ABSTRACT
Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory.
Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and questions just how secure that orthodox male position is.
Screening the Male brings together an impressive group of both established and emerging scholars from Britain, the United States and Australia unified by a concern with issues that film theorists have exclusively inked to the femninie and not the masculne: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class and generatonal differences.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |8 pages
INTRODUCTION
part |2 pages
Part I STAR TURNS
chapter |23 pages
VALENTINO, 'OPTIC INTOXICATION,' AND DANCE MADNESS
chapter |15 pages
MAMA'S BOY: Filial hysteria in White Heat
part |2 pages
Part II MEN IN WOMEN'S PLACES
chapter |16 pages
THE DIALECTIC OF FEMALE POWER AND MALE HYSTERIA IN PLAY MISTY FOR ME
chapter |15 pages
'DON'T BLAME THIS ON A GIRL': Female rape-revenge films
chapter |16 pages
DARK DESIRES: Male masochism in the horror film
part |2 pages
Part III Man to man
chapter |22 pages
ANIMALS OR ROMANS: Looking at masculinity in Spartacus
chapter |21 pages
FEMINISM, 'THE BOYZ,' AND OTHER MATTERS REGARDING THE MALE
chapter |17 pages
THE BUDDY POLITIC
part |2 pages
Part IV MUSCULAR MASCULINITIES