“Ready to do battle with the mountain”: Masculinity, Nature, and Sacrifice in Spike TV’sCoal

Abstract

This article examines the way in which Coal, a Thom Beers reality television program that aired for ten episodes on Spike TV in 2011, depicts ideas about masculinity, nature, and sacrifice. Coal is the story of a group of workers in a small mine in McDowell County, West Virginia. Like other reality television shows that focus on dangerous occupations in extreme environments, Coal accentuates the macho attributes of these workers and features a group of men putting their bodies on the line in a battle against the environment. This article suggests that the show deploys ideas about nature, tradition, sacrifice, and masculinity to construct a sense of authenticity and a narrative in which these men are struggling to survive not only the dangers of the mine but also a wider set of economic and social changes taking place across North America.

The raced and gendered persistence of human‐exemptionalism

“…Similar to male farmers' participation in extractive industrial agriculture, male miners also embed their hegemonic masculinity in successful employment in extractive industry (Bell & Braun, 2010; Feng, 2020; Kojola, 2019; Lewin, 2019; Thompson, 2019). Entanglements between local identity and the perception of oil extraction as “integral” to a “traditional” way of life have been observed in areas where the petrochemical industry is prominent (LeQuesne, 2019, p. 195).…”

“…The practices and behaviors that position men in proximity to the normalized ideal are so contextual that there is no single ideal to account for a universal situation. Thus, while hegemonic masculinity looks different for farmers (Campbell, Bell, and Finney, 2006; Peter et al., 2009; Whitley, 2021), miners (Bell & Braun, 2010; Lewin, 2019; Thompson, 2019), or urbanites whose leisure is founded on fossil‐fuel combustion (Allen, 2022; Daggett, 2018; Hultman & Anshelm, 2017; Landry, 2017), the common thread is a belief in control over the environment. The following sections explore how hegemonic masculinity manifests as environmental practices that both drive and claim to address climate change.…”

“…This is further illustrated by the voices of Indigenous women and their tribes, whose opposition to new mining operations on or near Indigenous lands are routinely overshadowed by the presence of white male workers (Kojola, 2019). In the Appalachian region and coal country around the continent, maintenance of the white supremacist, patriarchal gender structure is dependent on a human‐exemptionalism approach to the land, where coal is extracted at great cost to human—particularly nonwhite—and ecosystem health but persists as a culturally‐respected, white masculine practice (Bell et al., 2019; Feng, 2020; Kojola, 2019; Lewin, 2019; Thompson, 2019). In fact, the risk perception can be low among white residents living near coal impoundments—whose homes have been and could be destroyed from impoundment failure—as a result of the industry's cultural prominence (Greenberg, 2020).…”