The Orientalized “Other” and Corrosive Femininity: Threats to White Masculinity in 300

Abstract

The film 300 tells a fictionalized account of 300 Spartans’ courageous stand against Xerxes’s Persian army that provided Greece a beacon of masculine strength, independence, and freedom. This study seeks to understand the racist and sexist ideologies represented in the film’s characterization of the Spartan and the Persian armies. To uncover ideologies in the film, we conducted a textual analysis focusing on the intersecting constructions of nation, race, and gender. Our findings suggest that the film advances ideological support for the duty of Whiteness and masculinity in the United States, specifically, and the West, generally, to protect itself from the external, invading forces of the Orientalized racial “other” and against the internal, corrosive forces of femininity.

“Payback for Pearl Harbor”

“…Gods way of telling japanese people there gay.” Here, it is instructive to draw upon CDA’s connection of the micro discourse to macro cultural meanings (Fairclough, 2010). The mixing of explanations might seem to be irrational on a manifest level, but the coupling makes ideological sense when considering Asian men have been feminized and represented as asexual in U.S. popular culture (Espiritu, 2004) and when considering that White backlash culture is not only a response to the perceived threat of multiculturalism but also to the perceived threat of feminism (Oh & Kutufam, 2014). One manifestation of that perceived threat is to reassert heteronormative masculinity (Kimmel, 2006).…”