonstrates, plays a particularly important role in this imaginative nation-building, for the violence of the ring, as glorified in the Dublin press, serves as a “metaphor for political liberation” and “hetero-normative masculinity.” Denise Ayo’s “Scratching at Scabs: The Garryowens of Ireland” explores another neglected feature of the “Cyclops” episode—the scrofulous dog that accompanies the citizen to Kiernan’s pub. Tracing the history of Garryowen figures in Irish song, fiction, and drama, Ayo not only demonstrates Joyce’s allusive familiarity with this literary tradition but argues that he draws upon the work of Gerald Griffin, Maria Edgeworth, Dion Boucicault, and H. De Vere Stacpoole to evoke Ireland’s colonial dilemma. In Ayo’s carefully contextualized reading, Garryowen embodies two undesirable Irish identity options arising from British-imposed stereotypes: the “quaint savage” and the compliant civilian. If colonialism produces a bifurcated self-image for Ireland, Lauren Rich reveals in “A Table for One” that it also engenders a particular form of alienation that Homi Bhabha terms “unhomeliness.” Focusing on the figure of the solitary diner in public eateries in Dubliners and Ulysses, Rich argues that Dublin’s fragmented and largely unemployed populace “unhomed by colonial rule,” sought a sense of community in the city’s pubs, cafés, and tearooms. As her penetrating reading of “Two Gallants” reveals, however, by simulating domestic comforts, public eateries awaken a desire for home that they can never really satisfy. Thus, Lenehan leaves the Refreshment Bar with the illusory glow of belonging, only to be “re-consumed by the exploitative foodchains of the colonial city,” while the hermetic Duffy of “A Painful Case” can find no reassuring sense of companionship in restaurant or pub. Rich goes on to argue that Bloom feels the acute burden of exile and...

Wearing Pink as a Stand Against Bullying: Why We Need To Say More

This article presents a contextual discourse analysis of the media response to a campaign against bullying that was developed in the spring of 2007 in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. As a feature of masculine socialization, male-on-male bullying secures the reproduction of an aggressive and heteronormative hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987) for boys and young men in contemporary North American mainstream culture. I argue that the celebration of the “Pink Campaign” is illustrative of the normalizing silences, or “unremarkability,” about the related discourses of sexism and homophobia that motivate everyday practices of male-on-male bullying.

Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity through Meat-free Sex

The terms ‘vegansexuality’ and ‘vegansexuals’ entered popular discourse following substantial media interest in a New Zealand-based academic study on ethical consumption that noted that some vegans engaged in sexual relationships and intimate partnerships only with other vegans. At this time it was suggested that a spectrum existed in relation to cruelty-free consumption and sexual relationships: at one end of this spectrum, a form of sexual preference influenced by veganism entailed an increased likelihood of sexual attraction towards those who shared similar beliefs regarding the exploitation of non-human animals; at the other end of the spectrum such a propensity might manifest as a strong sexual aversion to the bodies of those who consume meat and other animal products. The extensive media hype about (and public response to) vegansexuality was predominantly negative and derogatory towards ‘vegansexuals’ and vegans/vegetarians. A particular aggression was evident in online comments by those positioned as heterosexual meat-eating men. In this article we examine the hostile responses to vegansexuality and veganism posted by such men on internet news and journalism sites, personal blogs and chatrooms. We argue that the rhetoric associated with this backlash constructs vegansexuals — and vegans more generally — as (sexual) losers, cowards, deviants, failures and bigots. Furthermore, we suggest that the vigorous reactions of self-identified omnivorous men demonstrate how the notion of alternative sexual practices predicated on the refusal of meat culture radically challenges the powerful links between meat-eating, masculinity and virility in western societies.

Perceptions of Staffriding in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Lethal Thrill of Speed or the Masculine Performance of a Painful Past?

Staffriding, or train surfing, involves taking life threatening physical risks by moving around the outside of moving trains. In aiming to better understand this risky practice, this small scale qualitative study used three semi-structured interviews and three focus discussions to understand perceptions of train surfing in South Africa's Gauteng province. Semi-structured interviews comprised general station staff (n=2), and a station manager (n=1). The first two focus group discussions held were with ticket marshals (n= 6 per group, with a total of 12), and the last focus group discussion was with commuters (n=4), security personnel (n=6), and a station manager (n=1). Findings revealed that the majority of staffriders were perceived to be young, urban, black boys/men attending suburban schools. Tracing these identity co-ordinates against possible configurations of masculinity, we argue that train surfing represents a particular performance of risky, heteronormative masculinity forged within and against the historical, political and economic legacies that contoured apartheid versions of ‘black’ manhood.

Dancing with the ordinary: Masculine celebrity performance on Australian TV

This article interrogates the mutual dynamics of grounding and floating evident in the mediated performance of Australian masculinity embodied by two male television personalities, Tom Williams and Jake Wall. I argue that both men's flirtation with feminizing spectacle – centred on acts of bodily, affective and media exposure – did not jeopardize but reinforced their association with heteronormative masculinity. The widespread popularity of both men's staged performances can be attributed in part to their ‘natural’ performance of self in which familiar and conventional narratives of nationality and class, gender and sexuality converged. While the construction of celebrity itself involves overlapping and mutually reinforcing performances of ordinary and extraordinary, the celebrity texts of Williams and Wall were built on a purposeful downplaying of the extraordinary and over-performance of a recuperative ordinariness: the panicked construction of a stable ground of masculinity as a point of origin and necessary return.

Queering Black Masculinity: Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits

Based on the assumption that the black gay man is the abject that not only signifies the lack of the heteronormative discourse of black masculinity, but also interrogates the hegemony of the exclusionary systems of race, gender, and sexuality, this paper examines the complex dynamics of black masculinity and homosexual identity that Kenan’s novel registers in a larger context of African American discourses and experiences. Kenan’s novel counters the heterosexist and monolithic concepts of black masculinity and identity that silence black gay men by exposing the underlying assumptions about blackness, masculinity, and homosexuality produced by the mainstream African American discourses. His novel problematizes the heteronormative discourses of black masculinity developed by the 1960s Black Power Movement that equated authentic blackness with heteronormative black masculinity to undo the effeminizing and racist representations of black men. Representing the protagonist’s contesting relationship between his budding homosexuality and his heteronormative community through his hallucinating one-night excursion to the agonizing past, the novel queers the ways in which homosexuality is abjected by the heteronormative discourse of black masculinity operating through such institutions as family, church, and school.

My Father and Myself : J. R. Ackerley’s Marginal Modernist Künstlerroman

While mainstream modernist (auto)biographical texts separate the Victorian age from modernity by the forceful impact of the Oedipal rebellion, J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself demonstrates that the two ages are drawn together by transgressive father-son desire. The memoir challenges heteronormative masculinity, and belongs to the separate subgenre: the queer Künstlerroman.

Race, Violence, and Terror: The Cultural Defensibility of Heteromasculine Citizenship in the Virginia Tech Massacre and the Don Imus Affair

Race, Violence, and TerrorThe Cultural Defensibility of Heteromasculine Citizenship in the Virginia Tech Massacre and the Don Imus Affair amy l. brandzel (bio) and jigna desai (bio) You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything. Seung-hui Cho "Today, We Are All Hokies"1 perhaps the shock jock, Don Imus, did not shock many when his white male appeal seemed to digress too neatly into the domain of blatant racist speech. The sexual/racial/gender-loaded phrases by which he characterized the Rutgers University women's basketball team saturated the media, as commentators repeatedly asked along the way whether it was or was not acceptable for him to say what they said over and over. The phrase, not needed here, was hotly defended by numerous Imus supporters, especially through the deployment of the color-blindness rhetorical maneuver of equivalency. In the process, the violence of Imus's speech was removed from the field of white masculinity and quickly displaced onto African American communities and rap music: if African American rap artists can say it, why can't Don Imus?2 But, the Don Imus affair quickly receded into the back pages as another event unfolded: the "Virginia Tech massacre," as [End Page 61] it soon became called.3 The defense here was more subtle as Asian/American groups, and Korean/Americans in particular, were held (in/directly) accountable for the redeployment of another age, old dichotomy: the unassimilated Asian and the American citizen. While it might appear to be an odd pairing, we want to use the Don Imus affair as a lens through which to examine the privileges of normative citizenship and the "cultural defenses" that circulate in regards to violence in the United States. Put differently, we want to ask, how does the juxtaposition of Don Imus and Seung-hui Cho4 allow us to see the ways in which certain citizen-subjects are afforded and sanctioned the "right" to violence?5 How might we use this opportunity to interrogate the reoccurring appeal of white wounded masculinity as a "cultural defense" for violence, a violence borne from unobtainable heteronormative ideals? While the connection was rarely made obvious, what made Seung-hui Cho's actions palatable were the ways in which the media worked to squeeze him into the wounded-masculinity narrative: he fit the "type" for young male school shooters. He was a loner, a nerd, and a young male ostracized from the community due to his inability to access male privilege, social capital, confidence, and, most importantly, women. In many ways, this might merely be another way to describe the historically produced stereotype of Asian American masculinity, yet increasingly this "type" is also becoming the description of white middle-class suburban boys who are unable to utilize the properties of white heteronormative masculinity and who are increasingly becoming framed as the most wounded victims within and of the nation. But as much as Cho could be made to fit within this typecasting, he refused such analysis. Through his series of videos, polemics, and photos, Cho highlighted the ways in which his isolation was directly related to normative white citizenship, the alienation of Asian Americans, and disenfranchised racialized "queer" masculinities. Therefore, we suggest that perhaps the media, and white America in general, worked so hard to fit Cho within the wounded-masculinity type in order to avoid the other hermeneutical option: the racially oppressed retaliating for their isolation from the privileges of normative citizenship. [End Page 62] Don Imus: In Defense of the Good Ole Boys White heteromasculinity is a pervasive discourse that depends upon the presumption that it is and always will be "on the defense." Moreover, as a discourse, it is not directly tied to particular types of bodies—rather, anyone can participate and further white heteromasculinity by ventriloquising the narrative of the loss of privilege of masculinity and/or whiteness at the hands of feminists, progressives, academics, and racially aware others...

MTV's Jackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity

In the post-civil rights era, it is argued that some white men have adopted a marginalized positionality. This ‘white male backlash’ is often described as a distorted attempt to wrest social privilege from civil rights, feminist, and gay/lesbian movements. Through ‘reflexive sadomasochism’ the white male subject is able to simultaneously express an aggressive and receptive identity. While this overt narrative of white male victimhood is a recurring theme in popular film it has only been discussed within the action-drama genre. In response, I rely on a textual analysis of the popular film and television series Jackass to explain an alternative version of white male victimhood, one that loosely resembles Bakhtin's carnivalesque. Jackass complicates an already complex discourse of white male disadvantage by portraying an abject white masculinity through parody and humour. Heteronormative white masculinity is reframed as antiheroic and marginalized, but it is also exposed to relentless mockery. Several sketches of Jackass are loaded with homoerotic inflections that potentially trouble a rigid heteronormative masculinity. As an ambiguous text devoted to grotesque realism and the ‘low other’, Jackass might signify a contemporary form of burlesque. In this light, the film appears to reaffirm dominant assumptions of white masculinity even as it lampoons the values of bourgeois society.

In a Pig's Eye: Masculinity, Mastery, and the Returned Gaze of The Blithedale Romance

young Ellen Langton stares at Fanshawe, the eponymous protagonist of Hawthorne's first novel, marvelling at his beauty; the Minister Hooper prevents anyone from seeing his face, hidden behind a black veil; Feathertop, believing he cuts a dashing figure, stares at himself in the mirror, discovering, to his horror, that he is merely the mirage of a man, a witch's illusion; Giovanni stares at lush, poisonous Beatrice Rappacini in her equally beautiful and deadly garden, little realizing that her father and Rappacini's own scientific rival, Baglioni, stares at Giovanni staring at her; Chillingworth triumphantly stares at the exposed flesh of sleeping, guilt-ridden Dimmesdale: these examples of the function of the gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne's work metonymically symbolize numerous important issues that inform his oeuvre. Hawthorne's intensely, provocatively visual literary work invites cinematic comparisons. Joining numerous critiques in the field of film criticism, this essay challenges Laura Mulvey's well-known theory of the male gaze, using Hawthorne's work as an example of representation that complicates gendered subject positions vis-a-vis the gaze. (1) In his work, Hawthorne makes it impossible to assign clear positions of dominance and submission. In so doing, he offers valuable contributions to our understanding of the construction and organization of gender and sexuality in the antebellum United States. By rendering male subjects as the objects as well as the wielders of the gaze, Hawthorne insists that we view men as possible objects of erotic contemplation, thereby beckoning queer and feminist analysis. If the radical nature of Hawthorne's work lies, in part, in his insistence on rendering male figures the object of multiple gazes, Hawthorne's 1852 novel Blithedale Romance poses a theoretical dilemma, since its protagonist, the cynical poet Miles Coverdale, clearly wields the gaze: one might even say his chief agenda is eluding the gaze of others by gazing at them first. In this essay, I examine the psychic costs of wielding the gaze, arguing that Hawthorne demonstrates the considerable potential personal risks involved in the avid desire to look, which he never treats as an act or symbol of power but, instead, as the very evidence of the debilitated fragility of the gazer. (21) am not arguing that Hawthorne depicts the phallic gazer as a victim who should be pitied for the patriarchal power he must embody and enact through gazing; this essay eschews any special pleading for the anxious condition of aggrieved American manhood. As Suzanne R. Stewart, in a study of late nineteenth-century masochism and manhood, writes, The problem with so many postmodern theories of the subject is the elevation of the failure of subjectivity into a general condition of all subjectivity, a failure that is then celebrated as subversive. (3) subversive energy of Blithedale Romance lies in the manner whereby Hawthorne exposes Coverdale's act of seeming masculine dominance--wielding the gaze, voyeuristically devouring what he sees--as indicative of a hopelessly unsuccessful embodiment of male power. novel can be read as a critique of developing antebellum forms and theories of American masculinity; an evocation of queer threats to it; and as a phobically defensive treatment of the issues of effeminacy that personally plagued Hawthorne. Moreover, and more pressingly, I will argue that Blithedale Romance provides a particular theorization of heteronormative masculinity's relationship to the male gaze. I compare constructions and theorizations of the voyeuristic gaze in Hawthorne, Freud, Lacan, and Alfred Hitchcock, artists and thinkers who all use the voyeuristic gaze as a means of both establishing and deconstructing normative models of patriarchal power. My chief focus is, however, Hawthorne, and in bringing in psychoanalytic and cinematic perspectives, I mean primarily to illuminate his work, particularly in the ways in which his ineluctable conservatism competes with a potential radicalism--his phobic demonizations with a heroic and embattled sensitivity. …

The Construction of Masculinity in The Matrix

The purpose of this paper is to explore the different modes of the representation of genders in the The Matrix (1999). Depicting a process of initiation and development, the film has for its major objective the production of a solo male protagonist that will fulfil the role of saving humanity from apocalyptic danger. This mission is a commonplace characteristic of films made in the science fiction/cyberpunk genre; the construction of the hero is, however, represented in a unique and contradictory way, especially with respect to gender and sexuality, and the phenomenon of masculinity crisis as the basis of identity formation. My claim is that in the formation of both the self and the social - two intertwined processes - performances of masculinities and femininities are determining. As the result of the homogenizing perspective of the film, femininity and masculinity come to be defined as mutually exhaustive categories in order to frustrate the notion of gender as performative. The final ascension of the triumphal, heteronormative masculinity reinforces gender hierarchy, underlining femininity as embodiment. Also, it serves to invalidate the homoeroticism the relationships between male characters are invested with throughout the film.