Troubling Masculinities

Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11

Glen Donnar

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496828583
• eBook ISBN: 9781496828590
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: North American History

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of "terror-Others, " from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood's attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Remasculinizing American Cinema Post-9/11
• 1. “Shielding Us from What We Are Not Yet Ready to See”: The Uniformed Hero as Victim and in Masquerade
• 2. “I Don’t Know Why This Is Happening”: Shamed Everymen and America’s Own Unknowable Monsters
• 3. “I Can Still Fix This”: Restoring Protective Masculinity and/but Becoming a Monstrous Savior
• 4. “A Variation of Vengeance”: The Inadequacy of Revenge in Remasculinizing the Nation Abroad
• Conclusion: “How Do You Love Your Family and Leave Them to Go to War?”
• Notes
• Filmography
• Works Cited
• About the Author