Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415077591 ISBN 13: 9780415077590

Publisher: Routledge, 1992

Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory.
Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and questions just how secure that orthodox male position is.
Screening the Male brings together an impressive group of both established and emerging scholars from Britain, the United States and Australia unified by a concern with issues that film theorists have exclusively inked to the femninie and not the masculne: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class and generatonal differences.

From the Back Cover:

Gathering together thirteen original essays by scholars in the US, UK, and Australia, as well as Steve Neale's ground-breaking article on male spectacle, this collection looks beyond the seemingly unassailable monolithic understanding of the 'masculine' which has previously dominated most film criticism.