White Working-class Masculinity Research Articles

"It Takes a Man to Work in Hell": The Hairy Ape and The Self-Destructive Paradox of White Working-Class Masculinity

"It Takes a Man to Work in Hell": The Hairy Ape and The Self-Destructive Paradox of White Working-Class Masculinity

록키와 아도니스

This article examines the Rocky films, the most successful sport film franchise in the world, and the Creed films, the equally successful reboot of the Rocky universe first released in 2015. While prior criticism focuses on the Rocky films’ dated narrative of white working-class masculinity in favor of the updated racial and gender diversity of the Creed films, my article highlights the former’ enduring achievements, as well as the latter’s process of “remasculinization” despite the surface inclusiveness. The first section surveys the key issues of sport studies, (sport) film studies, and masculinity studies, in relation to the term “ideology.” The second section looks at the “negative dialectics” of ideology and utopia portrayed in the Rocky films, and reads the representation of masculinity in these films from the perspective of “post-masculinity.” Drawing upon the theme of “crisis of white masculinity” which has been ardently adopted by American literary and film texts since the 1950s, the last section argues that the Creed films create an extended Black version of this theme in a way similar to Fight Club.

Black Lives Matter in London, June 2020: Patrick Hutchinson, instant celebrity, and changing discourses of race and class in British media

Registering the apparent popular success of the Black Lives Matter movement in the spring and summer of 2020, this essay investigates how and how far BLM’s critique of racist institutions and demands for the full recognition of black subjectivity penetrated mainstream British media.It focuses on the mediation of Patrick Hutchinson, a black personal trainer propelled into instant celebrity in the wake of counter-protests against Black Lives Matter in London, in June 2020. Hutchinson was hailed as a ‘[black] national hero’ after being shown rescuing a white counter-protester, but in ways that initially recuperated BLM for a white-centred cultural politics. First, Hutchinson’s heroism was often presented in terms of his assumed transcendence of or disaffiliation from racial identity. Second, in the context of media representations of the right-wing backlash against BLM, Hutchinson’s heroism was part of a wider discourse of race, class and masculinity, in which he was contrasted with Bryn Male (his rescuee) and Andrew Banks, a couple of abject figures identified with white working-class masculinity. The public shaming of Male and Banks constituted only a strategic withdrawal of white privilege, leaving white-centred judicial, policing, and political institutions unchallenged.In the longer term however Hutchinson and his associates have been able to foreground the centrality of black political traditions and identities to civil society. Starting with interviews with UK television’s Channel Four News, subsequently widely disseminated across different media, Hutchinson has been able to parlay his instant celebrity into a multifaceted activism that penetrates outside the celebrity spectacle into cultural, political, and educational spheres.

‘(Simply) the best’, or remembering when tina turner met the winfield cup: Nostalgia and the construction of authenticity in rugby league online spaces

This is an online content analysis using Discourse Tracing to make sense of how rugby league fans talk about changes in the game since the 1980s. Specifically, we are interested in how fans discuss Tina Turner singing ‘(Simply) the Best’ and another song in a famous marketing campaign for Australian rugby league’s professional Winfield Cup. We will use comments below the line on YouTube and in two public fan chat-rooms to explore how the remembering the video constructs a shared myth of Australian and British white working-class masculinity. We argue that while alternative constructions of Australian and British masculinity and national identity are present in this nostalgia, there is also a yearning for a time when hegemonic masculinity intersected with white, working-class nationalist identities and which was reflected in the imagery in the promotional videos.

Respecting young people’s informal learning: Circumventing strategic policy evasions

This paper explores experiences at the interface of research and policy through the lens of informal learning. The paper contends that in order to further social justice it is essential to value the informal learning that takes place outside the confines of educational institutions. However, it also demonstrates the difficulties in getting policymakers to take this issue seriously. Formal education, in its fixity around the neo-liberal human subject, will inevitably reproduce the values and assumptions that have created an unequal society in the first place. To achieve social change, what constitutes learning and where and how it happens must be rethought. The paper reflects on three research studies – two achieved, one imagined – which help to reveal the extent and nature of young white working-class informal learning. These findings challenge their positioning as abject, deficit and hating learning. It discusses the policy interest in these studies and the current move of white working-class masculinity to the centre of political debate. It argues that despite the nominal attention to such working-class lives, their informal learning was and is deflected and ignored by policymakers. It is not a question of educating policymakers better, but that policy actively chooses this blinkered stance because a shadow body of unrecognised informal learners helps to shore up the status of their privileged qualified peers. The paper concludes that rather than pursuing familiar research pathways, partnership working and micro levels of research combined with alternative forms of communication and agitation may better serve to support young people’s own fight for social justice.

‘Where you from, you sexy thing?’ Popular Music, Space and Masculinity in The Full Monty

Questions of class, masculinity and diversity are a recurrent theme in debates about The Full Monty (1997) but, despite their prominent role in the story, songs are not discussed as a significant element in the film's representation of white working-class masculinity. In this article, I examine The Full Monty's soundtrack, showing how the characters’ wounded masculinities are (re)constructed through music and considering the connotative baggage brought into the film by songs, often heard through visible devices which act as a signifier alongside the music. Songs of other non-dominant identities – women, non-white and queer – enhance The Full Monty's audiovisually inclusive image, amplifying these identities despite their otherwise problematic representations and serving as a temporary reclamation of damaged white working-class masculinity after the dismantling of heavy industry in post-Thatcher Britain. However, despite its aural reimagining of a diverse working-class masculinity, the way women, non-white and queer characters are represented weakens the musical connections between jobless white men and these non-dominant identities.

Men without Work: White Working-Class Masculinity in Deindustrialization Fiction

Men without Work: White Working-Class Masculinity in Deindustrialization Fiction

Paul Blart and the Decline of White Working-Class Masculinities

The author examines the representation of fatness in the comedy Paul Blart and how anxieties about the decline of White working-class masculinities are played out on the fat male body. The film relies on the stereotype of the fat male as demasculinized and bases a large part of its comedy on this. Yet, due to a need to mollify anxieties of contemporary masculinities, the fat protagonist is allowed to transform his undervalued job into an honorable task and regain his masculinity, with the genre conventions of comedy providing room for irony and ambiguity regarding the representation of White male fatness.

Masculinity, Whiteness, and the New Economy

This article takes up the varying ways in which white working-class men remake class and masculinity in the context of massive changes in the global economy. Situated in the northeast rust belt in the United States, the piece draws upon data gathered at two points in time—during the men's third year of secondary school in l985, and again when these same men reached the ages of 30–31. Data gathered via participant observation and indepth interviews in 1985 and a set of follow-up in-depth interviews in 2000–2001 suggest that it is the movement off the space of hegemonically constructed white working-class masculinity—that masculinity which emerged in relation to the old industrial economy— that now encourages “stable” working-class lives.

Steve Prefontaine: From Rebel with a Cause to Hero with a Swoosh

World-class runner Steve Prefontaine died May 30, 1975, at the age of 24. Running during a time of unparalleled track and field popularity, he was a favorite media focus. Incredibly, he regained media attention in the 1990s. Using a critical cultural studies approach, this article explores media accounts of Prefontaine. A 1970s working-class “rebel with a cause,” Prefontaine served as an ideal of White working-class masculinity and as a voice calling for structural changes to the track and field governing body. In the 1990s, with the Nike funded reemergence of Prefontaine, that rebelliousness was recontextualized and co-opted, shifting Prefontaine into a commodified maverick celebrity, embodying the changing ideals of White, classless masculinity and supporting the ideology of individualism in late consumer capitalism.

Gender, masculinity and the new economy

This paper examines the ‘remaking’ of white working class masculinities in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. It draws on ethnographic data gathered at two points in time in order to interrogate the relation of macro-economic and social relations on individual and group identities; to excavate the social psychological relations ‘between’ genders and races, as narrated by white working-class men; and to explore the nuanced variations among these men. Addressing theoretical, empirical and methodological issues associated with these studies, I argue that the remaking of the white working class can only be understood in relation to gendered constructions within itself, the construction of relevant ‘others’, as well as deep shifts in large social formations.

'Boyz to Men': Masculinities, schooling and labour transitions in de-industrial times

For working-class young men the transition to manhood was once inextricably linked to the movement from school to work. Today, with the widespread de-scaling of industry the relationship between masculinities, education and labour needs critical re-appraisal. The paper argues that emerging post-industrial masculinities cannot be fully understood through micro-institutional approaches that make school the sole focus of inquiry. Instead, contemporary school masculinities must also be situated in the intersecting pathways of family biography, history, locality and global transformations. This historically-informed ethnography investigates how and why a male school subculture should wish to preserve a 'traditional' white working-class masculinity in changing times. Here, 'local lads' were found to resist global change by accentuating pride of place and deploying the embodied grammar of manual labour. This modern 'curriculum of the body', as exemplified through rituals of football-fandom, was found to give corporeal substance to an archetypal industrial masculinity and in so doing provided the illusion of stability in insecure times.

'Boyz to Men': masculinities, schooling and labour transitions in de-industrial times

For working-class young men the transition to manhood was once inextricably linked to the movement from school to work. Today, with the widespread de-scaling of industry the relationship between masculinities, education and labour needs critical re-appraisal. The paper argues that emerging post-industrial masculinities cannot be fully understood through micro-institutional approaches that make school the sole focus of inquiry. Instead, contemporary school masculinities must also be situated in the intersecting pathways of family biography, history, locality and global transformations. This historically-informed ethnography investigates how and why a male school subculture should wish to preserve a 'traditional' white working-class masculinity in changing times. Here, 'local lads' were found to resist global change by accentuating pride of place and deploying the embodied grammar of manual labour. This modern 'curriculum of the body', as exemplified through rituals of football-fandom, was found to give cor...

Shaun's Story: Troubling discourses of white working-class masculinities

This article tells the story of a hard-working, well-behaved, poor, white, working-class boy trying to achieve academically in a 'sink' inner-city boys' comprehensive school, whilst simultaneously trying to maintain his standing within the male peer group culture. In doing so, it raises questions about the possibilities of bringing together white working-class masculinities with educational success in inner-city working-class schooling. It is argued that to combine the two generates heavy psychic costs, involving young men not only in an enormous amount of academic labour but also an intolerable burden of psychic reparative work. Shaun's narrative also suggests that the problem of 'failing boys' cannot be solved through school-based initiatives. Until social processes of male gender socialisation move away from the imperative of privileging the masculine and allow boys to stay in touch with their feminine qualities, the problem of 'failing boys' will remain despite the best efforts of teachers and researchers.

Power/knowledge/pedagogy: the meaning of democratic education in unsettling times

* Critical Educational Theory in Unsettling Times Dennis Carlson and Michael W. Apple. State Educational Policy And Curriculum Reform In Unsettling Times * Education in Unsettling Times: Public Intellectuals and the Promise of Cultural Studies Henry Giroux. * Pulp Fictions: Education, Markets, and the Information Superhighway Jane Kenway with Chris Bigum, Lindsay Fitzclarence, and Janine Collier. * Citizens or Consumers? Continuity and Change in Contemporary Education Policy Geoff Whitty. * Respondent: Distressed Worlds: Social Justice Through Educational Transformations Madeleine Arnot. Education, Identity, And The Other * Becoming Right: Education and the Formation of Conservative Movements M. W. Apple and Anita Oliver. * On Shaky Grounds: Constructing White Working-Class Masculinities in the Late Twentieth Century Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Judi Addelston. * Self and Education: Reversals and Cycles Philip Wexler. * Respondent: Self Education: Identity, Self, and the New Politics of Education D. Carlson. Reading Curriculum Texts * Danger in the Safety Zone: Notes on Race, Resentment, and the Discourse of Crime, Violence, and Suburban Security Cameron McCarthy, Alicia P. Rodriguez, Stephen David, Shuaib Meecham, Heriberto Godina, K. E. Supriya, and Carrie Wilson-Brown. * Fiction, Fantasy, and Femininities: Popular Texts and Young Womens Literacies Linda Christian-Smith. * Image Is Nothing: Struggling to Unsettle Basal Readers and More Patrick Shannon and Patricia Crawford. * Respondent: Loose Change: The Production of Texts William G. Tierney. Pedagogy And Empowerment * On the Limits to Empowerment Through Critical and Feminist Pedagogies Jennifer M. Gore. * Who Will Survive America? Pedagogy as Cultural Preservation Gloria Ladson-Billings. * Global Politics and Local Antagonisms: Research and Practice as Dissent and Possibility Peter McLaren and Kris Gutierrez. * Respondent: Pedagogy for an Oppositional Community Kathleen Weiler