Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film by Hannah Hamad

Author:Hannah Hamad [Hamad, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Men's Studies, Popular Culture, Gender Studies, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781135088835
Google: 0iJmAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-15T04:52:17+00:00

Paternalizing the Boy-Man in Contemporary Film

The salience of man-child masculinity, manifest in the plethora of immature adult male protagonists in contemporary film, has seen this figure join figures like the ‘metrosexual’ and the ‘new lad’4 in becoming a paradigmatic configuration of postfeminist masculinity. In a foundational conceptualization of his incipient prevalence, Daniel Dervin points to the subgenre of the “guy film,” via Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s canonical theorization of homosociality,5 arguing that protagonists of these films “operate in intermediate spaces between boys and men, partaking of both while constrained by neither,” and “find their comfort zone in a homosocial matrix.”6 Similarly attesting to the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, Gary Cross, in his sociohistorical contextualization of boy-man masculinity, makes clear that American culture has a history of equating masculine maturity with economic achievement, social power and domestic provision (i.e., the breadwinner father), and thereby of equating adult immaturity with failure and deficiency in these areas,7 a cultural logic that continues to inform configurations of this character. More recently, as Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker observe, the boy-man emerges as “One of the most distinct representational trends in contemporary Hollywood,” and “arguably operates as the most distinctive prototype of contemporary media masculinity.”8

The boy-man’s normalization as a negotiation of hegemonic masculinity is now a given in treatises and commentary on current movie masculinities, indicative of its ubiquity, most visibly in star-led comedian or male ensemble comedy and melancholic male melodrama. Nick Pinkerton, reviewing The Hangover Part II (2011), avers that the boy-man protagonist “has long replaced the taciturn westerner as the American male’s favourite projected self,”9 while Steve Rose, posing the obvious question arising from their representational omnipresence of why there are “so many movies about guys who won’t grow up,” hones in on the tendency of immature film protagonists “to stretch out that period between adolescence and parenthood to the extent that it becomes a prolonged state of infantile bliss.”10 He thus gestures toward Dervin’s notion that extended adolescence is a liminal state, wherein white masculinity appears stranded in a stasis of anxious uncertainty about the path to mature manhood, which is evasively sidestepped. Reviewing melancholic comedy of masculine immaturity Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), A.O. Scott expounds on this figure’s appeal when he writes:

The reluctance—or outright refusal—of ostensibly grown men to behave like adults is more than just a favored theme of modern movie comedy. It is an axiom, a principle, a worldview. The varieties of male immaturity seem almost infinite, even if the guys on screen are almost always white, middle class and at least presumptively, if not always successfully, heterosexual . . . balancing the pitiable traits of slackness and aggression with more appealing qualities of sweetness and honesty.11

Scott thus highlights the extent to which this figure is normalized, its strikingly classed and raced dimensions, and the discursive quid pro quo necessary for this simultaneously valorized and derogated cultural figure to be negotiated. Michael Kimmel relatedly discusses this extended adolescence for white middle-class masculinities stuck “between adolescence and adulthood,” 12 collapsing this space into the term “Guyland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.