Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media (Arnold Publication)

145 Pages·2003·7.2 MB·English

by  Kenneth MacKinnon

Representing
Men
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Representing
Menn
n
Kenneth MacKinnon
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group,
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH
http: //www. arnoldpublishers. com
Distributed in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY10016
© 2003 Kenneth MacKinnon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically,
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system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a
licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences
are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90 Tottenham Court Road,
London WIT 4LP.
The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and
accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the author nor the publisher
can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0 340 80832 2 (hb)
ISBN 0 340 80833 0 (pb)
123456789 10
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
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IV
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
PART A: The Wider Questions: Men/Masculinity/Representation 1
1. Masculinity 3
2. Men's studies and the 'men's movement' 17
3. Representation and spectatorship 23
PART B: Representation in Specific Media 35
4. Masculinity in movies 37
5. Masculinity on television 65
6. Masculinity in advertising 87
7. Masculinity in mediated sport 101
In conclusion 115
Bibliography 117
Index 125
v
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to write this book without the consid-
erable help of Learning Centre staff from the former University of North London
(now London Metropolitan University), particularly in terms of inter-library loans. A
similar debt of gratitude is owed to the former Faculty of Humanities and Teacher
Education's Research Committee for its valuable granting of research-relief resour-
cing to me.
The author and publishers would like to thank the following individuals and institu-
tions for permission to reproduce copyright illustrative material:
The Advertising Archives Ltd. for figure 6.1, bfi Collections for figures 4.2, 4.3, 5.1,
5.2, and 5.3, Phil Walter/Empics for figure 7.1, The Kobal Collection/20th Century
Fox Television/Feingold, Deborah for figure 5.4, National Film Archive for figure
4.1 and Richard Young/Rex Features for figure 7.2.
VII
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INTRODUCTION
When the word 'gender' or the term 'gender studies' is used, readers tend to think that
a discussion of women will follow. Yet, men are gendered. Masculinity is unlikely to be
an aspect of biology or nature, but popular thought sometimes believes that it is
beyond question or analysis, that it is not so much dominant as 'normal'.
There are additional reasons why men and their masculinity have evaded the sorts of
questioning applied to women and their femininity or to homosexuality. Feminism,
which has led die way in exploration of gender, historically applied most of its initial
energy to conceptions and depictions of women and femininity. Gay studies was more
concerned with considering societal reactions to homosexuality than to heterosexuality.
This meant that, for a time at least, masculinity and one of its traditional components,
male heterosexuality, escaped notice, and could continue to pose as the natural norm.
This book attempts to explore the long-protected mysteries of masculinity and, in
particular, to chart its representation in popular culture, especially from the 1980s
onwards. It falls into two halves. Part A deals with general questions surrounding men
and masculinity, and those concerning representation and spectatorship. Part B
looks at four different aspects of the mass media in order to consider the representa-
tion of masculinity in each: film, television, advertising and mediated sport.
The opening chapter of Part A attempts to understand the nature of masculinity. It
begins by considering whether gender is a matter of nature or of social education. It
then goes on to suggest die plurality of masculinities and to explore the notion and
point of 'hegemonic' masculinity, incorporating ideals and mydis towards which 'actual'
masculinities may strive but not achieve. The components of masculinity are viewed with
particular emphasis on questions of its relation to violence and to femininity.
Chapter 2 highlights the growth, within the past decade, of men's studies pro-
grammes in universities and of so-called men's movements within wider society. The
two phenomena could be distinguished, broadly, by the attention given by the former
to the realization that men are socially gendered; the latter, particularly in the case of
movements inspired by Robert Ely's Iron John, tends contrastingly to think of mas-
culinity as a sort of eternal essence which has been recently denied to men by the
over-influence of feminist thinking.
Part A ends with Chapter 3's investigation of representation and spectatorship. In
relation to the former, it considers the drawback with content analyses, that a norm of
ix