Browsing by Subject "Masculinity"
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Item Between Brothers: Brotherhood and Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages(2015-07) Bradley, CameronFamily relationships and responsibilities fundamentally shaped medieval life. This dissertation examines aristocratic brothers in order to understand how elite men negotiated the pressures of gender and kinship in the context of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). Brothers lived in the shadow of idealized brotherhood, which entailed loyalty, support, cooperation, and love. Yet a number of structural obstacles to harmony between brothers existed in the later Middle Ages, and perhaps most critically, brothers also were men—thus implicated within masculinity. The martial elites of this study were subject to what I call “chivalric masculinity,” a version that privileged prowess, honor, courage, reputation, and the pursuit of dominance through competition. Noble and royal brothers therefore stood at the intersection of essentially incompatible paradigms: peaceful and cooperative ideal brotherhood, and violent and competitive chivalric masculinity. Using both narrative and documentary sources, including the chronicles of Jean Froissart and Enguerrand de Monstrelet, wills, decrees, letters, legal proceedings, and accounting records, the dissertation explores case studies of brothers’ rivalries and alliances in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The primary geographical focus is France and England, but it also includes cases situated across Europe, with an in-depth analysis of the fifteenth-century Breton brothers François, Pierre, Gilles, and Tanguy. The dissertation argues that chivalric masculinity was a significant factor in relations between elite brothers. Masculinity shaped, steered, and constrained men’s behaviors, establishing the menu for the sorts of actions brothers—as men—could or should undertake. Brothers’ quarrels thus stemmed from the competitiveness of masculinity along with obvious catalysts such as vulnerable thrones, contestable inheritances, and the lure of prestige and influence. Secondly, it argues that some of the elements that drove brothers apart also could facilitate their cooperation. Rather than signal a failure of masculinity, fraternal cooperation indicates the presence of sufficiently compelling reasons to restrain the impetus to competition. The dissertation shows, thirdly, that despite many examples of fraternal strife, ideal brotherhood remained an important and influential paradigm in later medieval society. Even brothers who fought used its rhetoric in their quarrels, reinforcing its cultural weight even as they manipulated it to their own ends.Item Hungry for More: Anthony Bourdain and the Cultural Valorization of Chefs and Cooks(2016-08) Bergh, JustinFood, food media, and celebrity chefs make up an increasingly important element of the cultural industries. The craze is not altogether new, but the cultural relevance and ubiquitous appearance of chefs in all forms of popular media is a relatively recent phenomenon. Anthony Bourdain, although by no means the first celebrity chef in the era of cable television and omnipresent chef personae, did introduce a new and important image of chefs in the culinary media industry, what I call the “chef underground.” For this brand of chef the kitchen represented an escape from mainstream culture and values. The kitchen was not a sight for self-promotion or entrepreneurism, but rather a space that allowed for a prolonged commitment to subcultural participation. The kitchen was, and is, of course, a space of labor exploitation. Yet, for those travelers in the chef underground the kitchen allowed for the development of a transient existence, relatively free from outside scrutiny as well as normative notions and expectations of workplace and lifestyle behavior. By identifying and detailing the alternative social and cultural dispositions of the chef underground in his writing—and aligning himself with them—Bourdain at once managed to construct a unique anti-establishment media persona for himself as well as render the once nebulous group of outsider chefs and cooks legible in mainstream consumer culture. This dissertation investigates the cultural influence of the new archetype of chefs following Bourdain’s rise to prominence. In the midst of a broad cultural valorization of chefs and cooks, the promotion of Bourdain’s anti-establishment persona through multiple mass media created a new popular image of professional chefs. The previously unglamorous career of working in a restaurant kitchen was transformed into a cool and authentic occupation and subcultural formation. This dissertation explores the cultural significance of this re-articulation of chefdom by employing multiple methodological approaches in order to understand how the re-presentation of chefs and cooks after Bourdain’s rise to fame has affected the everyday lives of individuals working in contemporary professional kitchens and influenced the broader culinary and media industries.Item The Influence of Social Media Use on Male College Students’ Gender Identity and Gendered Performance(2017-05) Potts, LawrenceTo better understand the influence of social media use on male college students’ gender identity and male gendered performance, this research examined existing research on digital identity and social networking sites, male gender identity development, college student development theory, and the effects of living arrangements on college students. Using constructivist grounded theory, this study was guided by the following research question: How does the influence of social media use on male college students’ gender identity and gendered performance affect first-year students and graduating seniors? A total of 31 students at a private, liberal arts institution in the Midwestern United States participated in the study. Methods included individual interviews, synchronous ethnographic digital observations, and focus groups. The theory that emerged from this study was developed through analysis of students’ experiences and is a representation of the intersection and convergence of male gender identity development and digital identity development. Participants described changes that occur between the first year of college and the final year of college, both in the way that they define masculinity and the way that they describe their use social media. A shift occurs throughout time spent in college, evolving from pre-college expectations and assumptions to the intentional alignment of in-person and online values. Formative experiences and opportunities in college – including both in-classroom and out-of-classroom – provided the impetus for change that allowed the participants to better understand their identities and contexts and begin to understand how they engage with both the physical and digital world as men.Item The Kaleidoscopic Unsaid: Voice, Memory, and Body of the Afro-Americas(2019-08) Ramos Flores, HectorThis dissertation explores the self-representation of Afro-diasporic subjects in the Americas through the kaleidoscopic unsaid. In this metaphor the kaleidoscope is the global power structure while the unsaid is the articulation that emerges for these subjects within this world order. Using three case studies that reveal how the power structure shifts and moves within the local structures, I show how Black subjects constantly navigate a self-representation that is malleable and constantly shifting that both re-inscribes and resists the power schema. In the first chapter I demonstrate how the Autobiografía de un esclavo (1836) of Juan Francisco Manzano encounters issues of voice and agency for the former enslaved person. The second chapter engages with memory and trauma of Black subjects in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2006) by Junot Díaz and in The Farming of Bones (1996) by Edwidge Danticat. Finally, with the films Pelo malo (2013) by Mariana Rondón and La playa D.C. (2012) by Juan Andrés Arango Garcia I show how the Black male body and hair fluid sites of resistance. Together these three chapters show how the subjects in these cultural productions maneuver in such a way that showcases their multifaceted reality, pushing against the often one-dimensional representations that are imposed on them. Ultimately this dissertation attempts to decolonize stagnant representations of Black bodies in the Americas.Item The Old Longing Camp(2023) Nerburn, Nicholas K.Nik Nerburn writes about the disappearance of his great-grandfather in 1930, and goes on a road trip around Lake Michigan to look for his grave.Item Peak Politics: Resource Scarcity and Libertarian Political Culture in the United States(2013-06) Schneider-Mayerson, MatthewMy dissertation uses the "peak oil" movement as a lens to analyze the convergence of apocalyptic environmental thinking and libertarian political culture in the recent United States. The "peak oil" movement was a twenty-first century American social movement of Americans who came to believe that oil depletion and other environmental problems would lead to the imminent collapse of global industrial society. Dedicated adherents developed a rich subculture, primarily online, and prepared themselves for the "post-carbon" future by conserving energy, changing occupations, and even purchasing land. Drawing on surveys of over 1,500 participants, ethnographic research, discourse analysis of peak oil websites and literary analysis of subcultural fiction, my research reveals a group of mostly white, male, liberal Americans struggling with the perceived threat of economic, environmental and geopolitical decline while the country undergoes a broad shift in political culture: the continued rise of libertarian ideals, accelerated by the influence of Internet technology. I view this apocalyptic subculture in the context of petroleum dependence, eco-apocalyptic discourses, the environmental discourse of "limits to growth," white masculinity, climate change, and the influence of conservative individualism on American political culture.Item Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama(2021-06) Hyeon, YoungbinAbstract “Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama” analyzes how works of Asian American drama illuminate conflicted father-son relationships, labor, and states of alienation. Dramatic works by Asian American writers from the 1970s to the 2010s present key examples of the intersection of race and labor and the possibilities of father-son reconciliation. I look beyond previous scholarly approaches to Asian American literature and drama that focus only on the language and culture differences within families or explain the conflict between parent and child as an inevitable culture clash between different generations. This culture-oriented approach fails to consider how attitudes towards work affect the changing demographics and social expectations of Asian America. I argue instead that that these conflicts are symptomatic of U.S. race ideologies that dictate the nature of Asian American working lives and alienation that excludes Asian Americans from more fulfilling forms of labor (what Marx called the “life of the species”). Borrowing from Marxist theories, my dissertation argues that Asian Americans have been exposed to capitalistic and racialized self-alienation from their earliest histories in the U.S., and they still continue to experience it in the contemporary world. I also contend that this Asian American self-alienation informs many dramas of father-son conflict. In these intergenerational plays, the legacy of alienation and alienating work is both inherited and resisted, giving rise to serious and often violent events. Chapter One illuminates how Asian American father-son conflict is intertwined with the history of labor. I examine the historical origins of Asian stereotypes such as the “Perpetual Foreigners” and “Yellow Peril,” labor-based stereotypes about Asian Americans that have been constantly reproduced in American popular culture. These representations reinforce the self-alienation of Asian Americans by confining them into particular social roles. In this context, I analyze Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (1988). This play presents two Asian American actors who have differing views on how the professional actor might take responsibility as a representational laborer. The play illustrates how agreeing to play a stereotype not only brings about one’s self-alienation, but also help to popularize stereotypical images in culture and media, which in turn affect new generations. Chapter Two focuses on the alienation of Asian American men through their social roles in everyday life. Specifically, I illuminate how they are alienated from their masculinity by having to take on labor that defines them as emasculated. Frank Chin’s two plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The Year of the Dragon (1974), show how such gendered and racialized forms of work are accepted by father characters but resisted by their sons. Their defiance of their fatherly models signify a larger challenge against white America and how older immigrant generations have played into racial and ideological hierarchies. This chapter expands upon Chin’s concepts of the “real and the fake” in which he directed younger generation Asian Americans towards defying the dutiful acceptance of oppressive labor. Chapter Three examines the “model minority” myth as another form of alienation that is formative to destructive Asian American father-son relationships. I argue that this myth, which pictures Asian Americans as hard-working, uncomplaining, and family-oriented contributors to the American economy, works as a form of colonial mimicry and a method of preserving white control over Asian Americans’ upward mobility and social status. This myth was thus founded upon the presumption of compliance with racist, capitalist, and heteronormative regimes. In Chay Yew’s Wonderland (1999) and Julia Cho’s Durango (2006), older generations cope with the consequences and lack of self-fulfillment, while younger generations negotiate their autonomy. Both generations wrestle with compliance to work and heteronormative family structures. These plays show that even while a father’s specific job is not passed down to his son, the son still winds up inheriting the anxieties caused by these compulsory forms of compliance so foundational to the father’s mindset. Chapter Four questions the ways that the racialized and gendered binaries of labor are maintained and challenged in the new century. If the binary of alienating labor and non-alienating labor is itself an arbitrary distinction, how can the cycle of alienating labor can be overcome? Julia Cho’s Aubergine (2016) provides an answer, suggesting that the cycle can be broken only with the deconstruction of the dichotomous views of work and home. In this chapter, I firstly analyze how culinary labor has been racialized, gendered, and undervalued for Asian Americans, and then move on to examine how Cho restores the original meaning of the labor of cooking. Aubergine portrays a son reconciling with his dying father through cooking as an act of love; Cho turns the father-son conflict caused by labor into a father-son reconciliation enabled by the value of work. By examining the simultaneous recuperation of working lives and father-son relationships, I illuminate how Asian Americans’ understanding of labor, alienation, and family may have evolved since the days of Frank Chin. I end with an epilogue that discusses how several other examples—Aasif Mandvi’s 1998 play Sakina’s Restaurant, Lloyd Suh’s 2015 play, Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, and award-winning 2020 film Minari—show the continued preoccupation of Asian American playwrights and filmmakers with these themes.Item Rescuing men: the new television masculinity in Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Boston Legal, & Dexter(2009-11) Nettleton, Pamela HillA distinctive television genre has emerged in the shadow of 9/11: the male-centered drama. The Shield (FX), Nip/Tuck (FX), Dexter (Showtime), Rescue Me (FX), and Boston Legal (ABC) feature a distinctive discourse about the experience of modern American manhood that departs from previous programming in its reflection of post-backlash feminism and post-9/11 masculinity. The "masculinity crisis" in these dramas is a narrative shift away from earlier masculinity crises blamed on various social changes and then-emerging feminism. In the wake of 9/11, male-centered cable dramas offer what was previously infrequently seen on television: intense and intimate engagement with men's anxieties, failures, and contradictions, amid sometimes regressive gender politics. As the Twin Towers collapsed, so did swaggering American heroism; the male archetype was quickly reconfigured to allow for heroes who are uncertain and flawed. Gone is the cock-sure Cold War "rescuer" (Dragnet) who never questioned himself or his country and always had all the answers, replaced by the deeply anxious "rescuers" (Rescue Me) who struggles with fractured family relationships and is haunted by victims they could not save. The new television masculinity is part reinscription of patriarchy, deceptively cloaked in feminist-friendly behaviors. It is also part resistance to patriarchy, and an attempt to grapple directly with what it means to be masculine, inventing a myriad of possibilities rather than reverting to a single, hegemonic icon. Both parts merit uncloaking and thoughtful, probing criticism. The critical and commercial success of these dramas signals that these narratives emerging at this time reflect important cultural shifts that resonate powerfully with critics and audiences. This study considers what is at stake in the issues raised in these dramas, what makes them emerge in popular culture at this point in time, and what kinds of cultural and social work is being done by these mediated images.Item The wound at the heart of vision: fraught masculinities, marked bodies, and the subject of disability(2013-06) Kanyusik, William BradleyThis dissertation examines disability's presence in World War II-era literature and film in the context of broader cultural anxieties regarding masculinity and the place of the American man at midcentury. Because disability disrupts understandings of the body and sexuality in both military settings and society at large even today, this dissertation sheds light on contemporary debates surrounding disabled veterans, connecting these issues to a broad crisis of American masculinity that emerged following the Second World War. While scholars in disability studies have often read disability in literature and film primarily as a problematic signifier for otherness, and psychoanalytic film critics have seen disability more broadly as a representation of lack itself, this dissertation argues that neither of these positions fully accounts for the role disability assumes in literary and cinematic texts produced in the United States following World War II. In particular, this work deals with texts depicting a sudden onset of disability and its impact on the sense of self for person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of an `able' body, These texts demonstrate how an unexpected injury transforms a subject's body from `able' to `disabled' and, as such, shifts the individual's subject position from within the gendering matrix to one that exists outside that matrix, making visible the structures enabling our shared notions of heteronormative masculinity. Returning home from war, disabled American GIs learned to live with broken bodies presenting a constant reminder of the lasting impact of wartime violence otherwise absent in America's pristine postwar landscape; these men faced particularly pronounced difficulties reintegrating into postwar American society, due largely to the destabilizing effect of physical disability on traditional, heteronormative notions of masculinity. Film and literary representations of disabled veterans--which stage a sudden loss of masculinity in a subject that once epitomized maleness through his physicality--demonstrate the fragile nature of all masculinities in the postwar era.