Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film

Jude Davies, Carol R. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781579582272
• eBook ISBN: 9781135958374
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Hollywood has devoted big budgets and established stars to films about controversial issues in the last ten years. Identities considered marginal have come into prominence on the big screen. The authors of this title look at the issues raised by these developments, bring together debates in identity politics with film studies, and launch an innovative theorization of the cinematic representation of identity.

Movies from ForrestGump to Philadelphia, from Malcolm X to Falling Down have been specifically concerned with multiculturalism and identity politics. This book is concerned with the meanings put into circulation by these mainstream films and audiences' reactions to them. It provides an accessible introduction to issues such as arguments over positive and negative images and the relationship between cultural representation and political power in American life.

CHAPTER I

White Masculinity as Paternity: Michael Douglas, Fatherhood and the Uses of the American Family

[T]he social and economic changes of the past two decades are beginning to call masculinity into question. The masculinity that once believed itself to be at the pinnacle of the natural hierarchy of things is now being slowly exposed for what it is: a subjectivity that is organised within structures of control and authority . . . For men who were promised recognition and a secure place in the world, there lies ahead a frightening prospect: that masculinity will be shorn of its hierarchical power and will become simply one identity among others.

Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford, ‘The forward march of
men halted’¹

When did I have the power?

Michael Douglas as Tom Sanders in Disclosure

(Barry Levinson, 1994)

This chapter is not about white males and their cinematic representations, but about white masculinity as an exemplification of constructions of gendered identity. Our project here is twofold. First, the familiar critical operation of unmasking naturalised representations of white masculinity, and second, to indicate and to trace the workings of the variety of codes involved in its construction. This is to say not only that, like all other forms of identity, white masculinity is socially and culturally constructed, but also to emphasise the reciprocal relationship between white masculinity and other codes such as those of class, generation and national identity as well as race, ethnicity and gender. Historically, Hollywood representations of white masculinity have fulfilled two major semiotic functions. They have mediated the particular identities of white male Americans, while also focusing on other cultural and social issues and identities of ostensibly universal or national scope. In great part, this simultaneous rendering of the universalising and the specific has been predicated on (and has in turn reinforced) white patriarchal power, by constructing white masculinity as a kind of default position, ostensibly lacking specificity but defining the universal in the form of the white male. For several decades academic writing on film has played a part in unmasking these strategies. While Laura Mulvey has theorised the ways in which viewing positions that are usually taken for granted are gendered, Richard Dyer has analysed the ways in which classical Hollywood constructs whiteness as racially and ethnically ‘blank’.² Critics such as Henry A. Giroux have shown how, even in ostensibly liberal movies like Grand Canyon (Lawrence Kasdan, 1991), the ‘filling in’ of whiteness as a discrete category of racialised identity may be done in such a way as to allow whites to acknowledge the importance of race and otherness ‘without having to give up their power or privilege’.³ This constitutes an erasure of historical and structural understandings of power and privilege which works in the service of the racist politics of the new right. What we are concerned to analyse in this chapter are the varied implications suggested by the turn in many films from the late 1980s, whereby white masculinity is on the face of it firmly embodied as a specific set of codes.

The proliferation of white father-figures in films of this period has provoked critical academic and journalistic discussion which has focused on representations of whiteness and masculinity in terms of a specific, limited ethnicity and of certain gendered characteristics. Since the ‘traditional’ universalising forms of whiteness and masculinity had been linked with white patriarchy, these developments have been regarded as raising the possibility of disarticulating dominant and long-established androcentrism and imperialist representations of race and ethnicity. A range of commentators have related this debate to political rhetorics and cultural discourses around a ‘crisis of white masculinity’. This last phrase, somewhat confusingly, references a range of political, cultural and historical constructions, from the ‘angry white males’, disaffected, economically and culturally disempowered and largely Midwestern voters held responsible for the Republican landslide in the 1992 mid term Congressional elections, to the notion that, in the realm of cultural representation, it is no longer possible to reconcile the specific and the universalising codes of white masculinity. Clearly, in both cases, the power and prestige of white males is perceived to be at stake. Yet the issue is wider than merely that of constructing ‘positive’ or indeed negative images of white masculinity, because of the semiotic uses of such representations to connote identities based on codes such as nationality and class.

As critics such as Tania Modleski and Fred Pfeil have shown (see below), the emphasis on paternity, and the proliferation of representations of white males as fathers in films from the late 1980s on, often function as relatively new strategies for reproducing white patriarchal hegemony by annexing personal qualities hitherto typed as ‘feminine’. The problem for critics has been that a concentration on unmasking these strategies has tended to underplay two sets of considerations. Almost programmatically, the critical moves of unmasking and deconstruction throw into shadow the possible fragilities, instabilities and anxieties over constructions of white masculinity that are not only, arguably, the focus of subsequent Hollywood movies, but that might also provide ways of contesting hegemony. At the same time, many critics have registered a discomfort with focusing on representations of white masculinity, whether in crisis or not, since this simple emphasis tends to reinscribe the centrality of white patriarchal culture. Just as we are hardly the first to notice these problems, we have no magic resolutions. Our strategic response in this chapter is to take a trajectory from a concern with fairly straightforward discourses of positive images, to a more complex sense of the intersection of codes of identity. We have chosen to focus on films featuring Michael Douglas, since in his 1990s output Douglas has deliberately placed representations of white masculinity in relation to politicised discourses of identity. First, though, it is necessary to review the academic debate over the political valencies of the ‘domesticated’ white males.

From the mid 1980s onwards an increasing number of film critics have examined the intersections between constructions of identity along the lines of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Many of these, such as Kaja Silverman's detailed, wide-ranging and sophisticated Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), situate themselves primarily with respect to classical psychoanalytic film theory, and typically they revisit and re-vision the heterosexual gender binary on which it is predicated.⁴ Cohan and Hark's 1993 collection Screening the Male contains essays which utilise psychoanalysis, star criticism and concerns with gender, ethnicity and sexuality to unpack some of the tensions between masculinity as a condition of signification and as performance.⁵ In two books edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, a variety of critics develop positions out of psychoanalytical film criticism. Kirkham and Thumim have separated out essays by male critics into the cleverly titled You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men (1993), while the more heavily theorised and self-conscious essays in Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women (1995), are written by women.⁶ These volumes seek to bridge between theoretical discussions of gender rooted in psychoanalysis and more pluralist notions of identity. Contributors to both collections take up familiar Lacanian and post-Lacanian concerns with specularity and gender, and subject them to some precise and convincing rethinking with reference to cinemas from Europe and India as well as the USA.

Other critics, while also dealing with the cinema and identity, approach film with more concern for cultural and political contexts. Concerns with masculinity and the anti-feminist backlash feature prominently in the work of Tania Modleski and Elizabeth G. Traube, both of whom examine the intersections between ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and generation as determinants of cinematic identity.⁷ The work of Susan Jeffords combines elements of both traditions. In The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (1989) Jeffords valuably treats masculinity as carrying out cultural work by displacement: discontinuities in the national self-image produced by the Vietnam War are articulated and sometimes resolved via anxieties over American masculinity. The later Hard Bodies (1994) reads across films and other cultural products to disclose a specific kind of masculinity associated with Reaganite politics.⁸

At the same time that masculinity has become named as a focus of these diverse brands of film theory, Hollywood movies have themselves been engaged in producing revisionist masculinities. Since the late 1980s representations of white males as domesticated, feminised or paternal have featured prominently in numerous films in a range of genres including comedies, romances, action movies and thrillers; so much so that the cultish but mainstream gangster movie as revitalised by Quentin Tarantino is about the only mode in which macho masculinity remains intact. Even here this is achieved by virtue of ironies and self-reflexivity at the level of form which renaturalises white masculinity rather than drawing attention to its performance. In the case of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1995), it is arguable that a parodic and homophobic construction of homosexuality serves to authenticate the straight white males.

These developments have attracted much discussion, including that by Jeffords in the books indicated above. A particular focus of debate has been the significance in terms of gender politics of shifting representations of white masculinity.⁹ In the passage from Male Order (1988) quoted at the head of this chapter, Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford link the increased visibility of white masculinity as such, along with material factors, to a crisis in the power and authority of white males. To expand their argument, it could be considered that representations of men which do not conform to traditional notions of white masculinity might play a part in destabilising patriarchal hierarchies by making visible the constructedness of ethnic and gendered identities.¹⁰ The focus of Male Order is generally on representations of masculinity which do not conform to apparently hegemonic forms, for example gay men, ‘new men’ and black men. The implications of these representations remain very debatable, since they could well serve to signal marginal versions of masculinity in relation to which the hegemonic power of straight white forms is reconstituted. So far as representations of white masculinity are concerned, the major recent shift, attracting much comment, has been the attribution to male characters of qualities traditionally coded feminine. While Chapman and Rutherford do identify a significant shift in cultural constructions of masculinity and their effects, in subsequent Hollywood movies the increased visibility of heterosexual white masculinity in racialised and gendered terms has in general not been construed as a crisis of representation or of anything else, for either white males or anyone else. Not that it has been ‘business as usual’ in late 1980s and early 1990s Hollywood, but many films (for example, but not only, the ‘male transformation movies’ discussed below) have succeeded in presenting images of softened and domesticated white males while at the same time shoring up their hierarchical position in ways which still often feature the construction of straight white masculinity as accessing a universal perspective. It is in this context that a number of critics have identified a tendency in recent mainstream films, whereby attempts to construct revisionist representations of white males are supplemented by the invocation of patriarchal authority.

Against the view of changing constructions of masculinity as progressive, various critics, among them Donna Haraway, Susan Jeffords and Tania Modleski, have suggested that the apparently new-found fluidities of masculinity serve to enable men and male protagonists to maintain hierarchical positions by appropriating qualities traditionally regarded as feminine. In a 1993 article Jeffords identified a particular genre concerned with defining and redefining masculinity in quite explicit ways. These were what she termed the ‘male transformation movies’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s, from Regarding Henry (Mike Nichols, 1991) and The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991) through to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), and, we might add, Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993).¹¹ While welcoming certain aspects of these changes in representations of men, Jeffords is generally critical, quoting Donna Haraway's telling comment that ‘ the image of the sensitive man calls up, for me, the male person who, while enjoying the position of unbelievable privilege, also has the privilege of gentleness’.¹²

A similar argument is rehearsed by Fred Pfeil in White Guys. Returning to the male transformation films recognised earlier by Jeffords, Pfeil goes further in excoriating the strategic use in these movies of the acquisition of sensitivity by male protagonists in order to preserve patriarchal power. For Pfeil, the point for the heroes of what he calls the ‘sensitive guy’ movies of 1991 ‘is not finally to give up power, but to emerge from a temporary, tonic power shortage as someone more deserving of its possession and more compassionate in its exercise’.¹³

This position is further extended by Elizabeth G. Traube in her discussion of domestic men in Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender and Generation in 1980s film.¹⁴ Traube shows how, in the Steve Martin vehicle Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989), the trials of fatherhood are delineated as stemming from the need to balance success in the public sphere with domestic responsibilities, whereas female characters have to choose between the two, their families suffering if they choose career. By the end of the movie Gil, played by Steve Martin, is enabled to have a measure of success both at work and as a devoted and responsible father. Not only does this reinforce patriarchal power through allowing male protagonists to appropriate ‘feminine’ qualities, it also denies female protagonists the potential of inhabiting cross-gendered positions. Whereas Gil can have it both ways, the women of the film must sacrifice family for career, or vice versa. Thus, while the gendering of domesticity and the public sphere has been loosened, it is freed up in one direction only. For Traube, even the domestication of the male protagonists fails to sustain close inspection. As she drily points out, ‘Parenthood includes several scenes of women in the kitchen preparing, ser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Uses of Identity in Post-Reagan Hollywood Film
• 1 White Masculinity as Paternity: Michael Douglas, Fatherhood and the Uses of the American Family
• 2 Transactions in Race and Ethnicity: Positive, Negative and Interrogative Images of African Americans on Film
• 3 Putting the Homo into America: Reconstructing Gay Identities in the National Frame
• Conclusion: Aliens from Star Wars to Independence Day
• Index