Gender, War Heroes, and Cinema

Abstract

This entry offers an overview of the scholarship on masculinity in contemporary Hollywood war films. War heroes provide an analytical focus for film studies to examine the ways in which masculinity is defined through war film narratives. Recent studies show that two identifiable cycles in contemporary Hollywood war films have challenged the binary understanding of men/masculinity and women/femininity: the first depicts failed American heroes and interrogates the dominant discourse of war and military as expressions of manhood; the other features female protagonists and questions the alignment of men, masculinity, and heroism in mainstream war films. In order to assess the discourses of masculinity in contemporary Hollywood war films adequately, Yvonne Tasker proposes a “flexible gender model” in her critical approach to the genre's representation of heroes and heroines. Masculinity, as Tasker defines it, is not a set of identifying qualities for men, but rather a critical concept for exploring the complexities of masculinity as performed by all genders. Contemporary war films thus offer narrative conventions through which to negotiate and redefine socially constructed gender differences.