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zational communicationstudies. Western Journal of Communication, 62, 343-375. West, C., & Fenstermaker; S. (1995). Doing difference. Gender & Society, 9, 837. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, I , 125151. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

it is represented and defined in various media, genres, texts, or icons and the relationship between these sites and gender, the gender order, other cultural differences, identity and identification, the subject, experience, and reality in late capitalism. As has often been observed, the theoretico-political clusters of feminist and gay 0 1998 International Communicaton Assn. and lesbian studies have given particular impetus to the exploration of masculinity as a dominant cultural identity and invisible norm. At the same time, particular projects continue to be in dialogue with On Masculinity other theoretical work that has Theorizing Masculinity opened up mediated masculiniWitMn the Media ties to new questions. In media studies of the last decade, we have come to understand masculinity as both a product and process of repreby Robert Hanke sentation (de Lauretis, 1987, The relationship between mas- p. 5). Within a constructionist approach to representation and culinity and the media, which meaning, some scholars have first came into focus in the adopted a feminist poststruc1970s and gained increased turalist orientation to mascuscholarly attention in the late 1980s, has continued to gener- linity as signs, where masculinity is regarded as one of the ate work that theorizes, intersubjectivities (or subject-posiprets, and evaluates masculintions) that make up our social ity with/in the media. In the 5 identities (Saco, 1992). Within years since Fejes (1992)comthe growing body of work on pleted his review of empirical gender representation and dismass communication research course in the media, particular on masculinity, there has been a growing stream of books and attention has been paid to the representation of the male articles within media studies body, giving rise to debates that has shifted critical attenover its cultural significance, tion from what Fejes calls political valences, and its matemasculinity as fact to the riality. Today, as Hall (1996) facticity of masculinity. This work focuses on masculinity as observes, the body serves to
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function as the signifier of the condensation of subjectivities in the individual (p. 11). In this contribution, I want to briefly discuss some of the detours through theory, major concepts, strategies of media analysis, and issues that define the space within which media studies defines the problem of masculinity with a view to the possibilities that have been opened up as well as some of the limitations or problems that remain. Within the limited space of this forum, I am able only to offer a preliminary, no doubt overly simplifying and polemically unifying, mapping of the interdisciplinary border zone of theorizing masculinity. Although it is not a comprehensive survey, it should, I hope, be useful in taking our bearings. Different projects, of course, may be located in different research traditions, be informed by more than one theoretical position, and seek to set different priorities. An intradisciplinary dialogue concerning this topic is timely and important for several reasons. For starters, as Sedgwick (1995) has observed, Sometimes masculinity has got nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with men (p. 12). In other words, we should no longer presume a relationship between masculinity and men even if it is difficult not to. Second, recent writing on masculinity, gender, and patriarchy has begun to question their very utility as explanatory

concepts (Hearn, 1996; Hawkesworth, 1997; Ehrenreich, 1995). Finally, what is to be done if there is no definition of masculinity that is not already hegemonic (Rogoff & Van Leer, 1993), no gender trouble (whether as spectacle, masquerade, or parody) that would push the masculine stereotype beyond its threshold of recuperation? (Massumi, 1992, p. 89). I first discuss some strategies of media analysis that have been influenced by Gramsci, Foucault, and Butler. I then consider Berger, Wallis, and Watsons Constructing Masculinity (1995)and Smiths Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture (1996),two recent collections that lay the basis for current debates even as they do not exhaust all the possibilities for research and analysis. Work by Bordo (1994),Brod (1995), Byers (1995, 1996), Coates (1998),Cohan & Hark (1993), Doty (1993), Dyson (1993), Farred (1996),Jeffords (1994), Mercer (1994),Nixon (1996), Pfeil(1996), Savran (1996), Shaviro (1993),Tasker (1993), and Walser (1993) attests to the range of projects and diversity of theoretical routes. My simple argument is that, whereas film studies continues to maintain a prominent place in the study of popular representations of masculinity, because of its own rich tradition of film theory and criticism and a fascination with spectacular Hollywood masculini184

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ties, studies of masculinities in television, mediated sports, advertising, and publicity, as well as popular music, are also demonstrating the relevance of theoretical work that has pushed, as Carole Spitzack has put it, our existing visions and articulations of masculinity. M y Hegemonic Masculinity The concept of hegemonic masculinity, introduced by Connell(1987,1990) has been utilized in my own previous work as well as studies of mediated sports (Trujillo, 1991; Davis, 1997).In other writings where the term appears, it expresses the general idea of assumptions and beliefs about masculinity that have become common sense, that may be uncritically absorbed or spontaneously consented to, but that are presumed to have an imperative character in shaping consciousness, norms of conduct, affect, or desire. In light of some of the debate over the theory of hegemony (Condit, 1994;Cloud, 1996;Cloud, 1997;Condit, 1997),it is worth recalling that a neoGramscian-feminist perspective served to guide inquiry out of a functionalist, sex-role framework towards dialectical sociology, cultural studies, feminist media studies, and historical contextualization. The turn to Gramsci was a significant move in Marxist strategies of media and cultural analysis because it represented a depar-

ture from class essentialist and reductionist accounts of ideology and culture and opened up popular cultural analysis to struggles around gender and race (Bennett, 1996).Moreover, as Grossberg (1997) notes, a hegemonic project . .. does not demand the production of consensus . . .nor a process of incorporation. It does operate through the production of a certain convergence of interests through which subordination and resistance are contained (p. 226). Within civil society, the national popular culture is where various agents of hegemony (the New Right, cultural producers such as journalists, politicians, television producers, and filmmakers) give shape to the common sense of the people, including their takenfor-granted notions of masculinity and femininity. Thus, it seemed to me that a neo-Gramscian perspective could be brought into a productive dialogue with feminist media studies in order to theorize and critique masculinity in fictional U.S. television series and genres of the 1980s. By then, feminist media studies had moved toward an Althussarian sense of representation and ideology, which defined femininity as a set of highly orchestrated representational practices which together produced this coherence of female gender as easy and naturalized (McRobbie, 1997,p. 172).A neo-Gramscian-femi185

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nist perspective was also a way masculine subjectivity-the beof carrying out critical and em- coming conservative of White, pirical work on masculinity in middle-class, heterosexual, the U.S. context as a response professional-managerial men to Chapman and Rutherfords (Hanke, 1992). Taken together, (1988) collection, which began this work suggested that hegethe debate over the representa- monic masculinity is not only tions of the idealized New secured through the reassertion Man and Retributive Man in of dominance-based masculinithe U.K. These polarized fig- ties, but also through a new ures, as Tasker (1993) has view of manhood defined in since pointed out, tended to relation to womens liberation map a stable gender binary and its image of the new onto different male types. woman, and in relation to My definition of hegemonic representations of gay men masculinity referred to the so- that maintain a heteromascucial ascendancy of a particular line point of view. version or model of masculinTrujillo (1991) has exity that, operating on the terpanded the definition of hegerain of common sense and monic masculinity by identifyconventional morality, defines ing five major features that dewhat it means to be a man fine when masculinity is hege(Hanke, 1990). This implies monic in U.S. media culture: that one version may occupy a (1)when power is defined in leading position in the media terms of physical force and mainstream (for instance, the control (particularly in the much discussed hard-bodied, representation of the body), action heroes of the 1980s). (2) when it is defined through Because Gramscian common occupational achievement in sense is fragmentary, incoheran industrial, capitalistic socient, ambiguous, contradictory, ety, (3)when it is represented and multiform, however, other in terms of familial patriarchy, versions (e.g., the soft or (4) when it is symbolized by New Man, gay men, and so the daring, romantic frontierson) are among the representaman of yesteryear and of the tions that were also construct- present-day outdoorsman, ing masculinities. In follow-up and (5) when heterosexually work, I adopted Connells defined and centered on the (1987) categories of hegerepresentation of the phallus. monic, conservative, and subThrough an analysis of sports ordinate masculinities, arguing hero Nolan Ryan, Trujillo anathat 1980s fictional television lyzes how this figure exhibits articulated the relation among these features to varying dedominant, conservative, and grees and thus how hegemonic subordinated masculinity, so as masculinity reproduces itself in to produce a reformation of the context of mediated sports.
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psychological structures alone The limitation of this strategy (Middleton, 1992) is adequate is that any discussion of a unless the meanings and values single exalted male hero is f likely to tend toward a norma- o the masculine that these fantasy figure ensembles protive definition of manhood. duce and put into circulation Yet, such work reveals how are relationally defined, articusports writing, television, and lated to other differences, and advertising work in concorlocated within a particular hisdance to construct hegemonic torical conjuncture. masculinity and naturalize soQualitative, (con)textual cial and historical relations of power and privilege. analysis informed by postThe difficulty has been how structuralism enabled me to to talk about hegemonic masread a television series like thirtysomething as a text arculinity as a historically mobile relation (1995, p. 77) and ticulates a specific signifier as to maintain a focus on both its part of common sense and the continuities and disconproduction of experience tinuities. In analyzing specific (Grossberg, 1997, p 225), as well as the other side of masculinities, Connell ( 1995) suggests the need to consider double articulation-how two types of relationship: he- meanings are articulated to gemony, dominatiodsubordireal social practices, relations, nation, and complicity on the and conditions (Grossberg, 1997, p. 225). However, as one hand, marginalizatiodauthorization on the other (p. critics have been quick to point 8 1). A critical method consisout, men are missing as televitent with a neo-Gramscian sion viewers. Apart from the feminist perspective must be tradition of film study that has careful to avoid redescribing theorized the male gaze and hegemonic masculinity as an the male spectator, masculinity ideal character type, role iden- as a dimension of social auditity, or metaphysical substance ences reception practices re(Butler, 1990). For example, mains invisible except in a few the decline in popularity of Su- studies (Morley, 1986; Steinman, 1992; Fiske & perman and the rise in popularity of Batman is part of the Dawson, 1996). Donaldson (1993)has also critiqued the ebb and flow of specifiable meanings of masculinity, genexplanatory utility of Connells der, and sexuality encoded by concept, suggesting that the these hypermasculine heroes, gap between the culturally their partners, and the villains idealized form of masculine they encounter. Neither a role- character and what real men model, socialization theory ap- are means that it is unable to proach to such figures (Pecora, account for changes in the gen1992) nor an analysis of their der system. He proposes in187

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stead that we limit the concept to really real men, the exalted ruling-class heroes of capitalist entrepreneurship (Bill Gates, Sam Walton, Ted Turner, and the like). Although the articulation of masculinity and class is important, this move returns us to a Marxist perspective on social class relations and reintroduces the very problems that the turn to Gramsci sought to resolve. The relationship between hegemonic masculinity and social change can be addressed only historically, as Connell (1995) has attempted to do, although he neglects the media. He sums up the state of theorizing hegemonic masculinity as follows: On the one hand, hegemony is likely to be established only if there is some correspondence between a cultural ideal and institutional power(p. 77); on the other hand, even though few men may embody culturally exalted forms of masculinity, large numbers of men benefit from cultural definitions that legitimate claims to leadership. However, in addition to institutional life and technocratic variants of hegemonic masculinity, media studies also needs to consider how hegemonic masculinity articulates to structures and lived forms of patriarchy within everyday life, as recent work in cultural criticism and cultural studies has begun to do. Deviations from Foucault Besides offering a useful over-

view of central concepts, claims, and issues relevant to studying mediated masculinities, Nixons (1997) examination of exhibiting masculinity draws upon Foucaultian concepts of discourse, the place of the subject, subjectivization, and technologies of the self. In Foucaults archaeological writings, the subject was produced in discourse and subjectivization was a material rather than ideological process whereby power relations invested and materialized subjects. Nixon translates these concepts into a strategy for analyzing groups of statements (texts, sites), their regularity or underlying unity, and the place of the subject as it is produced in media discourse through specific codes and conventions of representing the male body. Based on a reading of three versions of the new man (articulated with generation, ethnicity, and race), he argues that visual codes of fashion photography not only work to produce a spectatorial look, but marks the formation of new subject-position for men in relation to practices of fashion, style, and consumption. Nixon rejects Foucaults notion of subjectivization in favor of Foucaults later notion of technologies (or practices) of the self (as read through Butler) to conceptualize the articulation of concrete individuals to particular representations as a performance based upon the citing and reiteration
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of discursive norms; a performance in which the formal positions of subjectivity are inha bited through specific practices or techniques (p. 323). In this formulation, new man imagery is operationalized or performed as a historical identity (p. 323). Codes of looking, among other techniques in the care of the self, are located across various representational sites, and these codes, in turn, are contextualized as part of the historical construction of new modes of spectatorial consumer subjectivity (first analyzed by Walter Benjamin). Contrary to Neale (1993),who argued that film was a technology for representing the male body in a way that circumvents eroticization, Nixon concludes that advertising and fashion photography are a technique for sanctioning the display of masculine sensuality and, from this, opening up the possibility of an ambivalent masculine sexual identity (p. 328). In a Foucaultian framework of discourse and powerknowledge, specifiable masculinities are understood as the effect of specific regimes of visibility, and such representations are overdetermined by discursive formations and the interplay of signifying practices, social processes, historical forces, and the business of late capitalism. The new man is a rearticulation of the relationship among masculinity, gender, and economics,

where consumption and mass culture is no longer figured as feminine as it was within modernity. In the US.context, this was also evident in advertisings image of the new man (Barthel, 1988) and also more recently in the gayification of advertising (Clarke, 1995). In their study of the gayification of action hero Claude Van Damme as fan object and publicity subject in heteronormative publications, Clarke and Henson (1996)argue that gay identity formation and valorization have become directly complicit in capital formation and valorization (p. 144). Gay-oriented publicity or advertising complicates the very logic of visibility and affirmation that has been central to gay and lesbian politics of representation. The increased visibility of gayness in these media produces them as new economic subjects whose gayness is increasingly defined in relation to marketing and consuming practices and the generation of corporate profits rather than the extension of civil rights. In sum, both neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony and Foucaultian theory of discourse, in dialogue with feminist media studies or theory, are tool kits for understanding power as a determinant of masculinities. Mediated masculinities construct figures to identify with and places to occupy within the gender order. For the former, the emphasis is
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on popular representations (figures) producing and circulating common-sense notions, so that hegemonic masculinity is won not only through coercion but through consent, even though there is never a complete consensus. For the latter, the emphasis is on masculine subject-positions (places) as an effect of discursive formations and how these positions are taken up or inhabited (practices of everyday life). Among the many implications of this work, there are two that I would like to mention here. First, once masculinity is understood as a historically specific cultural construction without fixed meanings or attributes, it is opened up to a modernist temporalizing logic that enables us to describe the changing codings of the masculine, how the meanings of White masculinity have shifted, and how they have produced our experience. In terms of feminist analysis and critique of patriarchy, it also means that the universal equation between men and patriarchy is put into question, for not all men have the same relationship to discourses and institutions of power. Second, once masculinities are opened up to poststructuralist theories of language, theories of sexual difference, and deconstruction, the polysemy and multiaccentuality of signs of masculinity become open to analysis and the very facticity of masculinity is put into question. Masculine

identity becomes impossible to define apart from its relationship to femininity and its articulation to sexualities (Doty, 1993; Fejes & Petrich, 1995), class (Aronowitz, 1992; Burnham, 1996), and race (Dyson, 1993; Mercer, 1994; hooks, 1995; Wallace, 1995; Farred, 1996). The challenge now is to conceptualize and describe more than one difference at a time, their intersection, and their interlocking effectivity, at the level of psychic processes, the self, and social relations of privilege and power.

Reciting Judith Butler Since the publication of Butlers Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990),her theorization of gender as a corporeal style, an act, as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where performative suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning (p. 139) has been influential in rethinking gender and sexuality in antiessentialist terms. Her thesis, based on rereadings of feminist and psychoanalytic theory and an analysis of the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the stylization of butch or femme identities, is that gender is a performance that maintains the retroactive illusion of a core feminine, or masculine, self. Gender impersonation, she argues, disarticulates gender signification from the poli190

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tics of truth and falsity that makes for an essential, polarized female or male identity. Following Butler (1990),I have attempted to argue that mock-macho sitcoms invite parodic laughter by parodying the mechanisms of the construction of some original domestic patriarch or macho stereotype (Hanke, forthcoming). These performances temporarily deprive the hegemonic norm of its claim to a naturalized or essentialized gender identity (Butler, 1990, p. 138). However, the light parody of mock-macho sitcoms is less likely than menin-drag sitcoms to constitute the kind of gender performance that will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and the feminine (Butler, 1990, p. 139). Nonetheless, Cohan (1995) has brought feminist film studies of femininity as a masquerade into dialogue with the theatrical rather than phallocentric implications of Butlers work to read Cary Grants masculine masquerade in North by Northwest (1959). In his historicizing reading of this performance ethic, Cohan reveals how ideologically conflicted the film is, and that its portrayal of a masculine identity crisis is not only symptomatic of new class anxieties, but that it destabilizes the relationship between gender and representation, so that masculinity (like femininity) is an ongoing and potentially discontinuous

performative masquerade (p.

46). He also suggests that be-

cause of Hollywoods institutionalization of stardom, the analysis of masculine masquerade brings to the foreground of popular representation the epistemological problems (p. 58) that Butler describes even though Cary Grants performance does not subvert gender or trouble heterosexuality. In Bodies That Mutter (1993), Butler has revised her views of gender parody and gone on to argue that denaturalization is not necessarily subversive; she now claims drag is hyperbolic conformity to gender norms, taken not as commands to be obeyed, but as imperatives to be cited, twisted, queered, brought into relief as heterosexual imperatives, are not, for that reason, necessarily subverted in the process (p. 237). In light of this, my presumption that men-in-drag sitcoms would be more subversive than mock-macho sitcoms needs to be reconsidered. However, Coates (1998), drawing on de Lauretiss notion of gender technologies and Butlers (1993) notion of femininity as the abject of masculinity, has described how a self-conscious performance of the feminine within Rocklist, a male-dominated academic discussion list on the Internet, gave gender trouble to the coherence of masculine as it is normally reiterated within the rock formation.
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Scattered Hegemonic Masculinities The combined influence of Butler and Foucault is evident in the introduction to Berger, Wallis, and Watsons collection, Constructing Masculinity (1995). Their conceptual bias is toward Butlers theorization of gender as always a doing and Foucaults theorization of power (as power/ knowledge applied to the regulation of conduct). The editors have organized contributions according to Foucaults notion of disciplinary systemsprocesses and institutions through which power is replicated and enforced, such as philosophy, culture, science, law, and political practice. Within this framework, gender dualisms or binary opposites are put into question by an emphasis on gender discontinuities, and enactment, as fluid and temporal. Although some contributors wrestle with the question, What is masculinity?, it is clear that this does not entail any straightforward description of what maleness is. It is no longer a question of being, but rather of gender thresholds and a dynamic self-recognition (Sedgwick, 1995), accomplishments, and (dis)avowals (Butler, 1995), and a prefixing of the rules of gender and sexuality; an appendix or addition, that willy-nilly, supplements and suspends a lack-in-being (Bhabba, 1995).

Other contributors explore the ways representations of men and maleness in the media and in the arts are negotiated and circulated, and how such images can produce and ultimately reshape notions of the masculine (Berger, Wallis, & Watson, 1995, p. 6-7). These contributions offer different strategies for reading modernizing hegemonic masculinities. Solomon-Godeau (1999, for example, puts the contemporary range of mediated masculinities into a historical perspective by arguing that the feminized masculinity is not merely the product of a contemporary crisis, or postSecond World War historical trauma, as Silverman (1992) has argued, but very much in evidence in late 18th- and early 19th-century French art. If heroic masculinity is always in crisis, the issue becomes how heroic masculinities manage to restructure, refurbish, and resurrect themselves for the next historical turn (p. 70). For Smith (1999, even Clint Eastwood, one of the most popular contemporary representations of masculinity, signifies troubled presentations or investigations of the kind of (or, of the image of) masculinity that they popularly stand for (p. 78). Smiths thesis is that the narrative disposition of particular tropes of masculinity does not ultimately control or delimit them (p. 80). Not only does the male pro-

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tagonist display an inability to act as the solution to narrative and social contradictions (p. 79), but- Eastwoods changeable, excessive, defective body figures male subjectivity as hysterical, that is, outside of phallic organization. The hysterical moment, for Smith, marks the return of the male body out from under the narrative process. . . (p. 92), so as to express what is unsayable in male-embodied experience. hooks (1995) examines representations of Black men in the context of White-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In her reading of films featuring Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, she argues that within White cultural productions, images of Blackness are overdetermined by a structure of competition, envy, and black male desire for white approval (p. 99). Black masculinity is reenvisioned, but only to produce a new stereotype, one that is continuous with, and reproduces, the narrative of colonialism. Finally, Ross (1995)foregrounds how hegemonic White masculinities seeking to maintain their profile of dominance are updated. Alongside other reformed violent, hard-body, he-men, Steven Segal has morphed into Eco-Man, a heroic figure Ross reads as modernizing the imagery of the frontiersman and outdoorsman by articulating White male rage to the ecology movement.

Whereas none of these contributors share a conceptual vocabulary, one theme that emerges is that neither masculine representation nor subjectivity is monolithic. At the same time, there is a clear commonality running through their conclusions: Feminized, eroticized, or androgynous representations may affirm patriarchal privileges (Solomon-Godeau); hysterical representation is designed to lead the male subject through a proving ground toward an empowered position (Smith); black masculinity continues to be represented as unrequited longing for white male love (hooks); and Segals White male rage and kick-ass conscience may be just another ruse of patriarchy (Ross). Thus a major issue is how hegemonic masculinities are refurbished, reempowered, renegotiated, and reenvisioned. Taken together, this work suggests that patriarchy reforms masculinity to meet the next historical turn, to regain the pleasure of reinforcing the norm, to fit the social climate, or to articulate the new racism. Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture (1996),edited by Paul Smith, takes up the topic of masculinities within a cultural studies rubric. In this collection, the question, What is masculinity, which, at some level, presumes the giveness of masculinity as a cultural category, is abandoned

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in favor of what Smith calls indefinite masculinity and the specificities and dispersals of masculinity and maleness (p. 2). This work proceeds from the point of view of hegemonic masculinitys othersminorities of masculinityand attempts to maintain a dual focus on the construction and the heterogeneity of subjects presumed to be male (P. 2). Ramsay, Willis, and Burnham are all engaged in film study, but this does not exhaust the analysis of popular representation, as work by Clarke and Henson, Farred, Fuchs, and Michael demonstrates. One of the major issues that emerges in the film studies is whether particular bodies of work or even particular films are subversive of conventional or idealized notions of masculinity or femininity. Ramsay and Burnham suggest that some filmic representations of maleness can be non- or counterhegemonic, and Willis advances the domestication of difference argument. Following Cohan and Harks (1993) anthology, which focuses on the disturbances and slippages in idealized Hollywood masculinities that are not easily effaced, Ramsay (1996)explores Canadian horror and fantasy filmmaker David Cronenbergs films as a minority discourse (p. 81). For Ramsay, Cronenbergs male heroes are manifestations of the forces

of idealized masculinities other that is in sharp contrast to Hollywoods rehearsal of hegemonic masculinities. Cronenbergs films deliberately blur and cross the very boundaries that define the masculine subject (mind and body, male or female, rational or irrational, conscious or unconscious) until they collapse and dissolve, and his male heroes are passive and lacking, derelicts, outsiders, exiles, and losers who carry the burden of the abject truth of masculinity. For Ramsay, the cultural significance of the violence of these characters signifies the ambivalence of men who are simultaneously attracted to, and repelled by, others. Thus, she argues, the crisis of White, heterosexual, middle-class masculinity is played out within and across the splittings of the masculine subject. Willis (1996)examines the role of fetishism in The Crying Game, a film that represents multiple differences in a narrative structured around the secret of heterosexual difference. Her basic argument is that the spectacle of Dils body and the visibility of her penis is correlated with a structural displacement of Jodys Blackness and his homosexuality. For Willis, this logic of excessive visibility and displacement works to secure both Ferguss heterosexuality and the films own address to a heterosexual viewer (p. 104). Contrary to Bordo (1994),who reads
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Fergus as an emotionally responsive, nonphallic hero without masquerade-a revisioning that is an indictment of modern masculine subjectivity-Willis argues that spectacle of heterosexual difference displaces questions of racial identity, sexuality, and politics so that the embodied materiality of black homosexual masculinity gets reduced to a picture (p. 109). For Willis, within the context of the global culture of capitalism and its marketing of difference, The Crying Games spectacle of difference is a recuperation of absolute otherness into a domesticated diversity (p. 109). Burnhams (1996) essay takes the recovery of minorities of masculinity right into the core of hegemonic masculinity represented by U.S. male action-adventure or law-and-order films. For Burnham, Harvey Keitels on- and offscreen representations call into question hegemonic American masculinity, figured as white, working-class, (perhaps) ethnic (Italian), and heterosexual (p. 113). For Burnham, Keitels characters lack is not a signifier of femininity, but of a breakdown of the masculine order and the masculine subjects dissolution from male mythology rooted in imperial experience or fantasies. Over the course of Keitels career, his performances are postmodernized, so that in The Piano, his face imitates the subaltern and

his body is revealed in full frontal nudity. Keitels body, Burnham continues, is neither classically muscular nor lithe, but his gestures reveal a certain Real.. . (p. 121). He thus concludes that Keitels work presents the possibilities of a white, working-class ethnic subjectivity that admits the Other-women, queers, people of color as a nonhegemonic subjectivity (p. 124). By foregrounding minorities of masculinity, these essays beg the question of their cultural significance and political valence, raising the issue of whether becoming minoritarian (Massumi, 1992) is an option for all subjects of late capitalism, including the traditional White, male subject. Willis seems certain that The Crying Game demonstrates that there can no telling the story of masculinity that is neither heterosexual or white, thus positing that a definite White, heterosexual subject persists through its spectacular indefinite appearances in contemporary film. Thus, Williss thesis is in tension with the thesis of dissolving or ambivalent masculine subjects at the core of Ramsays and Burnhams essays.
Newly Hegemonic Masculinities Neither Constructing Masculinities nor Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture, which lay the basis for current debate, exhausts all the pos195

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sible strategies of media analysis. In closing, I want to return to Halls observation about the body as a signifier of subjectivity, in order to single out work that attempts to put the embodied struggles of hegemonic masculinities and its various others into the context of the postmodern condition. Byers (1995,1996),Savran (1996) and Pfeil (1996)all read Hollywood rnasculinities as a cultural response to the historical trauma and identity crises wrought by the transition to late capitalism or postFordism. For Byers (1999, feminism and homosexuality become tropes of a range of economic, social, and cultural shifts and developments since the 1970s. The postmodern condition, in turn, has precipitated a profound, unprecedented identity crisis, particularly for masculine identity. In his neo-Marxian, neo-Freudian analysis of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Byerss strategy is to read the Terminator model T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the newer T-1000 as embodying the oppositions between classical and late capitalism, between a production-based industrial and a consumptionbased informational economy, between modern and postmodern culture, between paranoia and schizophrenia (p. 8). These terminators are signifiers of traditional masculine subjectivity and a

postmodern one. In contrast to the domesticated T-101, the liquid metal T-1000 embodies the schizophrenic flows that Deleuze and Guattari identify with capital as a force and capitalism as a social formation (p. 10).As a nomadic rather than monadic subject, the T-1000 represents the forces that threaten to dissolve the self, which, in turn, activate defensive psychic processes such as paranoia and narcissistic regression. Thus, in Byerss neo-Freudian reading, the T-1000 is a paradigm of paranoia and homophobia, while the T-101 is aligned with hypermasculinity, patriarchy, and the recuperation and preservation of the family, over and against all threats . . . (p. 17).This recuperation is accomplished through the domestic subplot in which Sarah Connor represents a masculinization of the female body that is delegitimated, whereas the T-100 is positioned as the legitimate Uberdad of the Connor family. Contrary to Jeffords (1 994), who suggests that the films ending signals a transition from an outwarddirected to inward-directed masculinity, Byers argues instead that the future New M a n . . . must be both more sensitive and more successfully violent than ever (p. 25). Although this analysis is phrased as both/and, Byerss evaluation is that, in spite of discernible differences between the T101 (father)and the New Man
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(son), these differences are not only easily recuperated by, but are recuperative of, the fathers dominion (p. 26). If one response to the historical trauma of postmodernity is for hegemonic American masculinity to imagine its own patriarchal future as the only 996) sane choice, Byers (1 demonstrates how Forrest Gump, through a double process of forgetting and remembering, writes the past in order to control the popular memory of this historical trauma. Byerss strategy is to show how this films treatment of history as pastiche dumps countercultural (re)constructions of the gender and race down the memory hole and figures the dominant subject not only in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, and generation, but also as a subject of contemporary, conservative historical consciousness. For Byers, Forrest represents a liberal myth (in Barthess sense. . .)of the boomer as the new man, egalitarian, sympathetic to the marginalized, and in touch with his feminine side (p. 431). At the same time, however, he lives up to fantasies of traditional masculinity, thus combining an apparent accommodation of feminism with a deep-seated misogyny (p. 432). Unlike the alien T-1000, which must be destroyed for future New Man John Connor to live (and lead), Forrest is the new man who, in his relations to (and appro-

priations of) femininity and Blackness, has united with the identities of those whose otherness threatens the white male (p. 437). In the process of forgetting of the others cultural history and social struggles, the patriarch is all that is remembered (p. 439). Within global postmodern cultural productions, hegemonic masculinities are constructed through, not outside, difference for without the Other, there would be no Same (Hall, 1996, p. 4). Hegemonic identities need the other as a constitutive outside to constitute itself in the first place and its unity (internal homogeneity) is constantly destabilized. Halls theorization of identity accounts for the fact that some work posits an indefinite, dispersed, nonphallic, nonhegemonic masculinities (foregrounding the impossibility of identity), and other work can argue that dominant fictions preserve, consolidate, recreate, and retell this imaginary identity (foregrounding the necessity of identities). If the New Man has functioned as a symptomatic figure and sign of the times, he is not the only contender for a leading position within the social imaginary. In Savrans ( 1996) analysis, for example, the white male backlash that surfaced in the media in the mid-l990s, signifies the new, white masculine fantasmatic that coalesced in the mid1970s in order to facilitate an
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adjustment to changed material circumstances by encouraging the white male subjects simultaneous embrace and disavowal of the role of victim (p. 128). For Savran, the prototypes for a new type of male protagonist were Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in Rambo, and D-Fens (Michael Douglas) in Falling Down (1993).Recent films such as Face/Off, Air Force One, Conspiracy Theory, The Game, and The Edge have expanded the array of its preferred icons, because these films feature male protagonists who perform their own contradictions, struggle with themselves as much as with evil or nature, or undergo ordeals that prove they can take pain and punishment like a man. Savrans major contribution, however, is to offer a critique of neo-Freudian film theory and its dematerializing and universalizing tenden~ies.~ First, he rereads one of the most phallic representatives of national-political phallic masculinity of the 1980s (Rambo) as a spectacle embodying opposed positiona1ities-h ypermasculinity and femininity. In his rereading, even Rambo fails to represent pure phallic masculinity. Second, he historicizes the paradigm of reflexive sadomasochism by specifying the social and economic changes of the last 30 years that gave rise to the cultural figure of the White male as victim. Rather than

grounding the fantasies and desires that this figure embodies in the Oedipal complex, Savran locates it in what he calls The Right Stuff complex. Third, he analyzes the rhetoric of Robert Bly, whose Iron John theorized the deep masculine and hailed readers into a mens movement based on imperialistic fantasies and the racialization of the Wild Man. Finally, he suggests the most emblematic victim-as-hero is Michael Douglas. So, in The Game, for example, Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy corporate potentate who experiences rejection, powerlessness, invasion of privacy, and temporary poverty. Savran concludes that this newly hegemonic masculinity has given impetus to the patriot movement and that Timothy McVeigh is an enterprising, malignant-and since Oklahoma City, suddenly demonized-variation of the White male as victim and victimizer. Pfeils White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference goes further than any other text I know of in analyzing straight, White masculinity in relation to both femininity and liberal feminism, in a way that underlines the political limitations of any (essentialist) left-feminist position that posits White, straight masculinity as a single, monolithic, absolute evil against which an interminable struggle for turf and power must be
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waged (p. xii). In his close reading of male rampage films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the 1991 cycle of sensitive-guy films, Pfeil(l996) gives greater attention to their postmodern formal elements rather than formulaic ones, as well as the complex pleasures and satisfactions these films offer as subjects living through the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. His Gramscian-feminist textual analysis demonstrates the value of close reading and is an implicit critique of more horizontal types of cultural interpretation, which gloss over the complexities of texts and the specificities of cultural and political conjunctures. In contrast to Jeffordss (1994) narrative analysis, where straight, White masculine hard bodies and their makeovers are read as historical signs of the Reagan revolution, Pfeil reads Hollywood white guys as a network of contrasts, codes and correspondences in order to emphasize the irresolutions, anxieties, and contradictions sawing away at one another within the constructs and discourses of straight white masculinity (p. 2). Jeffords (1994) argues that there has been a shift from the 1980s hard body to the late-1980s fathering films (where fathering is the vehicle for transcending racial and class difference), and to films that position their White male heroes as agents of justice on behalf of African Americans

and women. Yet, for Jeffords, there is an underlying symmetry between hard bodies that define strength either externally or internally and presidential rhetoric, which she takes as evidence of the continuity of the Reagan revolution into the post-Cold War era. Pfeil also sees gender as a coded projection that is also fundamentally present in the most popular Hollywood films, but he argues that goodbad guy dualities are often disturbed, the Other is not only resisted but partially, covertly taken in (p. 10)and, at level of rhythm and mise-tn-scene, such films express a thematics of post-patriarchal male wildness-a breakdown and rejigging of the oedipal patterns of classical emplotment (p. 27), that is inseparable, in the first instance, from postFordist modes of production. In particular, Pfeil claims the combination of male bodies and buildings literally in-corporate Fordist old and postFordist new (p. 29). So, whereas Jeffords argues that the ending of films like Terminator 2 offer only the appearance of masculinitys own negation while the narrative supplies a new direction for masculinity that works to resolve anxieties about the end of masculinity, Pfeil concludes that the wild, violent, mortified white male body at the center of male rampage filmswhose fantasies of class- and gender-based resistance to the
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post-Fordist, postfeminist world are typically turned into accommodations-may nonetheless suggest anew and vertiginous psycho-social mobility, a moment of flux (p. 32). For Pfeil, in the final analysis, no psycho-social body is ever finally closed, no imaginary ever complete or fully resolved, (p. 32), including the straight, White male imaginary. Pfeils work thus urges us to be aware when White, working mens (screen) bodies are mutating, for this means that they are open to redefinition and rearticulation. Pfeils strategy is to focus on popular films symptomatic irresolution, in which case even some male rampage or sensitive-guy films may offer not only evidence of ideological recuperation, but also of those morbid symptoms that occur when, as Gramsci said, the old is dying and the new cannot be born (P. 5 5 ) . Taken together, these studies in postmodernizing hegemonic masculinities offer varying models for analysis and critical practice that close the gap between the discursive and the material and take account of psychic processes, the self, and social relations in the present conjuncture. The foregoing discussion has not produced a definitive map of the zone of theorizing masculinity witldin the media, but it does indicate how the agenda for media studies work on the topic has been evolving. The theoriza-

tion of mediated masculinities, an argument that is to be continued, is likely to be advanced, however, only when we begin to take seriously the relevance of theory for media studies work, read across disciplinary borders, and make, as Carole Spitzack has proposed, a commitment to the destabilization of singularity in perspective.
Author Robert Hanke is on the faculty of the University of Louisville. Notes
As Conell (1995)notes, functionalist complementary sex-role theory was itself a form of normalizing gender politics. For further discussion of these positions in the context of television studies, see Hanke (1997). For a powerful and fascinating critique of, and alternative to, film theorys continued maintenance of an all-encompassing, hegemonic paradigm for the critical and theoretical discussion of film, see Shaviro (1993),whose work draws f o rm Deleuze and Guattaris postpsychoanalytic theory of the subject in order to break from Freud and Lacan.

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0 1998 International Communication Assn.

On Masculinity

Disciplinary Violation as Gender Violation: The Stigmatized Masculine Voice of Performance Studies

by Craig Gingrich-Philbrook

As with Whiteness and heterosexuality, masculinity, as a term marking unexplored privilege, has begun to inspire considerable investigation. This effort undermines the power of the previously unexplored term by demonstrating its performative, imaginary, unnatural status. However, whereas masculinity may not be natural, it nonetheless motivates a range of cultural expressions, objects or events that, apart from possessing physical characteristics, express or refer to some mental content (Rickman, 1972, p. 277). One category of these ex203