At first, I really couldn't get into this weeks reading since I can't relate to the content as I never watched WWF (or now known as WWEF) or to sports. But then I remembered soemthing from y days of working with the resident hall student government. When I was an officer for SHAC, my adviser at the time during meetings would give the WWF belt to an officer on the board that did something special or extraordinary that previous week. We would proudly display the belt at our desk if we were awarded that week. I had no context for WWF as I never watched it, but I did understand from this context that it is something special to be awarded for a special task I accomplished that week.
Now to this weeks readings, I saw a general theme in all the articles is how heterosexual white working men in the United States have entertainment that is directed toward them in the form of meladrama.
The idea of the "crisis of masculinity" is intriguing as it introduces the idea of the response that "masculine" power has when its power is threatened due to forces within culture. Carroll discusses the point that "white injury--phantasmagratphic through it may be--is a phenomenon that attempts to recoup political, economic, and cultural authority" (264). I wonder if the show American Chopper reflects a new type of working man that has not existed in American culture before and what type of men is emerging from the political, economic and cultural forces shaping the discourse surrounding shows such as American Chopper?
The theme of money and economic power is seen in the Carroll article about American Chopper and the Friedman article about sports television and both articles about the WWF. How does economic power for the working men work out in all four of these articles and what are the implications for "white male power" in the United States? Is this similar to what we've discussed with post-feminism and how it is closely tied to consumer and mass culture in the United States? Is sport and popular culture meladrama creating a sense of buying power for men in relation to the topics the articles discuss?
Coming from a blue-collar family and my father as a plumber, I thought many of the points about males finding the place in order to engage in mass culture in acceptable space relevant. I wonder what other contexts can we find this "crisis of masculinity" in current shows and popular culture? Is this shifting with men and women roles changing rapidly in our current economic situation in the United States?
Here are some videos to add some context to the material (at least it helped me as I haven't viewed some of the shows.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Seems Appropriate
Coming off our discussion of videogames last week, I couldn't help but think of the game MadWorld when reading this week's articles. The clip below seems to encompass themes across all the authors' work. There are commentators, a stereotypic black pimp, and hyper-masculine, muscled white guy, and women as little more than sexual commodities, regardless of the small amount of agency the prostitute shows near the end of the clip. While representationally troubling, I think this reveals how this troubling form of hegemonic masculinity, protected by the guise of post-feminist irony, is systemic in gaming as a medium, in addition to other cultural entertainment forms.
MEN ...
I agree with Carroll’s general argument that American Chopper presents a version of masculinity that harkens back to before the postindustrial service economy. His article made me think about how quickly culture has transformed for male representation in the media, and the lack of valorization of traditional male roles and masculinity in programming. I have this image of my dad, when I was little, surrounded in our front driveway, with a group of other men, all gathered to look under the hood of my dad’s station wagon. Although Carroll doesn’t mention this specifically, this program also relates to nostalgia for the days when men were valued by society (and also, by women) for their ability to “work with their hands” and “fix things.” From what I recall about the era when my dad had a bunch of cars and car parts laying around our back yard for “weekend projects,” his M-F job as a Math Professor was secondary to this “real work” he did on the weekends, much to my mom’s dismay. In reading about American Chopper, this program taps into this “loss” that white, working-class men have “suffered,” by showing men who are not following prescribed notions of male attributes in the new economy, e.g. no coiffed hair, clean-cut suits or very little attempt to play into new values of the postindustrial consumer culture. The garage itself plays an important part as a cultural signpost whose era has dwindled. The show puts great value on displaying this outmoded type of masculinity, demonstrating exaggerated male attributes (guys throwing stuff and arguing). Is this show successfully creating a temporary and imaginary “home” for contemporary working-class white males to negotiate their identities within a new consumer economy?
In Rose and Friedmans’ article, they make the point that TV sports shows for men serve to embrace the male collective and provide a “vehicle for the utopic imaging” (8), reinforcing masculine ideals, all while showing the tension that masculinity undergoes within a capitalist framework. The authors argue that sports “expose the ideological contradictions of masculine identity,” (11) yet I’m most interested in their brief discussion on the “metadiscourse of sports.” The TV show is just one element of participation, whereas the experience of sports involves immersion and “the fabric” of men’s lives. In this sense, I think sports offers more to men than soaps do to women. First, soap operas present fictional characters – sports offer “real games” played by “real guys,” and men are often viewing in “real time.” For men, “chasing the dream” by vicariously involving oneself in the player’s life, salary, extracurricular activities, and stats, they are able to be more involved with the discourse with other men in the “universe.” (3) In this sense, doesn’t this discursive world offer a sense of power that can build among men, with at least a cultural solidarity that soaps don’t provide for women? Robert Allen argues that the community created is as masculine as the games themselves.
Back to the Carroll article on American Chopper, I found the description of differences in work habits between Senior and Paulie to be particularly interesting. Senior’s “old school” labor habits, e.g. “getting to work and getting the job done on time” vs. Paulie’s pondering, artistic and seemingly lazy approach to work – display a contradiction that mirrors masculine roles in flux. The “older version” of masculinity at the workplace was all about hard work and manual labor, where men worked up a sweat and got dirty, and popped open a beer at the end of the day. The new role of men has increasingly transitioned into valuing a white-collar worker, with clean hands, where labor is often “virtual” -- a few taps a Blackberry, and he’s off having a martini in a posh bar after work. In other words, physical labor is passé, and the contradictions played out between Senior and Paulie bring this tension to the forefront. Is the dominant viewing of this show to one or the other value (father/son) or it is simply reinacting the tension? --- Molly
In Rose and Friedmans’ article, they make the point that TV sports shows for men serve to embrace the male collective and provide a “vehicle for the utopic imaging” (8), reinforcing masculine ideals, all while showing the tension that masculinity undergoes within a capitalist framework. The authors argue that sports “expose the ideological contradictions of masculine identity,” (11) yet I’m most interested in their brief discussion on the “metadiscourse of sports.” The TV show is just one element of participation, whereas the experience of sports involves immersion and “the fabric” of men’s lives. In this sense, I think sports offers more to men than soaps do to women. First, soap operas present fictional characters – sports offer “real games” played by “real guys,” and men are often viewing in “real time.” For men, “chasing the dream” by vicariously involving oneself in the player’s life, salary, extracurricular activities, and stats, they are able to be more involved with the discourse with other men in the “universe.” (3) In this sense, doesn’t this discursive world offer a sense of power that can build among men, with at least a cultural solidarity that soaps don’t provide for women? Robert Allen argues that the community created is as masculine as the games themselves.
Back to the Carroll article on American Chopper, I found the description of differences in work habits between Senior and Paulie to be particularly interesting. Senior’s “old school” labor habits, e.g. “getting to work and getting the job done on time” vs. Paulie’s pondering, artistic and seemingly lazy approach to work – display a contradiction that mirrors masculine roles in flux. The “older version” of masculinity at the workplace was all about hard work and manual labor, where men worked up a sweat and got dirty, and popped open a beer at the end of the day. The new role of men has increasingly transitioned into valuing a white-collar worker, with clean hands, where labor is often “virtual” -- a few taps a Blackberry, and he’s off having a martini in a posh bar after work. In other words, physical labor is passé, and the contradictions played out between Senior and Paulie bring this tension to the forefront. Is the dominant viewing of this show to one or the other value (father/son) or it is simply reinacting the tension? --- Molly
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
1.) Carroll discusses the way ‘Old School’ manual labor is associated with the superiority of masculinity and mental labor is associated with the inferiority of femininity (274). Now, that dichotomy seems to have changed so we culturally associate the mind with masculinity and the body with femininity. How does this switch function hegemonically? When did this reversal take place? How was the association with masculinity and the body different from our current associations with the body and femininity? On another note, can you be masculine and inauthentic? Carroll discusses the biker community’s sentiment that the way the Teutuls assemble from fabricated parts instead of building a bike’s basic components makes their choppers signify leisure, feminized domesticity, and consumption (275). Do you agree that this “authentic masculinity” has been diluted by culture, leisure, and consumption?
2.) Why can men only ever achieve an emotional release, develop trust between with other men, and have intimacy with other men by displaying “homophobic disgust, and patriarchal outrage against any and all incursions beyond heterosexual dominance” (64)? Does wrestling specifically allow for the joining of melodrama and masculinity, or can this example be more generalized to other ‘masculine’ activities? Also, do you think the incorporation of romance plots within WWF narratives help balance the “homosocial desire” and reduce the risk of displaying male intimacy and dependence? Obviously, if wresters are depicted as defending/loving/marrying women- they aren’t actually homosexual. Is this the same as men’s magazines depicting scantily clad women to prove their straightness?
3.) What exactly do Battema and Sewell mean by us living in a neoconservative era?...In response to second-wave feminism and challenges to traditional patriarchy the WWF enacts depictions of hypermasculinity, and legitimizes reasons for physical violence against women. Battema and Sewell give the example of how a female manager “interferes with a match by dealing her wrestler’s opponent a blow to the crotch” (270). So women have ‘agency’ to do this, but men now have warrant for retaliation? Do you think the abandonment of “civilized masculine behavior” and “man as protector” is a response to feminism? Later, the authors talk about how power and authority are “freely and naturally available” and those who are unable/unwilling to exercise it are “deficient, deviant, and weak” and those who “exercise power should be celebrated” (281). Do you think women are included as having the ability to obtain power in the World Wrestling Federation? If power in WWF is either shown through money or strength/physicality—then it seems like the female manager’s blow to another’s crotch should be celebrated as powerful not retaliated against!! Well, maybe not.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The Empire Strikes Back
In “To the White Extreme: Conquering Athletic Space, White Manhood, and Racing Virtual Reality,” Leonard argues that extreme sports games, specifically Tony Hawk Underground (skating), Amped and SSX Tricky (snowboarding) systematically erase, trivialize or caricature people of color while at the same time reducing the presence of women to mere erotic objects and sexual rewards to solidify and carve out a new space for the (mistakenly perceived) threatened white masculinity. As these games are all from the early part of the 21st century, based on the article, how do they fuel or oppose a post-racial and post-feminist popular culture? Additionally, how are civil rights and the feminist movement taken into account, if at all? Do these games fall into the categories of a post-racial/post-feminist society or are they more regressive, conjuring representations of a post 1960s/1970s era? Finally, while the other texts this week dealing with The Man Show, Talk Radio, and Lad Mags tend to “lash out at women, minorities, gays, lesbians, and the poor,” as Douglas points out in her article, the position taken in these videogames seems much more systemic and internalized. Are these representations intended to be malicious or are they merely the result of the internalization of a culture in the midst of feminist and racial negotiations?
In far less subtle ways, Johnson argues that The Man Show also emerges out of a (I would argue white) masculinity that feels under threat by the forces of feminism and political correctness. Here she explains that The Man Show successfully created a “straw woman,” of sorts, out of the modern woman who enjoys the small successes so far gleaned from the feminist movement. Utilizing protest rhetoric, The Man Show is able to position women as the tyrannical dominators, granted as they were with an excess of power after the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, and symbolically reverse the perceived power hierarchy in society through a lens of “victimization.” Can The Man Show then be described as a hybridization of feminist backlash and post-feminist recognition that feminism has done its job? What implications does thinking women have, in fact, gained too much power in a post-feminist society? In the conclusion, Johnson makes connections between The Man Show and Playboy as both exhibit signs of masculine rebellion. While Playboy might be argued to be a text that demanded for men an escape from the domestic sphere into a fantasy bachelor pad, is The Man Show asking not so much for an escape from but for a coup of the domestic space? How is this protest different?
All of these texts, to some extent, exercise the annihilation of the feminine and in some cases, the presence of women altogether. If women do appear, they are reduced to the sexual components of their body and positioned as pleasure objects for the male gaze. In “Sex, booze, and fags,” Edwards points out that this male gaze, amongst lad magazines in England, anyway, is increasingly being refocused not on woman-as-sex-object but on male-as-ideal-masculinity, a homoerotic gaze where heterosexual, and indeed violently homophobic, men end up staring at bare-chested males in advertisements for clothing and cologne. How are these ads “read” by these New Lads? Are the objectified images of women peppered through the mags enough to make up for this apparent contradiction? How can homosexuality be so violently oppressed while these New Lads hang posters of David Beckham and other male sports stars up in their houses? Finally, what fuels this defensive sexuality? Is it just a response to the sexually ambiguous New Man or is it part of another modern crisis in masculinity?
In Thornham’s article, “’It’s a Boy Thing,’” the girls she interviews admit to playing dumb when it comes to videogames for their male audience. Sara commented, “I’d clown about and mess about and pretend I couldn’t work out what to do.” However, some of these girls were quite good at the games outside of certain social contexts; they just understood they weren’t supposed to admit to this or indeed that they weren’t supposed to have those skills even in private. If as Thornham suggests, social context and gender expectations are key in understanding performance and pleasures in videogames, might these same principals apply to other activities in life? Do girls and women purposely “play dumb” or underperform in other contexts because of the gendered-nature of the activity? Conversely, do men do the same for traditionally feminine activities? What are the major implications of this finding? For instance, if one gender or the other is culturally thought to be less skilled in a given professional field, will that result in an underperformance by that gender in that field? What is the danger, then, in gendering even casual leisure activities, like videogames?
In far less subtle ways, Johnson argues that The Man Show also emerges out of a (I would argue white) masculinity that feels under threat by the forces of feminism and political correctness. Here she explains that The Man Show successfully created a “straw woman,” of sorts, out of the modern woman who enjoys the small successes so far gleaned from the feminist movement. Utilizing protest rhetoric, The Man Show is able to position women as the tyrannical dominators, granted as they were with an excess of power after the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, and symbolically reverse the perceived power hierarchy in society through a lens of “victimization.” Can The Man Show then be described as a hybridization of feminist backlash and post-feminist recognition that feminism has done its job? What implications does thinking women have, in fact, gained too much power in a post-feminist society? In the conclusion, Johnson makes connections between The Man Show and Playboy as both exhibit signs of masculine rebellion. While Playboy might be argued to be a text that demanded for men an escape from the domestic sphere into a fantasy bachelor pad, is The Man Show asking not so much for an escape from but for a coup of the domestic space? How is this protest different?
All of these texts, to some extent, exercise the annihilation of the feminine and in some cases, the presence of women altogether. If women do appear, they are reduced to the sexual components of their body and positioned as pleasure objects for the male gaze. In “Sex, booze, and fags,” Edwards points out that this male gaze, amongst lad magazines in England, anyway, is increasingly being refocused not on woman-as-sex-object but on male-as-ideal-masculinity, a homoerotic gaze where heterosexual, and indeed violently homophobic, men end up staring at bare-chested males in advertisements for clothing and cologne. How are these ads “read” by these New Lads? Are the objectified images of women peppered through the mags enough to make up for this apparent contradiction? How can homosexuality be so violently oppressed while these New Lads hang posters of David Beckham and other male sports stars up in their houses? Finally, what fuels this defensive sexuality? Is it just a response to the sexually ambiguous New Man or is it part of another modern crisis in masculinity?
In Thornham’s article, “’It’s a Boy Thing,’” the girls she interviews admit to playing dumb when it comes to videogames for their male audience. Sara commented, “I’d clown about and mess about and pretend I couldn’t work out what to do.” However, some of these girls were quite good at the games outside of certain social contexts; they just understood they weren’t supposed to admit to this or indeed that they weren’t supposed to have those skills even in private. If as Thornham suggests, social context and gender expectations are key in understanding performance and pleasures in videogames, might these same principals apply to other activities in life? Do girls and women purposely “play dumb” or underperform in other contexts because of the gendered-nature of the activity? Conversely, do men do the same for traditionally feminine activities? What are the major implications of this finding? For instance, if one gender or the other is culturally thought to be less skilled in a given professional field, will that result in an underperformance by that gender in that field? What is the danger, then, in gendering even casual leisure activities, like videogames?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
All about the men
A link to The Man Show's page at the G4 cable channel. We'll check out some of the videos in class.
Monday, April 13, 2009
hegemonic masculinity
As someone who grew up with skateboarding and video games, I have to take issue with Leonard's work. While much of his analysis is good, Leonard skews or ignores issues that should make us all closely examine his work. Leonard's introduction, using EA Sports' multi-million unit sales as justification for extreme sports games' importance, is disingenuous because EA doesn't produce any of the titles focused on later in the article nor any extreme sports games of note. Further, Leonard's dismissal of Tony Hawks' series as exclusively white male or tokenized flies in the face of the fact that the Tony Hawk games prior to the introduction of customizable characters included pro skateboarder Elissa Steamer, (non tokenized) Thai skater Eric Koston or Brazilian Bob Burnquist, and the 45 year old Steve Caballero who was born with scoliosis. Perhaps it was their very non-tokenization that caused Leonard to completely overlook them.
Caballero
Koston
SteamerThat said, Leonard's main argument is that these games "construct a white masculinity through erasing people of color, commodifying inner city spaces, offering opportunities to dominate nature, [and] render females as sexual objects." (112) My question is this, can we think of any sports video games that don't do the same thing? Whether it's the pitch, court, mountain, or track, I think that the underlying premise of all sports games is to dominate the environment where the game takes place. I would also argue that the degree of the sexualization of female bodied characters in sports games occurs at pace with the hyper-masculinization of male bodied characters. If we can't think of other games that don't follow this pattern, it should be assumed that the totality of hegemonic masculinity present in sports games is a response to what sells to video game consumers. As Brian Ott wrote, "The culture of the television inudstry is patriarchal, thus the ideological critic who begins and ends with a television show (video game) as their object of study will find only the...dominant ideology." (Johnson, 168) With all our critique of capitalism and awareness that perceived profitability is the gatekeeper of production, should we really expect non-dominant depictions of masculinity in sports games? If not, how could we make our critique more systemic and materially oppositional to hegemonic masculinity in pop culture and its perceived effects?
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Letting the Boys Be Boys - Susan J. Douglas
While many people like them, many others see Limbaugh, Imus, and others as "male hysterics" and don't take them seriously. Still, Limbaugh has mobilized conservative voters and has perhaps influenced policy as well. This seems to indicate that emotion, sensationalism, and outrageousness, while not taken seriously by the mainstream, can influence the limits of debate and open space for negotiation. Could being "radical" and outrageous work for non-dominant purposes? Or, is the success of Limbaugh and others directly tied to their irrationality for the sake of hegemonic masculinity? It seems that if people went on air talking about sex as a social construction and video games as reproducing traditional masculinity that they would be labeled wackos and render the limits of debate unchanged. Also, is there a reciprocal, oppositional cohesiveniess that is a byproduct of "shock jocks" polarizing rhetoric? For example, the perceived threat of Limbaugh motivating people to take up the cause with Planned Parenthood or the N.O.W. Personally, it seems as though Limbaugh et al. have a monopoly on acceptable hysterics indicating that it isn't so much the delivery (the hysterics) as the content (hegemonic masculinity, conservative values) that is the measure of inclusion or exclusion in mainstream political discourse.
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In "The Sublteties of Blatant Sexism," Ann Johnson begins by drawing a distinction between blatant sexism and subtle sexism "such as popular representations of liberated but unhappy women and the overstatement of the success of women's movements" (167). While she cites many other studies on subtle sexism, I was wondering what other examples we could think of and what potential cumulative effects may be. Psychological research by reserachers who I can't remember have found that repeated viewing of idealized female body types such as in advertisements lowers the self-esteem and self-image of women who view them. Subtle, almost passive-aggressive sexism likely has such a cumulative toll on people and may be related to the prevalence of post-feminism sentiments in pop culture.
At close to twice the circulation of Rolling Stone magazine, Maxim was the 22nd highest circulating magazine in 2007. However, Maxim only sold a little over 2.5 million magazines that same year, roughly the equivalent of the number of people in US prisons in 2008. Neither Stuff, FHM, nor Loaded made the top 100. Despite the small readership relative to the US population, "Lad mags," in ways similar to Limbaugh, seem to be opening up space for the acceptance of obnoxiously heteronormative male consumers. It seems as though the saying "boys will be boys" is quite flexible and can be stretched to include the arrogant masculine hedonism portrayed by the lad mags. As feminist and queer scholars, is it our role to challenge this trend? What suggestions could we make to help steer lad mag behavior into the unacceptable range within mainstream discourse? How could feminist and queer scholars more directly shape mainstream discourse by intervening in the production and content of contemporary pop culture? (without, of course, being completely co-opted).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Letting the Boys Be Boys - Susan J. Douglas
While many people like them, many others see Limbaugh, Imus, and others as "male hysterics" and don't take them seriously. Still, Limbaugh has mobilized conservative voters and has perhaps influenced policy as well. This seems to indicate that emotion, sensationalism, and outrageousness, while not taken seriously by the mainstream, can influence the limits of debate and open space for negotiation. Could being "radical" and outrageous work for non-dominant purposes? Or, is the success of Limbaugh and others directly tied to their irrationality for the sake of hegemonic masculinity? It seems that if people went on air talking about sex as a social construction and video games as reproducing traditional masculinity that they would be labeled wackos and render the limits of debate unchanged. Also, is there a reciprocal, oppositional cohesiveniess that is a byproduct of "shock jocks" polarizing rhetoric? For example, the perceived threat of Limbaugh motivating people to take up the cause with Planned Parenthood or the N.O.W. Personally, it seems as though Limbaugh et al. have a monopoly on acceptable hysterics indicating that it isn't so much the delivery (the hysterics) as the content (hegemonic masculinity, conservative values) that is the measure of inclusion or exclusion in mainstream political discourse.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In "The Sublteties of Blatant Sexism," Ann Johnson begins by drawing a distinction between blatant sexism and subtle sexism "such as popular representations of liberated but unhappy women and the overstatement of the success of women's movements" (167). While she cites many other studies on subtle sexism, I was wondering what other examples we could think of and what potential cumulative effects may be. Psychological research by reserachers who I can't remember have found that repeated viewing of idealized female body types such as in advertisements lowers the self-esteem and self-image of women who view them. Subtle, almost passive-aggressive sexism likely has such a cumulative toll on people and may be related to the prevalence of post-feminism sentiments in pop culture.
At close to twice the circulation of Rolling Stone magazine, Maxim was the 22nd highest circulating magazine in 2007. However, Maxim only sold a little over 2.5 million magazines that same year, roughly the equivalent of the number of people in US prisons in 2008. Neither Stuff, FHM, nor Loaded made the top 100. Despite the small readership relative to the US population, "Lad mags," in ways similar to Limbaugh, seem to be opening up space for the acceptance of obnoxiously heteronormative male consumers. It seems as though the saying "boys will be boys" is quite flexible and can be stretched to include the arrogant masculine hedonism portrayed by the lad mags. As feminist and queer scholars, is it our role to challenge this trend? What suggestions could we make to help steer lad mag behavior into the unacceptable range within mainstream discourse? How could feminist and queer scholars more directly shape mainstream discourse by intervening in the production and content of contemporary pop culture? (without, of course, being completely co-opted).
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