Page 469 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Representat ons of Mascul n ty

in G.I. Jane (1997), and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986) and Alien 3 (1992). Additionally,
actress Hilary Swank won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance as
the cross-dressing Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry (1999).

PErForming masCuLiniTy
The idea that gender (masculinity and femininity) amounts to a performance
of a particular kind of identity can be traced back to the late 1920s, when psycho-
analyst Joan Riviere published a now famous article, “Womanliness as Masquer-
ade,” in which she suggested that women who operated in a male-dominated
field adopted a façade of femininity as a defense against any feeling that they may
be challenging the men they worked with. The idea that elements of our identi-
ties may be something that we perform, rather than inherent qualities that we
possess, gained further ground in the 1950s when sociologist Erving Goffman
suggested in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that our everyday social
interactions amount to an act of self-presentation or identity performance. The
idea that our identities are performative rather than inherent has been very in-
fluential on recent critical thinkers such as Judith Butler who, in Gender Trouble,
argues that masculinity and femininity are nothing more substantial than pure
performances of gender: scripts that are learned and internalized by individuals
and, as such, are unstable and open to variation and challenge.

FiLm anD masCuLiniTy

In modern times, writers on gender and culture have come to regard the
media as a key institution for shaping our conceptions of masculinity. Not only
are many media representations literally performances, but the media are seen as
a key source of the images of masculinity that shape contemporary ideas about
what it means to be a man. Representations of masculinity abound in all media,
of course, but our focus here is on film. As the preeminent medium of entertain-
ment for the first half of the twentieth century, and with many blockbusters of
the latter part of the twentieth century centering action on lone male hero fig-
ures, film has been a key source of debate about how masculinity is represented
in the media. We could also argue that many of television’s key scripts for men
were learned from film, such as the hard-nosed detectives of the CSI and Law &
Order franchises that reference heroes of film noir.
Much of the debate over representations of masculinity in film has focused
on what representations are acceptable, particularly so far as the depiction of
male sexuality is concerned. For much of what is known as Hollywood’s classical
period (from around 1915 to the early 1960s), Hollywood operated a system of
self-regulation known as the Production Code, which provided rules govern-
ing what sorts of representations were morally acceptable in Hollywood films.
In 1934, Joseph Breen became head of the Production Code Administration.
Breen, a staunch Catholic, held deeply conservative views about the depiction
of sexuality, particularly homosexuality, and this limited the extent to which
what Breen frequently referred to as “pansies” or “sissy types” could be explicitly
depicted onscreen.