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- Volume 6, Issue 3, 2015
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2015
Volume 6, Issue 3, 2015
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Lowe T(V): Directing masculinity in a new century
More LessAbstractThough a generally innocuous, if funny, series of advertisements, the recent set of Rob Lowe commercials for DIRECTV offers something else beyond the various selling points of a specific television service. The commercials, each of which portray regular Rob Lowe alongside an unfortunate alter ego (‘Scrawny Arms’, ‘Painfully Awkward’, ‘Overly Paranoid’, ‘Crazy Hairy’, ‘Total Deadbeat’, ‘Creepy’, ‘Peaked in High School’ and ‘Meathead’), provide a catalogue of twenty-first-century masculinities. By contrasting the regular Rob Lowe alongside his lesser iterations, the commercials cast a critical eye on traditional masculinity, calling into question both physical (‘Scrawny Arms’, ‘Crazy Hairy’ and ‘Meathead’) and behavioural (‘Painfully Awkward’, ‘Overly Paranoid’, ‘Total Deadbeat’, ‘Creepy’ and ‘Peaked in High School’) extremes. When read against the particulars of Lowe’s own experiences (as found in his 2011 autobiography Stories I Only Tell My Friends and its 2014 companion piece Love Life), in which he has either inhabited or encountered those alter egos throughout his life and career, the commercials suggest that twenty-first-century masculinities, in the person of Lowe, are expansive.
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From lonesome cowboys to geek masculinities: A study of documentary films on the financial crisis
Authors: Monika Raesch, Micky Lee and Frank Rudy CooperAbstractSpace is a vantage point from which masculinity can be critiqued and understood. Documentary film-makers employ specific mode(s) to relate space to masculinity by positioning themselves vis-à-vis the interviewees, and the interviewees vis-à-vis the viewers. A financial crisis may threaten the hegemonic masculinity embodied by Wall Street’s lonesome cowboys and provide a chance for film-makers to critique this type of masculinity. This article analyses three documentary films, I.O.U.S.A., Capitalism: A Love Story and Floored, which were released after the 2008 economic crisis in the United States. The films contain three prototypes: the lonesome cowboy; white, working-class masculinity; and hypermasculinity. These films may portend a new masculinity that prioritizes intellectual bravado, geek masculinity.
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‘This is what I’ve always wanted’: Bromance and the evolution of male intimacy in the Jump Street films
Authors: Ann M. Ciasullo and David MagillAbstractFor over a decade now, American popular culture has registered its fascination with the relationship between heterosexual men through the film genre of the ‘bromance’. We might have predicted the development of this genre, for it mirrors our recent shift in twenty-first century masculinities not only towards renewed fraternal connection but also towards more open emotional connection. This article focuses on the recent Jump Street movies as both nods to their ‘bromantic’ predecessors and responses to the established narrative boundaries of the genre. 21 and 22 Jump Street not only test the limits but, we would argue, explode them via three distinct but interrelated strategies: through the narrative structure of the films themselves, particularly in their representation of the bromantic relationship and the lack of heterosexual narrative closure; through their mixing of genres (buddy movie/action movie/romance/bromance); and through the queer inter- and extratextual narrative generated by what film critic Richard Dyer calls the ‘star power’ of the two leads, especially Channing Tatum. An examination of these strategies will reveal that the Jump Street films both define and defy bromantic conventions, contributing to a new understanding of male intimacy in US mainstream culture.
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Hot, cool and gone in the twenty-first century: Black male identity and the embodiment of early jazz improvisation
More LessAbstractIn the second decade of the twenty-first century, the expiration of a historical ‘cool’ has been conspicuous among African American men, evidenced by a performance of cool that signals extreme self-importance and excess, in lieu of authenticity and improvisation. The former behaviours, heightened among athletes, musicians and media figures, emerge when black males transcend racial, sexual and class identities. From Kanye West to Chris Brown and the sports players Richard Sherman and Tiger Woods, there exists tension in the display of supremeness, masculinity and dandyism. In the last century, African American males entered and influenced mainstream culture through the expressive art of jazz and distinctive style. Thus, a case study of ‘hot, cool and gone’ phases in jazz will contextualize this modern turbulence in black male identity.
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‘Will I do myself proud or only what’s allowed?’ Performing masculinities and Generation X men in contemporary Hollywood comedies
By Tom PaceAbstractThis article explores how Generation X men are portrayed in romantic comedies featuring friendships between men, or bromances, including films such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and This is 40, directed by Judd Apatow and Juno, directed by Jason Reitman. Using Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, this article explores how these films perform competing masculinities and how they at times signify these masculinities by focusing on the body. As such, these films portray Generation X men variously as contradictory, as adaptable (or not) to changing circumstances, as unsure in their relationship with women in a post-feminist world, and at odds with their Baby Boomer predecessors and Millennial successors.
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‘The man your man should be like’: Consumerism, patriarchy and the construction of twenty-first-century masculinities in 2010 and 2012 Old Spice campaigns
More LessAbstractIn times when masculinity has become a fluid, vague and sometimes endangered concept, representations of men in television advertising can provide important points of reference in the identity construction of young men. As many men in the twenty-first century seek to hold on to traditional masculinity through the products they consume, this article takes a critical look at the construction of masculinities in one of the most iconic advertising campaigns of the century: the Old Spice campaigns Smell Like a Man, Man and Smell is Power. By conducting textual analyses of the thirteen commercials that make up both campaigns, this study assesses the semiotic power of the commercials in the reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchic ideology. The author argues that Smell is Power relies on men’s insecurities about their masculine self by using former NFL player Terry Crews as a spectacle of hyper-hegemonic masculinity, while Smell Like a Man, Man presents protagonist Isaiah Mustafa as a toned-down version of Crews by constructing him as a patriarchic, masculine object of female desire. As such, both Old Spice campaigns serve as an apt cultural guide on what it means to be a man in the United States of the twenty-first century.
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