The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Sport by Rory Magrath & Jamie Cleland & Eric Anderson

Author:Rory Magrath & Jamie Cleland & Eric Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030197995
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Analysis

Through our analysis of the ten videos of men dancing to the Single Ladies song, we identified a sense of playful masculinities running through each video. Play and playfulness can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and this was certainly the case with these performances. To help make sense of the different styles of play on show, we found it useful to draw on the concepts of pastiche, parody, and drag. For those unfamiliar with these terms, pastiche involves ‘combin[ing] imitations without regard to formal wholeness or generic unity’. A text that pastiches can therefore be ‘hybridic and heterogeneous, mixing modes, genres or styles’ (Cohan, 2007, p. 547). Parody refers to artistic work that identifies a culturally established subject and ‘broadly mimics an author’s characteristic style (and holds it up to ridicule)’ (Zinkhan & Johnson, 1994, p. 2). And drag can be viewed as ‘an ironic commentary on how gender and sex are produced by the mastery of bodily acts and gestures that signify masculinity and femininity’ (Burkitt, 2008, p. 121).

In the majority of the copycat videos, what emerged was a mixture of these elements, that is, playful masculinities were enacted through differing blends of pastiche, parody, and drag. As an example, in the Chocolate Chip Dancers version (video 6) we see the hybrid and heterogeneous elements of pastiche, with highly edited clips of close ups, freeze frames, repeated frames, and a mixture of dance styles, blended with forms of parody, with parts of Beyoncé’s original choreography imitated in a juvenile, laddish, and slapstick style designed to be humorous.

In addition to the enactment of playful masculinities, we also found a continuum of dance styles from professional to dorky. The professional dancers performed technically proficient versions of the Single Ladies choreography that seemed to challenge orthodox masculinity, showing the ways men’s bodies could move in ways coded as feminine, and encouraging audiences to appraise the men’s bodies. We argue these forms of play acted as forces of innovation and creativity, whereby male dancers were able to temporarily escape, destabilize, and subvert restrictive and essentialist forms of orthodox masculinity, and experiment with new performances of inclusive masculinities. These Single Ladies dances therefore acted as a technology of subversion by enabling the production of new masculinities, yet embedded within existing discourses.

At the other end of the continuum was ‘dorky’ dancing (Young, 2007). These socially awkward performances and parodies challenged restrictive notions that dancers must demonstrate highly proficient levels of skill and technique, yet their implications in terms of performing orthodox and inclusive masculinities were mixed. The parodied forms of dorky dancing reinforced the idea that men could not proficiently dance like Beyoncé and looked funny trying. Positioning this form of hypersexual dance as only intelligible when performed by women, the parodied dorky dances maintained a strong delineation between men and women and their gendered performances. In turn, this linked the parodies with orthodox masculinity since the effect was to reproduce essentialist discourses of (embodied) masculinity and femininity. In contrast, sincere and

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.