Page 468 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Representat ons of Mascul n ty |

Italy and is particularly pronounced in statuary created by the Nazi regime in
Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is an ideal of masculinity that still persists
to some extent today, sometimes in a greatly exaggerated form found within
the relatively marginal subculture of body builders, but also in more main-
stream representations of masculinity (see the discussion of Stallone, Willis, and
Schwarzenegger below).
The longevity of these idealized images of masculinity and the widespread
adoption of these ideals within an array of different cultural contexts can have
the effect of endowing this ideal of masculinity with an aura of naturalness; in
effect, repeated exposure to these images conditions our everyday understand-
ing of what a man should be like, so much so that we assume that it is men’s
nature to be muscular, athletic, and competitive. However, more recent thinking
on the subject suggests that it is more accurate to think of gender not as natural
condition but as a set of practices that are performed by the individual, a “script”
that is acted out. Understood in this way, it is possible to see that the singular
term, masculinity, is not really adequate to describe the variability and com-
plexity of every way of performing manhood, and for this reason it has recently
become more usual to talk about masculinities in the plural and to recognize
that there may be significant variations between different types of masculinity.
Most particularly, ideas about masculinity have been subject to historical and
geographical variation: what it means to be masculine may be very different at
different historical times and in other parts of the world. Even in a particular
historical moment and geographical location, there will be considerable varia-
tions in masculine types, particularly when gender intersects with other major
components of social identity such as race and ethnicity to produce specific
masculine identities.

FeMale MasCulinity

If masculinity is nothing more than an elaborate masquerade, if the relationship between
masculinity and the male body is merely an arbitrary convention rather than an essential
one, then is it possible to have masculinity without the male body? Yes, according to certain
thinkers working within “queer theory,” most notably Judith Halberstam. Halberstam argues
that the most complicated and interesting manifestations of masculinity are to be found not
in the normative straight white male but in the more transgressive forms of gender iden-
tity encountered in women who perform masculine identities: the “stone butch,” the “drag
king.” These gender performances are not perverse or deviant appendages to normative
gender configurations, but illustrate the constructedness of all gender identities and reveal
the role played by power in elevating certain normative identities to privileged positions of
widespread acceptance.
This detachment of masculinity from the male body may be most striking when witnessed
in overtly gay and lesbian contexts, but these are not the only manifestations of the phe-
nomenon. Several well-known, mainstream Hollywood movies have utilized images of pow-
erful, muscular women: Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Demi Moore