Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema

Fatherhood, UK political culture and the new politics

“…As Richard Collier (2009) points out, discourses about the role of the husband often intersect with those which articulate a backlash against the gains made by feminism within popular culture and thus underline the significance of 'father-rights' discourses and related representations regarding the loss of paternal possession and control for the preservation of hegemonic masculinity. The notion of 'father-rights' may sound extreme in its reactionary nostalgia for a lost patriarchal authority within the family, yet the anxieties that underpin its demands also resonate with a yearning for 'the good father' as symbolized in popular images of masculinity and fatherhood in the media and their representation in politics and popular culture in particular (Yates, 2007). 3 The past 15 years have produced some iconic representations of masculinity within UK political culture that capture broader shifts and contradictions in hegemonic masculinity and fatherhood -as symbolized by the metrosexual posturing of the guitar-playing, jeans-wearing Blair, and, following him, Cameron and Clegg, who adopt a similar 'dressed-down' style of presentation.…”

“…Yet, as Benjamin (1990, pp. 138-146) and others have noted (Yates, 2007), in mourning the loss of the father, Lasch utlilizes a 'fatherless society' critique as deployed by the Frankfurt School in the late 1940s and reproduces a particularly selective reading of Freud that idealizes the father and pathologizes the preoedipal relationship between mother and baby.…”

“…Given the inherent instabilities of masculinity as a psychosocial and cultural construction, one can argue that it is always 'in crisis' and that such contingencies were symbolized and made particularly visible in the 1990s, when the old fictions and entitlements of masculinity appeared to be less credible than previously, and the notion of 'masculinity in crisis' became widespread in academic research and popular culture (Bainbridge and Yates, 2005;Yates, 2007;Layton, 2011). As I discuss, the loss of such entitlements has been a recurring theme in popular discourses of fatherhood within popular and political culture over the past 15 years.…”

‘Video Replay: Families, films and fantasy’ as a transformational text: Commentary on Valerie Walkerdine's ‘Video Replay’

“…As Walkerdine argues, the key theme of Rocky II, and Mr. Cole's identification with it, is the active narrative of transformation. This theme -'masculinity in crisis' -has since been explored indepth by feminist scholars of media, film and cultural studies (Kirkham and Thumim, 1995;Bainbridge and Yates, 2005;Yates, 2007). Walkerdine shows us the limits of research that remains within a textual, theoretical framework and that ignores the interrelation of fantasy and the cultural context of lived, everyday experience.…”

“…Today, researchers are far more ready to own up to the pleasures of their own engagements with mainstream popular culture through films such as Rocky and through the analysis of fan culture (Hills, 2002). The identifications that take place in relation to lack and vulnerability when 'women read men' have, following Walkerdine, been explored and problematised, providing the potential for a less authoritarian and 'feminine' gaze on the part of researchers (Yates, 2007;Bainbridge, 2008). Yet, in the late 1980s, such engagements with Hollywood cinema were seen as far more problematic than they are today and constituted a sort of political 'giving in' to the consoling narratives of popular culture (a reflexive, critical analysis of such pleasures can be found in Kirkham and Thumim, 1995).…”