Giving Hegemonic Masculinity a Face Lift: Masquerade in John Woo's Face/Off and the Somatechnics of Masculinity in Crisis

In 1990s America, the question of what made a ‘real’ man was at the forefront of debates about sex and gender. During this pivotal moment in American history, hegemonic masculinity in particular was experiencing numerous threats to its ontological security. For instance, masculinity was infamously pronounced in crisis, the advent of the ‘new man’ betrayed anxieties about an image-conscious and feminine performance of masculinity, and there was mounting social pressure from civil rights, feminist, and queer groups for straight, white, masculinity to be challenged as the centre of the patriarchal stage. In short, the issue for masculinity in the 90s was that of legitimacy. The response from Hollywood was an influx of films which featured leading men in costume, disguise, or masquerade. John Woo's Face/Off is one such film that betrays anxieties about the constructedness of hegemonic masculinity. Face/Off does so through the motif of plastic surgery. In this article, I will explore how Face/Off uses the image of plastic surgery to represent the masculinities of its male protagonists as masquerades. I will demonstrate how plastic surgery in Face/Off is a device which transforms hegemonic masculinity so that it may adapt to the climate of crisis and secure its continuation. Face/Off demonstrates that masculinity is a construct which masquerades as an ontology.

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Socialist/Marxist Feminism

Literary and Critical Theory ◽

10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0088 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Wendy Lynne Lee

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Sex And Gender ◽

Communist Manifesto ◽

Original Intent ◽

Wide Range ◽

Women's Lives ◽

And Gender ◽

Material Conditions ◽

The 1960S

The long arc of Marxist scholarship certainly reaches many domains—economics, sociology, political ecology. However, few scholarly projects have likely benefited more, or offered more, to sustaining the relevance of Marx and Marxism than the feminist analysis, interpretation, and application of the Marxist critique of capitalism. From the earliest translations of Marxist thought into revolutionary action, socialist feminists have sought to introduce sex and gender as salient categories of capitalist oppression, arguing that being a woman bound to patriarchal institutions such as marriage is comparable to a working-class laborer bound to the wage. Friedrich Engels also plays a key role in the socialist feminist appropriation of Marxist ideas. By showing the extent to which marriage is about the maintenance and expansion of property, Engels opens the door to a wide range of analysis concerning the material conditions of women’s lives and labors. Marxist ideas become the focus of renewed interest over the course of the American civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. It is thus unsurprising that a wealth of new feminist and antiracist theories begin to develop during this period, as well as analyses of structural inequality, including oppression with respect to the LGBTQ community. It is perhaps the most recent work among socialist feminists, in league with other activists and theorists, however, that is both truest to Marx’s original intent and that demonstrates the relevance of his ideas to the future fortunes of human societies, namely, the application of Marxist critique to environmental deterioration—especially anthropogenic climate change. Hence, the following is organized historically but also topically. It begins with the work of early socialist feminists, looking to include women within Marxist categories of class analysis but quickly moves to arguments that sex and gender—and then race/ethnicity and sexual identity—constitute their own salient categories of oppression. This explosion of theory and activism deserves to be treated topically so that the variety and breadth of socialist feminist ideas as well as the divisions and debates among its representatives becomes clear. The critique of capitalism has, of course, always been an essentially global enterprise. It is thus not surprising that the extension of socialist feminist analyses to the Global North and Global South would produce a wealth of insight and activism. For many of the same reasons, the same is true of the rise of socialist ecofeminism. The last section comes full circle. Devoted to arguments whose focus is the justification and fomenting of revolution, The Communist Manifesto finds its place next to contemporary socialist ecofeminist calls for workers from all regions of the planet to unite to overthrow once and for all the capitalist economic system responsible for jeopardizing the planet’s capacity to support life.

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The Politics of Sex and Gender in Latin American History: New Perspectives

Radical History Review ◽

10.1215/01636545-2003-85-265 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 2003 (85) ◽

pp. 265-271

Author(s):

S. J. Smith

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

American History ◽

Sex And Gender ◽

Latin American History ◽

And Gender

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Feminist Psychology in North America

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.665 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Kate Sheese

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Theory And Practice ◽

Feminist Psychology ◽

Sex And Gender ◽

Institutional Practices ◽

Women's Lives ◽

The Face ◽

And Gender

Feminist psychology as an institutionalized field in North America has a relatively recent history. Its formalization remains geographically uneven and its institutionalization remains a contested endeavor. Women’s liberation movements, anticolonial struggles, and the civil rights movement acted as galvanizing forces in bringing feminism formally into psychology, transforming not only its sexist institutional practices but also its theories, and radically challenging its epistemological and methodological commitments and constraints. Since the late 1960s, feminists in psychology have produced radically new understandings of sex and gender, have recovered women’s history in psychology, have developed new historiographical methods, have engaged with and developed innovative approaches to theory and research, and have rendered previously invisibilized issues and experiences central to women’s lives intelligible and worthy of scholarly inquiry. Heated debates about the potential of feminist psychology to bring about radical social and political change are ongoing as feminists in the discipline negotiate threats and dilemmas related to collusion, colonialism, and co-optation in the face of ongoing commitments to positivism and individualism in psychology and as the theory and practice of psychology remains embedded within broader structures of neoliberalism and global capitalism.

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