Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films


Book Description

In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society.




Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films


Book Description

In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society.




Troubling Masculinities


Book Description

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of “terror-Others,” from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood’s attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.




Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies


Book Description

The Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies provides a contemporary critical and scholarly overview of theorizing and research on masculinities as well as emerging ideas and areas of study that are likely to shape research and understanding of gender and men in the future. The forty-eight chapters of the handbook take an interdisciplinary approach to a range of topics on men and masculinities related to identity, sex, sexuality, culture, aesthetics, technology and pressing social issues. The handbook’s transnational lens acknowledges both the localities and global character of masculinity. A clear message in the book is the need for intersectional theorizing in dialogue with feminist, queer and sexuality studies in making sense of men and masculinities. Written in a clear and direct style, the handbook will appeal to students, teachers and researchers in the social sciences and humanities, as well as professionals, practitioners and activists.




Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film


Book Description

Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.




Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema


Book Description

Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema is the first book to explore contemporary male stars and cinematic constructions of masculinity in Italy. Uniting star analysis with a detailed consideration of the masculinities that are dominating current Italian cinema, the study addresses the supposed crisis of masculinity.




Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World


Book Description

Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World sheds new light on the interrelationship between gender and the nation, focusing on the role of masculinities in various processes of nation-building in the modern world between 1800 and the 1960s.




Breaking Down Joker


Book Description

Breaking Down Joker offers a compelling, multi-disciplinary examination of a landmark film and media event that was simultaneously both celebrated and derided, and which arrived at a time of unprecedented social malaise. The collection breaks down Joker to explore its aesthetic and ideological representations within the social and cultural context in which it was released. An international team of authors explore Joker’s sightlines and subtexts, the affective relationships, corrosive ideologies, and damning, if ambivalent, messages of this film. The chapters address such themes as white masculinity, identity and perversion, social class and mobility, urban loneliness, movement and music, and questions of reception and activism. With contributions from scholars from screen studies, theatre and performance studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, geography, cultural studies, and sociology, this fully interdisciplinary collection offers a uniquely multiple operational cross-examination of this pivotal film text and will be of great importance to scholars, students, and researchers in these areas.




Monsters and Monstrosity


Book Description

Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today’s globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective , dealing with artificial intelligence.




Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama


Book Description

Offering queer analyses of paintings by Caravaggio and Puccini and films by Özpetek, Amelio, and Grimaldi, Champagne argues that Italian masculinity has often been articulated through melodrama. Wide in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this much-needed study shows the vital role of affect for both Italian history and masculinity studies.




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