Browsing by Subject "Masculinity in motion pictures"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Patriarchs, pugilists, and peacemakers : interrogating masculinity in Irish film
(2008-08) Moser, Joseph Paul; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-
Examining representations of gender from a postcolonial feminist perspective, Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Masculinity in Irish Film analyzes select works of three popular filmmakers whose careers, taken together, span the period from 1939 to the present.1 I argue that these three artists--John Ford, Jim Sheridan, and Paul Greengrass--explore fundamental questions about patriarchy and violence within Irish and Irish-American contexts, and that, in the process, they upset conventional notions of masculine authority. Investigating alternative conceptions of manhood presented in these films, as well as these filmmakers’ complex engagement with Hollywood film genres, I offer a fuller understanding of their subtle critiques of patriarchy. I contend that their illustrations of socially sanctioned male dominance in the lives of women, as well as their portrayals of male and female resistance to patriarchy, constitute a subversive challenge to traditional order. In the process, I address gendered archetypes that are prevalent in Irish and American cinemas and analyze the ways in which Ford, Sheridan, and Greengrass employ and critique these masculine types through their portrayals of fathers, sons, boxers and pacifists. Ultimately, I argue that the recent Irish films of Sheridan and Greengrass gesture toward future modes of manhood that completely disavow patriarchy and violence. In sum, this project plots a trajectory of Irish cinema during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, charting a progression from ambivalent critique of patriarchy (in the films of John Ford) to outright rejection of patriarchal masculinity (in Jim Sheridan’s work) to reconceptualization of manhood and the family (in the Irish films of Sheridan and Paul Greengrass).
Tough guys, rock stars, and messiahs: genre and gender in the Hollywood musical, 1966-1983
(2004) Kessler, Kelly Kay; Staiger, Janet
This project seeks to examine how the generic norms (narratives, themes, aesthetics, performers, and performances) of integrated musicals of the 1966-1983 period diverge from those the previous era, and further, how they interrelate with the films' representations of masculinities (visually, intertextually, and bodily). While the musical has oft been discussed academically and popularly as having an underlying mission of projecting an imagined cultural utopia and celebration of romance, many of these later vehicles deviate into a subgenre which features a pattern of unsatisfactory resolutions including unrequited love (Sweet Charity [1969], At Long Last Love [1975]), failed business ventures (Camelot [1967]), and death (The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975], All That Jazz [1979]). This study interrogates emerging generic dictates in terms of narrative goals, integration of contemporary visual techniques associated with New American Cinema, and a definitively changing pool of musical male stars (eschewing Howard Keel and Fred Astaire for Steve Martin, Burt Reynolds, and The Village People), and ultimately examines their impact on the construction of a less restrictive notion of male gender.