Rehabilitating Hegemonic Masculinity With the Bodies of Aging Action Heroes

2020 ◽  
pp. 178-196
Author(s):  
Kelvin Ke
Keyword(s):  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Aging Male ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Action Cinema ◽  
Action Hero

The aging action hero has become an important figure in post-millennial action cinema. Its significance can be seen in how aging heroes can be seen in such franchises like The Expendables (2009 – 2013), Taken (2008 – 2014), The Fast and the Furious (2001 – 2017), Mission Impossible (1995 – 2018), and James Bond (2006 – 2015). In the following chapter, it is argued that the aging action hero and the aging male body is significant because they provide an opportunity to rehabilitate the tropes of hegemonic masculinity and the indestructible male body by emphasizing the benefits of the aging male body and where male toxicity is replaced by wisdom and maturity; egocentricity is replaced by allocentrism. As a result, the presence of the aging hero shows the dynamism of action cinema in offering different and alternative visions of heroism and heroes.

Racializing heterosexuality: Non-normativity and East Asian characters in James Bond films

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mie Hiramoto ◽  
Phoebe Pua
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
East Asian ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Film Series

AbstractThis article investigates how naturalized models of hegemonic masculinity affect race and sexuality in the James Bond film series. Through close analysis of film dialogue and paralinguistic cues, the article examines how the sexualities of East Asian female and male characters are constructed as oversexed and undersexed, respectively. The analysis therefore affirms Connell's (1995) conception of white heterosexual masculinity as exemplary: East Asian characters are positioned not only as racial Others, but as bodies upon which Bond's heterosexual masculinity is reflected and affirmed as normative and, by extension, ideal. In this way, race is curiously invoked to ‘explain’ sexuality, and Bond's unmarked white masculinity becomes the normative referent for expressions of heterosexual desire. By showing how the sexuality of East Asian characters is typecast as non-normative, the article gestures toward the possibility of theorizing racialized performances of heterosexuality as queer. (East Asia, James Bond, sexuality, race, masculinity, femininity, normativity, film)*

scholarly journals Keyword: Action

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Yue
Keyword(s):  
Engaged Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Action Cinema ◽  
Action Hero

My keyword today is action. No, it’s not about Meaghan Morris the action hero! But it is about Meaghan Morris as a woman of action. It is also about Meaghan’s work on action cinema and cultural research as engaged scholarship in action.

scholarly journals Shape Shifting Masculinities: Accounts of maleness in Indian man-to-animal transformation horror films

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Mithuraaj Dhusiya
Keyword(s):  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
A Site ◽  
Hindi Film

University of DelhiUnlike the werewolf myth, on which there is a significant corpus of takes in Hollywood cinema, Indian horror films abound in snake-, tiger- and gorillatransformations. Most of these shape-shifting monsters represent aberrant subjectivities that set in motion a cycle of destruction and redemption within these narratives. This article will explore how the male body in Indian horror films acts as a site of different bodily discourses that permits a reading of socio-cultural crises within the societal framework. Although there are almost a dozen Indian horror films to date that deal with such shape-shifting monsters, this article will limit itself to studying one Hindi film Jaani Dushman (1979, dir. Raj Kumar Kohli) and one Telugu film Punnami Naagu (1980, dir. A. Rajasekhar). The following core questions will be explored: do these narratives challenge the constructions of hegemonic masculinity? What departures from normative masculinity, if such a thing exists at all, take place? How do these narratives use horror codes and conventions to map the emergence of different types of masculinities? How can these bodily discourses be correlated with various contemporary socio-political issues of India?

Confronting the impossibility of impossible bodies: Tom Cruise and the ageing male action hero movie

2017 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
Lisa Purse
Keyword(s):  
Physical Performance ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Action Films ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Ageing Male ◽  
Action Hero

This chapter discusses ageing action stardom by examining the physical performance of a range of ageing male action stars in post-2000 action films with a focus on Tom Cruise. In the context of a film franchise predicated on the achievement of the impossible, it analyses how Cruise confronts his own encroaching inability to perform the impossible. The chapter suggests an intense cultural negotiation over the ageing male body and makes the differentiation between Cruise who defies the age-related decline narrative and other stars who do not.

Chapter 9: Forever Functional: Sexual Fitness and the Aging Male Body

2005 ◽  
pp. 161-187
Author(s):  
Barbara L. Marshall ◽  
Stephen Katz
Keyword(s):  
Male Body ◽  
Aging Male

scholarly journals Hard bodies and sidelong looks: Spectacle and fetish in 1980s action cinema

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicky Falkof
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Action Cinema ◽  
Action Hero

From Stallone and Schwarzenegger to Gibson and Willis, the Hollywood action star of the 1980s was a hard-bodied hero with an attitude to match. But more than this, the action hero was an ideological construct; referenced by the president, ubiquitous in popular cultural production and reception of the time, his excessive muscularity forms a complex and problematic textual canvas for reading the hegemonic desires of Reaganite America. I this paper I consider cinematic relations to the heroic body through the dual prism of Freud’s conception of fetishism and De Bord’s formulation of the spectacle. Using the work of film theorists like Metz and Mulvey, cultural historians Susan Jeffords and Yvonne Tasker and psychoanalyst Kaja Silverman, I illustrate that the hero’s spectacular body operates as a fetish for the viewer, and thus that spectacle is fetish. Films to be considered include Rambo, Terminator and the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series.

Off the Leash and Out of Control: Masculinities and Embodiment in Eastern European Stag Tourism

Sociology ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 977-991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Thurnell-Read
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Consumption ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Heavy Alcohol ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Heavy Alcohol Consumption ◽  
Physical Effects

Entrenched conceptions of masculinity have constructed the male body as bounded and controlled. This article discusses the centrality of a particular construction of the male body to the phenomenon of British premarital stag party tourism to Eastern European cities. Drawing on data from participant-observation in Kraków, Poland, it is shown that the tour participants enact an embodied masculinity which is unruly and unrestrained. The stag tour experience is embodied through the use of clothing and incidences of nudity, public urination and vomiting, and the detrimental physical effects of heavy alcohol consumption. This embodiment is self-destructive and frequently self-parodic. The failures of participants to sustain a controlled and contained body are celebrated as part of the enactment of a boisterous masculinity. This represents a release from normative pressures concerning the male body but, with transgression being only temporary, also acts to support the ritualistic reinscription of a wider hegemonic masculinity.

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