InMediaThe French Journal of Media Studies 

2 | 2012Performing/Representing Male Bonds

Electronic versionURL: http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/301DOI: 10.4000/inmedia.301ISSN: 2259-4728

PublisherCenter for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW)

Electronic referenceInMedia, 2 | 2012, « Performing/Representing Male Bonds » [Online], Online since 15 November 2012,connection on 24 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/301 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.301

This text was automatically generated on 24 September 2020.

© InMedia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Performing/Representing Male Bonds

Performing/Representing Male BondsRaphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction FilmsMarianne Kac-Vergne

The Reluctant Patriarch: The Emergence of Lads and Lad Mags in the 1990sNick Growse

Seducing Women to Assess Each Other: Male Hierarchies within the Seduction CommunityMélanie Gourarier

Midlife Pop Masculinities in the Here and NowChris Tinker

Varia

British Party Election Broadcasts (2001, 2005 and 2010): Ideological Framing, Storytelling,IndividualisationDavid Haigron

Bibliographical Essay

‘Locus of Control’: A Selective Review of Disney Theme ParksThibaut Clément

Interview

At the Crossroads of Media, Media Critique, and the Critique of Media critics – An Interviewwith Serge Halimi, Editor-in-Chief of Le Monde DiplomatiqueSerge Halimi and Christine Larrazet

Critical Perspective

Social CognitionDivina Frau-Meigs

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Conference and Seminar Reviews

Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television8-11 July 2012, Monash Prato Centre, ItalyOliver Haag

The Translation and Reception of Multilingual Films 15-16 June 2012, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3Samuel Bréan and Jean-François Cornu

Contemporary Screen Narratives17 May 2012, Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of NottinghamFabrice Lyczba

Internet Studies in EuropeSymposium on Internet and Society, 25-28 October 2011, Humboldt University, BerlinICTs and Society Conference,2-4 May 2012, Uppsala University, UppsalaMathieu O'Neil

Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers, 16th SERCIA Conference8-10 September 2011, University of BathJulie Assouly and Marianne Kac-Vergne

Book Reviews

Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : les Artistes américains contre la guerre en IrakParis : Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.Delphine Letort

Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (eds), Major Problems in American Popular CultureBoston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.Elsa Grassy

Carol MacKeogh, Díóg O’Connell, Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the1990sCork: Cork University Press, 2012, 176 p.Estelle Epinoux

Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11New York & London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.Delphine Letort

Rock History and CultureChristophe Pirenne, Une histoire musicale du rock (Paris: Fayard, 2011, 800 p.); Claude Chastagner, De la culture rock(Paris: PUF, 2011, 277 p.)Éric Gonzalez

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Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie et Pierre-Antoine Pellerin(dir.)

Performing/Representing MaleBonds

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Performing/Representing MaleBondsRaphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-AntoinePellerin

EDITOR'S NOTE

This dossier was followed for InMedia by Divina Frau-Meigs and Nolwenn Mingant.

Masculinity, Men, Male

1 In 1993, Michael S. Kimmel published a ground-breaking article entitled “Invisible

Masculinity,” which began with a particularly striking opening statement: “American

men have no history.”1 Kimmel argues that even if history books are largely written by

men and are about men, they do not deal with the experience of men as men. Thus, for

Kimmel, men have no history as “gendered selves” and the effect is to render the

multiplicity of masculine identities invisible. Thanks to the work of feminist scholars

over the past four decades we have been able to recognize the different manifestations

of invisible hegemonic masculinities. As Stephen M. Whitehead informs us, the fields of

Masculinity and Men’s Studies have thus been able “to turn attention to men in a way

that renders them and their practices visible, apparent and subject to question.”2

2 Rather than attach themselves to hegemonic masculinity as a unified normative

practice guaranteeing men’s domination over women, the articles in this issue of

InMedia will attempt to render visible some of the practices that construct and define

the various relationships between men as well as structure the homosocial spaces in

which they take place. Concentrating on the performances of masculinity, the articles

featured here focus on the representations made of male bonds in and through

different media in the English-speaking world. Though the notion of ‘performance’

here is to be understood as both the observable behaviour of one group of people as

well as the carrying out of an operation that has been commanded, one must also bear

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in mind Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity. Butler distinguishes between

performance and performativity where “gender proves to be performative – that is

constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing,

though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.”3 For Butler,

gender is “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame”4 where the

subject, masculine or feminine, is not free to choose the performance of their gender

because the subject only exists within performative gender acts. The articles collected

here deal both with Butler’s understanding of gender identity but also with media

representations of the performances of masculine subjects and how these are received

by different communities of men, whether it be actors in film, male models on the

covers of men’s magazines, online avatars or singers on a stage.

3 It is important at this point to map out the vocabulary used when discussing

masculinity. Defined as the “qualities regarded as characteristic of men”,5 the simple

denotation of the noun ‘masculinity’ does not preclude its application to women.6

There is a suggestion in this dictionary definition, however, that if a subject does not

demonstrate masculine qualities it would be difficult to identify it as a man. The state

of being a man and having masculine characteristics appears inextricably linked as

R.W. Connell confirms:

4 In its modern usage the term assumes that one’s behaviour results from the type of

person one is. That is to say, an unmasculine person would behave differently: being

peaceable rather that violent, conciliatory rather than dominating, hardly able to kick

a football, uninterested in sexual conquest, and so forth.7

5 It is the definition of the characteristics of men, that is to say the quality of men as

societal and cultural beings, which must retain our attention. In the precise context of

male bonds, the articles featured here also tackle the question of men as social beings

defined by and through their associations with other men.

6 The adjective ‘male’ refers us back to a purely biological notion designating the sex that

can fertilize the opposite sex but cannot bear offspring itself.8 Yet, as we continually

swim against the current of connotation, it is impossible for such a term to remain

impervious to suggestion, inference and interpretation. In this manner, to be male is to

be robust, vigorous and virile; it is, of course, to be ‘manly’. Beyond grouping together

these attributes, however, such terms as ‘maleness’ and ‘manliness’ are meant to help

constitute an identifiable group, a group that can position itself in an ‘us against them’

logic wrapped up in such dictionary definitions as “the type of strength, fortitude, or

hardiness traditionally associated with men as opposed to women or children” 9 (our

italics).

7 It is important to analyse dictionary definitions as they often remain the primary

source of information when trying to stabilise the meaning of words. However, as we

have seen these definitions are not thorough enough when trying to understand the

social and cultural impact generated by such complex terminology. The articles

published in this issue of InMedia address, with vital critical insight, these difficult and

intricate notions through the links and ties that constitute different communities of

men. These male bonds are understood to be complex societal phenomena that

function as part of an integral whole, not in opposition to but in relation with women as

well as other men and groups of men.

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Why Study Men and Masculinities?

8 Like femininity, masculinity is an exclusion procedure, a code that protects us against

individualism and the expression of freedom of others. Where speakers violate these

codes the system traditionally reacts by categorizing non-masculine behaviour in men

as pathological, obscene, perverse, deviant or simply criminal. Thus, as Donald E. Hall

remarks, the system must work to police against such behaviour: “[t]he prevailing

gender and sexual paradigms of an era regulate everyone’s lives, working to curtail

possibilities and relentlessly push sexual/erotic relationships into socially acceptable

channels.”10

9 Masculinity and femininity it follows are second order codes, special categories of

political fiction operating at the level of the social system. Second order codes are

organic, however, bent on being all-inclusive, and gradually non-masculine behaviour

is subsumed and ingested by what one may wish to call hegemonic masculinity.

10 As the American historian E. Anthony Rotundo reminds us: “Manhood is not a social

edict determined on high and enforced by law. As a human invention, manhood is

learned, used, reinforced, and reshaped by individuals in the course of life.”11

Moreover, if men can subvert rules by virtue of their cognitive autonomy, they can

push back the boundaries of masculinity, of what is socially acceptable for a man to say

or do without compromising his identity as a man. Nick Growse’s article presented here

examines how British men’s magazines today tackle issues that had long been

perceived as feminine concerns by the British press such as parenting and health. At

the same time, Growse demonstrates how these magazines also reject traditional heroic

forms of athletic masculinity which their readership appears to view as ‘unmanly’.

Chris Tinker’s article on 1980s male pop singers shows how new forms of masculine

identity become acceptable through performances that revolve around sensitivity and

androgyny, feminizing a musical tradition that had so far relied more or less

exclusively on virile and even aggressive performances.

11 Through the evolution of different media representations, the extension of what

masculine is and the way we understand masculine identities change over time. Along

with the question ‘What is it to be masculine?’ comes its phenomenal bedfellow: ‘What

is it to be perceived as masculine?’ In other words, masculinity as a cognitive fiction, or

gender script, participates in the construction of reality at the self-referential and the

hetero-referential levels. Its function lies in the communication of socially useful

codifications between men and women but also amongst men themselves. The media

has played an important role in producing and reproducing masculine gender scripts,

especially the media directed at a male audience such as men’s magazines which are

dominated by articles written by men about men for men. Like discourses that

construct our understanding of history, religion, the law, science, politics, philosophy,

etc., we must recognise that masculinity is itself a masculine construct. As Connell

stresses, the study of this systematic authoritarian “hegemonic masculinity” becomes

essential in understanding how the world around us has been fashioned.12

12 Like all other second order codes, masculinity is governed by a number of societal

rules; it is a heteronomy. What place then is left to the autonomy of authenticity, of

staying true to oneself, of legislating one’s self? This question is central in

understanding the heuristic fiction of masculinity. For Stefan Dudink therein lies a

paradox that it is important to address, where “men adhering to these norms and

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expectations can at the same time live in a nearly untouchable aura of individuality, in

a powerful fiction of just being themselves.”13 Moreover, if social contexts change and

mutate over time, then so too must the heuristic fiction of masculinity. Indeed, if we

conceive of the possibility that several social contexts can co-exist, so then must we

conceive of the possibility of several masculinities co-existing. Once gender theory had

understood this, it could challenge these fictions by defining and redefining them, as

Hall writes:

13 Key then to gender theory of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is a

meta-commentary on such contextual embeddedness and ‘arbitrariness’ which allows

the gender theorist and political activist to challenge discriminatory laws, popular

perceptions and offensive discursive commonplaces. All such theoretical

categorisations and their at once enabling and resulting (or, in other words, self-

reinforcing) lived, interpersonal systems of behavior became newly perceived as

socially constructed and therefore potentially deconstructable through concerted

analytical work and political action.14

14 If, as we have argued, there is not one but many co-existing and conflicting

masculinities, if gender is a fiction, a cultural construct, then it is contingent and is

open to perpetual redefinition. Thus, studying men and masculinities, as constituting a

series of discrete groups must be understood as vital.

Crisis of Masculinity

15 According to Hélène Cixous, feminist critical theory has come to threaten the stability

of masculinity.15 Indeed, the development of feminist criticism and gender theory

appears to have led to a proliferation of literature on the disruption of masculinity and

the success of such publications as psychiatrist Pr. Anthony Clare’s On Men: Masculinity

in Crisis16 (2000) bears witness to this. In his book, he begins by addressing the phallic

question of masculine insecurity: “Male preoccupation with their penises would appear

to be based on fear, right enough: not on the Freudian fear of castration, but on the

Alderian fear of ridicule. Are we up to it? ask today’s men anxiously, peering at their

shrivelled cocks and analysing their social skills […].”17

16 “Are we up to it?” The rhetorical nature of such a question underscores the self-

reflexive nature of masculinity, which projects masculine qualities as defined by men

onto the male subject. According to Clare, the sense of ridicule to which he alludes has

a dual origin: men performing their hypermasculine role on the one hand, and women

ridiculing men’s obsession with the size of their penises on the other. For sociologist

William Simon, the fear of castration hides a number of anxieties that “can also serve

as a defence against one’s hostility towards one’s own penis, as a metaphor for a

complex array of anxieties regarding shifting expectations and uncertain futures.”18 It

is within these “shifting expectations and uncertain futures” that a sense of crisis is

born.

17 Simon understands one aspect of the fear of castration as developing from the bonds

that tie masculinity to a sense of belonging to a particular social class; thus the

homosocial comes to play a fundamental role. For instance, if the working class

struggle was often seen to be a male specific struggle, a man who aspired to social or

professional mobility would find himself qualified with feminine attributes. Teresa de

Lauretis understands the system of gender identification as both a sociocultural

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construction and a semiotic tool, i.e. as a system of representation that ascribes specific

signs to individuals within a particular group such as social class, sporting prowess, job

type, etc.19 Problems appear to arise, then, when signs and their signification shift

within a particular category, for instance when women leave the home and enter into

the masculine workplace.

18 If the function of masculinity lies in the communication of social constructions, so

these codifications find themselves mediated through different forms of cultural

expression, from the press to film, from the internet to music. As signifying codes and

operative fictions are propagated through different media, so the increased social

exchanges allow for our understanding of such notions as masculinity to be moved

forward. The articles presented here thus show how cinema (Marianne Kac-Vergne),

men’s magazines (Growse), the internet (Mélanie Gourarier), and pop music (Tinker) all

participate in the production, reproduction, and sometimes disruption of certain myths

and rituals of homosociality. Further, with new technology speeding up communication

on a global scale and the development of new media allowing for a proliferation of

messages targeting evermore sub-defined social groups, we can expect masculinity to

continue pluralizing and fragmenting. The evolution of the ‘buddy movie’ genre

studied by Kac-Vergne is exemplary in this respect, though the inclusion of Afro-

American characters in such films, as Kac-Vergne demonstrates, is not necessarily as

progressive as one might think and the racial bias of such movies needs to be

questioned thoroughly.

19 Though these changes in the way we represent the notion of masculinity are a force for

deconstruction, in this context the communication of masculinity itself necessarily

becomes less and less stable. As Mike Featherstone demonstrates, the instability

provoked by the globalisation of culture leads to a reaffirmation of more secure

traditional values: “An increasing familiarity with ‘the other’ […] may equally lead to a

disturbing sense of engulfment and immersion. This may result in a retreat from the

threat of cultural disorder into the security of ethnicity, traditionalism or

fundamentalism […].”20

20 This type of reaction serves to construct an ideology of nostalgia. Hence, in order to

counter a sense of ‘masculinity in crisis’ provoked by an all-inclusive worldview,

certain responses attempt to reconstruct a collective sense of identity at the local level.

The availability of new media, however, means that the local need no longer be defined

by a sense of place and can identify communities that share specific common interests

across the planet like the virtual communities analysed by Gourarier. Attempts at social

control through processes of reconstruction will never be able to stop manifestations of

social non-conformity from emerging, and this is further underlined with the

development of new media, as Hall explains: “New technologies today further

complicate this dynamic as individuals no longer even need to be in physical proximity

to find each other, discover common ground, and privately or publicly proclaim a

shared identity.”21

21 Thus, it becomes impossible to separate the global from the local; there is an intricate

complex tension between the two that cannot be ignored. This phenomenon, whereby

an ever more available worldview would lead to a ‘retribalization’, had already been

identified by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. Having recognised the importance of

what were to become new technologies, McLuhan spoke famously of the global village,

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where the worldwide communication of local cultures allows the individual to escape

the conformity of society:

22 Individual talents and perspectives don’t have to shrivel within a retribalized society

[…]

23 The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far

more diversity and far less conformity within a family group than there is within an

urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity

lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-

village conditions being forced by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity

and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the

global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable.22

24 In light of this, we must perhaps revaluate a sense of hegemonic masculinity as being

simply prescriptive. Indeed, even the most hermetic totalitarian regime can be

subverted through samizdats, irony and parody, armed resistance, silence.23 The

articles presented here all contribute to the analysis of various strategies of resistance

that media representations of male bonding resort to, subverting the very imagery they

relied on for so long such as cross-dressing in pop music performances (Tinker),

avatars in online communities (Gourarier), parody in buddy movies (Kac-Vergne), or

ambiguity in men’s magazines (Growse). In this way hegemonic masculinity may well

have embedded in its very nature a propensity for crisis, as Connell suggests:

“Hegemony, then, does not mean total control. It is not automatic, and may be

disrupted – or even disrupt itself.”24

25 Once again, if masculinity, hegemonic or otherwise, is not a rule imposed by a higher

power but a social code that has been culturally defined and identified as the most

common consensus then it is a product of its time that will necessarily evolve. Further

to this, Connell reminds us that different media offer a stage for the performance of

hegemonic masculinity, which then feeds back into society guaranteeing us the

comfort of our own received ideas on gender practice:

26 At any given time, one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted.

Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which

embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy,

which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the

subordination of women […].

27 This is not to say that the most visible bearers of hegemonic masculinity are always the

most powerful people. They may be exemplars, such as film actors, or even fantasy

figures, such as film characters.25

28 As the consensus on hegemonic masculinity shifts through time, so the representation

of male heroes in Hollywood, for example, has moved from George Bailey to Rambo,

from Obi-Wan Kenobi to Alan Garner.26 It is perhaps within the gaps provoked by the

shifts in gender practice that the sense of crisis is created until the situation is once

more stabilized and the new consensus rendered available as signifying codes through

different media.

29 The term ‘crisis’ deserves significant attention especially if we are to escape trite uses

of the much media-hyped expression that ‘crisis of masculinity’ has become. At one

level, a crisis can be understood simply as a critical point that requires some form of

resolution through decisive action. If the crisis is not resolved then a point of no return

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is reached. In Jürgen Habermas’s early writings, crisis is understood as a means to

political emancipation if responded to by a combination of decisive action and self-

knowledge. Here, the idea of self-knowledge is crucial, relying on society’s capacity, or

indeed, on an individual’s capacity, to be self-reflexive and thus relying on their ability

to reveal to themselves the illusions that they have been harbouring about themselves.27

30 As Habermas developed his theory on crisis, he engaged with systems theory. A system

is a structure which draws on natural resources from its environment to transform

them into a product (from consumer goods to the health service) and Habermas came

to see a crisis as a failure in such a system.28 Concentrating on capitalist systems, for

Habermas, crisis tendencies come to represent the potential for failure (from the

absence of natural resources to strike action). For Connell, however, it is difficult to

talk of a crisis of masculinity because masculinity itself is not a system. We must,

therefore, return to the question of gender practice:

31 The concept of crisis tendencies needs to be distinguished from the colloquial sense in

which people speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’. As a theoretical term ‘crisis’ presupposes

a coherent system of some kind, which is destroyed or restored by the outcome of the

crisis. Masculinity […] is not a system in that sense. It is, rather, a configuration of

practice within a system of gender relations. We cannot logically speak of the crisis of a

configuration; rather we might speak of its disruption or its transformation. We can,

however, logically speak of the crisis of a gender order as a whole, and of its tendencies

towards crisis.29

32 Whether it is gender in general or more specifically masculinity itself within which

crisis tendencies can be identified, we cannot negate the fact that the practice of

gender or masculinity is performed by human beings. As Andrew Edgar underlines,

however, “[s]ociety may be modelled as a system, but at the end of the day it is made up

of real people making real decisions.”30 A system cannot resolve its own failures,

indeed, only people can identify crises through self-knowledge. In this way, when we

read of a crisis of masculinity perhaps we must understand it as a failure of operative

fictions within gender relations recognized as such and requiring decisive action for

social codifications and practices to evolve.

The Mediation of Male Bonds

33 The much talked about crisis of masculinity could be qualified in part as a ‘crisis of

representation’.31 Different forms of media representation contribute to this, acting, on

the one hand, as a prism through which meaning is constructed and, on the other, as a

mirror reflecting back into society a perceived form of reality. In this way, the media

and mediated representations become the voice of authority that dictate and forbid

certain social roles for men and performances of masculinity; they become the

purveyors of the hegemonic masculinity of the time.

34 However, as we have seen hegemonic masculinity has built within it a capacity for

change, and it contains crisis tendencies. As Hall insists, following on from Foucault,

there is always a need “to multidimensionalize power relationships to resist reducing

them to a simple top/down model of socio-sexual regulation.”32 Indeed, the more

hegemonic the system, the more threatening the resistance. Hegemonic masculinity,

therefore, can only lead to new male bonds that attempt to redefine what is socially

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acceptable even if, as Hall reminds us, “paradigm shifts occur very slowly.”33 As this

introduction suggests then, different media representations continually confront us

with a paradox that Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac an Ghail identify as social

problems seen through the eyes of “common-sense psychology”:

35 On the one hand, media representations suggest that this ‘what about the boys?’

narrative, which they have been central in projecting, is a late modern(ity)

phenomenon. On the other hand, they draw upon rather atavistic ideas – an amalgam

of common sense and scientific theories – making appeals to an earlier imaginary

gendered social order, based on biological differences between men and women. These

images are accompanied by a nostalgic remembering of a ‘golden past’, when men and

women occupied established gender roles in a stable social system.

36 The popular media script follows a familiar format in which particular social issues are

selected: the absent father, the violent football fan or the underachieving male student,

for example.34

37 The idea of “common sense-psychology” reminds us of the positivist strategy of gender

characterisation which aims to offer an empirical categorisation of masculinity by

defining men as what they actually are. As Connell points out, however, categorisation

is a “process of social attribution using common-sense typologies of gender,”35 which

means the system is based on assumptions and suppositions about masculinity. Rather

than define what men are, the normative system attempts to portray men as what men

‘ought to be’. In light of media representations this is perhaps the most prevalent

system we have discussed, where the performance of masculinity corresponds to the

social consensus. Here, exemplars such as film actors/characters, sportsmen, singers,

are presented as and come to represent role models of masculinity.

38 The process of defining itself can be conceived as an exclusion procedure, the

masculine being what is not feminine. This is how the semiotic strategy functions, as a

system that attributes signs of symbolic value that attempt to differentiate between

masculinity and femininity. This ‘war of the sexes’ system is very limited as it excludes

from the equation relationships with other social systems, such as consumerism or war,

and the effects of these systems on gender construction. Finally, the most commonly

available signifying codes are born out of the essentialist strategy where certain

behaviour traits and characteristics are held to be biological truths. In this way men are

genetically programmed to buy technological gadgets and fight wars. It is this approach

that provokes Robert De Niro’s character, Jack Byrne, in the films Meet The Parents36 and

Meet the Fockers37 to question whether his future son-in-law, nurse Gaylord Focker, is

man enough for his daughter. Though this is a wry critique of reactionary attitudes

towards masculinity, it is the approval of De Niro’s portrayal of the father figure that is

sought throughout the two films.

39 As the articles collected here show, beyond these strategies it is the relationships that

men and women forge and the social interactions with which they engage that define

their gender identities. Gender practice, both in performance and representation, is

socially and culturally constituted through bonds that connect people together. In the

words of Connell:

40 Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object (natural character type, a

behavioural average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships

through which men and women conduct gendered lives. ‘Masculinity’, to the extent the

term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the

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practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects

of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture.38

41 Today, male bonds – from kinship to friendship, from the homosocial to the

homosexual – continue to present an intriguing and complex multidisciplinary area of

study that remains under-examined. If Judith Butler’s principle that gender is

performed holds true, then it becomes an important exercise to explore how media

representations of these relationships between men feed into the performance of the

relationships themselves.39 Through different media these relationships come to be

defined both by their performance and reception, changing the way male bonds are

constituted and function in society. However, Butler's notion of performance also

opens the possibility of playing with the norm, so that one is not bound to the values

that certain media representations convey.

42 In film, buddy movies shift the focus from the traditional romantic male-female

relationship toward heterosexual male comradeship allowing for explicit expressions

of homosocial friendship. With the popularity of action movies in the 1980s a new

crossover genre developed combining action and homosocial relationships producing

such film franchises as 48 Hrs40 and Lethal Weapon,41 where idealized images of the male

hero are offset by expressions of a masculinity in crisis. Parallel to this, or perhaps as a

reaction to this, science fiction action movies came out of Hollywood portraying what

Marianne Kac-Vergne calls ‘hypermasculine’ male machines that are invincible and

invulnerable. With the emergence of biracial buddy movies from the 1970s onwards,

Kac-Vergne asks if hypermasculinity can be seen as “the aggressive concretization of

hegemonic masculinity, the reassertion of the white man’s superiority in Reaganite

America”.

43 In the written press, the popularity of men’s magazines, or ‘lads mags’, may have done

much to transfer attention away from the notion of the caring sensitive ‘new men’ by

trying to make expressions of chauvinism acceptable, but they also gave space to

articles on such topics as men’s health and fatherhood, therefore, recognizing a change

in how certain men viewed themselves as individuals and consequently recognizing a

change in how they viewed the male groups to which they belong. Nick Growse studies

the representation and reception of masculinity in different categories of men’s

magazines and observes that if in continental Europe such publications portray men as

healthy and sporty, these images are rejected by the British male audience as

‘unmanly’. Growse identifies a paradox in British men’s magazines where “the

representation of masculine weakness is generated by men for male consumption”.

Through a number of case studies, Growse demonstrates that the discourse of these

‘lads mags’ creates a community of male readers that positions itself as a resistance to

the dogma of hegemonic masculinity.

44 The Internet has served to accelerate how male bonds are defined and redefined,

asserted and reasserted. Online communities have moved the concept of societies from

the local to the global allowing for an unprecedented upscaling of potential affinities.

This has allowed for the once negatively-viewed societal status of being a ‘geek’ to be

given a public forum, whereas, conversely, some online communities that focus on

male sexual prowess have preferred to retire behind private fee-paying portals. In both

cases, however, the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 allows for peer-review on a global

scale which may lead to mass recognition or mass humiliation. As Mélanie Gourarier

demonstrates, though the medium has changed, perhaps here we still find practices of

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male bonds that continue to construct frameworks that ensure male domination, not

over women, but over subordinated masculinities.

45 Simon Reynolds has argued that pop music has developed an obsession with its own

past and the popularity of musical nostalgia tours bear witness to this.42 According to

Chris Tinker, the re-emergence of artists promoting the music that made them famous

a generation ago appears to have created a new space for ‘midlife masculinities’ to

express themselves. Here, masculinities appear to be performed knowingly, as if the

passing of time has afforded these male artists the distance necessary for social

reflexivity. This has allowed such pop stars of the 1980s as Boy George, Jason Donovan

and Rick Astley, to escape characteristics traditionally attributed to hegemonic

masculinity, such as aggression, domination and heterosexuality, and challenge the

discourse of midlife maturity “through the importance attached to emotion and

sensitivity, a reduction in work related competitiveness and the expression of a more

detached, light-hearted, even flippant, attitude”.

46 This special issue follows on partly from the international conference Performing the

Invisible: Masculinities in the English-Speaking World, organized at the Université Sorbonne

Nouvelle-Paris 3 on September 25-26, 2010 (http://www.men.univ-paris3.fr) and

sponsored by the university’s research groups CREW and PRISMES, its postgraduate

school EDEAGE-Etudes Anglophones, Germanophones et Européennes, its research council

and its division for international relations. The conference was part of the two-year

transdisciplinary research project Performing Straight White Masculinities, sponsored by

the Sorbonne Nouvelle's research council. The editors of this special issue wish to

thank the conference’s organizing committee, namely Ariane Blayac, Sophie Chapuis,

Claire Conilleau, Claire Delahaye, Marianne Kac-Vergne, Marie Moreau, Emilie Piat and

Hélène Quanquin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge,

1990.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine B. Clement. La jeune née. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975.

Clare, Anthony. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. London: Random House, 2000.

Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

De Lauretis, Teresa. The Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Dudink, Stefan. “The trouble with men: Problems in the history of ‘masculinity’”. In European

Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (1998): 419-31.

Edgar, Andrew. Habermas: Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

Featherstone, Mike. Undoing Culture. London: Sage, 1995.

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13

Grant, C. B. Literary Communication from Consensus to Rupture. Theory and Practice in

Honecker’s GDR. Amsterdam/Atlanta (GA): Rodopi, 1995.

Grant, C. B. “Probleme des Öffentlichkeits-Begriffes im Verorten von Literatur.” LUMIS-Schriften

University of Siegen 45 (1996): 20pp.

Habermas, Jürgen. Theory and Practice. Translated by John Viertel. Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1976 (1971).

Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. London: Heinemann,

1976 (1973).

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Hall, Donald E. “Gender and Queer Theory”. In The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory,

edited by Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, 102-14. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

Haywood, Chris and Máirtín Mac an Ghail. Men and Masculinities. Buckingham: Open University

Press, 2003.

Kimmel, Michel S. “Invisible Masculinity”. Society 30, no. 6 (1993): 28-35.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan.” Playboy Magazine, March 1969,

http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_03.html.

Meet the Parents. Dir. Jay Roach. Perf. Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Teri Polo, Blythe Danner, and

Owen Wilson. United States: Universal, 2000.

Pease, Bob. Recreating Men: Postmodern Masculinity Politics. London: Sage, 2000.

Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber, 2011.

Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution

to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Schaper, Eva. “The Kantian Thing-in-Itself as a Philosophical Fiction”. The Philosophical

Quarterly 16, no. 64, History of Philosophy Number (July 1966): 233-43.

Simon, William. Postmodern Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1996.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames and

Hudson, 1999.

Whitehead, Stephen M. “Men”. In International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, edited by

Michael Flood, Judith Keegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle, 401-05. Abingdon:

Routledge.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 2008.

NOTES

1. Michael S. Kimmel, “Invisible Masculinity,” Society 30, no. 6 (1993): 28.

2. Stephen M. Whitehead, “Men,” in International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, eds Michael

Flood, Judith Keegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 402.

3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990),

25.

4. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33.

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5. OED Online, June 2012, s.v. “masculinity, n.”, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114566?

redirectedFrom=masculinity (accessed August 27, 2012).

6. For further reading see Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press,

1998).

7. R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 67.

8. Within the context of this definition, it is important to note that there are cases of transgender

men who, having retained a functioning womb and ovaries, have given birth.

9. OED, s.v. “manliness, n.” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/113556?redirectedFrom=manliness

(accessed August 27, 2012).

10. Donald E. Hall, “Gender and Queer Theory,” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, eds

Simon Malpas and Paul Wake (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 103.

11. Anthony E. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the

Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 7.

12. See Connell, Masculinities.

13. Stefan Dudink, “The trouble with men: Problems in the history of ‘masculinity’”, European

Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (1998): 425.

14. Hall, ‘‘Gender and Queer Theory,’’ 106.

15. Hélène Cixous and Catherine B. Clement, La jeune née (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975).

16. Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (London: Random House, 2000).

17. Clare, On Men, 6.

18. William Simon, Postmodern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1996), 94.

19. Teresa De Lauretis, The Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1989).

20. Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture (London: Sage, 1995), 91.

21. Hall, ‘‘Gender and Queer Theory,’’ 104.

22. Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy Magazine, March,

1969, http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_03.html (accessed August 6, 2012).

23. For further reading see Colin B. Grant’s Literary Communication from Consensus to Rupture.

Theory and Practice in Honecker’s GDR (Amsterdam/Atlanta (GA): Rodopi, 1995) and “Probleme des

Öffentlichkeits-Begriffes im Verorten von Literatur.” LUMIS-Schriften University of Siegen 45 (1996).

24. Connell, Masculinities, 37.

25. Connell, Masculinities, 77.

26. These are characters respectively from It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), First Blood (Ted

Kotcheff, 1982), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and The Hangover (Todd Philips, 2009).

27. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1976a

(1971)).

28. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1976b

(1973)).

29. Connell, Masculinities, 84.

30. Andrew Edgar, Habermas: Key Concepts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 31.

31. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames and

Hudson, 1999) for an analysis of how representations of the masculine ideal in 18th and 19 th-

century art influenced the male public of the time and continue to influence our conception of

masculinity today.

32. Hall, ‘‘Gender and Queer Theory,’’ 104.

33. Hall, ‘‘Gender and Queer Theory,’’ 104.

34. Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac an Ghail, Men and Masculinities (Buckingham: Open University

Press, 2003), 146.

35. Connell, Masculinities, 69.

36. Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000).

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37. Meet the Fockers (Jay Roach, 2004).

38. Connell, Masculinities, 71.

39. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

40. 48 Hrs (Walter Hill, 1982).

41. Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987).

42. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber, 2011).

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Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fallof Hypermasculinity in ScienceFiction FilmsMarianne Kac-Vergne

1 In the 1980s, science-fiction became one of the privileged vehicles for a new

representation of masculinity in Hollywood which can be associated with

hypermasculinity, building on Lynne Joyrich’s analysis of Miami Vice which sees

hypermasculinity as an “excess of maleness acting as a shield” against feminization

implied by becoming the object of the look, hypermasculinity thus becoming “the

underlying structure of male spectacle”1. Drawing also on Varda Burstyn’s use of the

term to describe “an exaggerated ideal of manhood linked […] to the role of the

warrior”,2 I will use the term here to emphasize an excessive yet glorified

representation of masculine attributes implying a heightened visibility of the male

body as spectacle while associating masculinity with dominance, violence and physical

force. Hypermasculinity is therefore only one model of masculinity among others – a

set of cultural norms and expectations about what men ought to be from a position of

power within an unequal system of gender relations. However, hypermasculinity can

be considered as hegemonic within the context of 1980s America, when “hard bodies”

became the dominant model, as Susan Jeffords demonstrates in Hard Bodies, Masculinity

in the Reagan Era,3 dominating other masculinities (especially non-white) as well as

women.4

2 The most striking aspect of hypermasculinity in 1980s Hollywood is the visibility of the

male body and specifically the spotlighting of muscles as ‘natural’ signs of masculine

power5, prominently so in cyborg science fiction films. Hypermasculinity puts

masculinity on show by making muscles highly visible: hypermasculine heroes often

wear tight and revealing clothes, like Dolph Lundgren in Masters of the Universe (Gary

Goddard, 1987), or no clothes at all, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first appearance

in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) – even Robocop’s metallic armor reproduces a

body-built torso by incorporating sculpted titanium pectorals (RoboCop, Paul

Verhoeven, 1987). The central question of science fiction, what it is to be a Man, i.e. a

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human opposed to non-humans, thus seems to be reformulated into a more specific

questioning about what it means to be a man, or how to define masculinity. Through

close textual analyses of four major science fiction films of the 1980s and 1990s, this

paper wishes to examine the changing representations and definitions of masculinity

offered by science fiction in the two previous decades and its relationship to hegemonic

masculinity – how science fiction provided a specific hegemonic model in the 1980s in

the guise of hypermasculinity while at the same time highlighting its flaws, which led

to its transformation and seeming demise in the late 1990s, with the appearance of

alternative models of masculinity. Were the hypermasculine “hard bodies” of the 1980s

always presented as the masculine ideal in science fiction films such as RoboCop or The

Terminator? Can science fiction provide alternative models of masculinity? Can it even

call into question male hegemony?

3 The visibility and excesses of hypermasculinity have often been and can assuredly be

interpreted as a strident reassertion of male power and domination.6 Science fiction’s

“invincible armored cyborgs” seem to have realized the male fantasy of physical

invulnerability, best embodied by the cult figure of the Terminator, played by former

Mr Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet if the Terminator emblematizes male power,

a perfect male body pitted against more vulnerable opponents, it is first and foremost a

machine, and a terrifying one at that in the first opus of the series. Films like The

Terminator but also RoboCop indeed contain an inherent critique of hypermasculinity

which critics like Susan Jeffords or Claudia Springer have generally missed. In fact, the

Terminator of the first opus is the enemy, a cyborg killer devoid of any human

weakness – a hypermasculine soldier gone wrong. So wrong indeed that it comes back

surprisingly as the ‘good guy’ in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991). The

Terminator’s transformation has a lot to do with Schwarzenegger’s shrewd careerism

and confirmed star status, but also with changing definitions of masculinity in

American society and the celebration of a more sensitive and nurturing “New Man”, as

Susan Jeffords argues in broad strokes without close textual analysis in “Can

Masculinity Be Terminated?”.7 Taking up where Jeffords left it, this article ends by

examining the second Terminator’s legacy in terms of masculinity. Indeed, the

Terminator’s evolution signaled the end of hypermasculinity in the 1990s and the rise

of less visibly masculine heroes in science fiction, culminating in the feminized figure

of Neo in The Matrix (the Wachowskis, 1999), whose very name asserts the victory of the

New Man. Thus, whereas the Terminator’s hypermasculinity stands out as highly

visible in 1984, the singularity and visibility of the male body, as well as the opposition

between masculinity and femininity tends to be erased in the 1990s, as exemplified by

the Terminator’s reinvention and (limited) demasculinization and Neo’s feminization,

in parallel with the masculinization of their female counterparts, Sarah Connor (Linda

Hamilton) and Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss). Can this loss in visibility restore gender

balance or at least offer an alternative model of masculinity within science fiction film?

Hegemonic Hypermasculinity

4 Hypermasculinity relies heavily on the display and control of the male body, for which

muscles, especially biceps and pectorals, function as a synecdoche. Hypermasculinity

thus appears as the net result of the male actors’ often highly publicized bodybuilding,

even though the process itself is never shown onscreen, so that the heroes’ physical

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strength remains ‘natural’. Hypermasculinity, despite its excessiveness, paradoxically

goes back to an essentialist definition of masculinity as both active and naturally

powerful. Within an ideology which associates masculinity with activity, the emphasis

on bodybuilding as a process of physical training and transformation allows male stars

to display their bodies without being feminized, since, as Richard Dyer puts it, “The

muscle man is the end product of his own activity of muscle-building”.8 Furthermore,

according to Dyer, muscles are read as signs of male power, hence naturalizing male

hegemony:

The potential for muscularity in men is seen as a biological given, and is also themeans of dominating both women and other men who are in competition for thespoils of the earth. The point is that muscles are biological, hence ‘natural’ […]. The‘naturalness’ of muscles legitimizes male power and domination.9

5 The visibility of the male body in hypermasculine science fiction films can thus be seen

as reinforcing and justifying male hegemony, which is something men have actively

strived for and therefore somehow ‘deserve’. In this way, hegemonic masculinity gains

its value from being ‘hard’, both resistant and difficult to attain.

6 Indeed, in 1980s science fiction, power, toughness and integrity are most often reserved

to white male heroes. Minority members are secondary characters who can sometimes

help the hero but usually disappear during the course of the action, leaving the white

hero to fight on his own. The only prominent woman in RoboCop, Lewis (Nancy Allen),

Murphy/Robocop’s partner, is cast as a supporting role in all its meanings: she is

constantly supportive of Robocop, a witness to his suffering heroism, but secondary

and powerless – she does not eliminate any of their adversaries in the final shoot-out

and is instead shot down, disappearing from the last scene of the film. In Predator (Mc

Tiernan, 1987), Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is aided by a group of soldiers including

two Black men and a Native American, who are all brutally slaughtered, while RoboCop

and The Terminator both feature the traditional and ubiquitous African-American police

captain, well-meaning but powerless and ineffectual. Yet, what is especially striking in

RoboCop, despite its progressive credentials and its satire of the Reagan era,10 is the way

it participates in the demonization of ethnic and racial minorities through its portrayal

of its “bad guys”, a gang of sadistic drug-trafficking criminals responsible for hundreds

of deaths. The gang, headed by a bespectacled white man, otherwise includes an

African-American, a Hispanic, an Asian-American and an ethnic White whose name,

Emil Antonowsky, emphasizes his foreign origin. All are associated to the errant and

degenerate “soft body” described by Susan Jeffords and quoted above (note 3). The

African-American poses and laughs hysterically, and is stereotyped as a ‘stud’ when he

distracts Lewis by showing her his penis and then boasting about his feat. The Hispanic

is arrested by Robocop in a night-club full of undulating and scantily-clad bodies. All

deal and consume cocaine. In a striking and gore image, the degeneracy of these

criminal bodies is underlined at the end of the film when Emil crashes into a tank of

toxic waste and transforms into a monster, his shredded body liquefied by the acid.

7 The gang is moreover constantly associated with the decay of Detroit, gangrened by

criminality. Their headquarters are in a dilapidated industrial zone and they take great

pleasure in destroying the city during the police strike: Emil breaks the window of a TV

shop only so he can listen to his favorite show while the African-American burns down

a car to test his new ‘toy’, a military mortar. Thus, although the film criticizes

Reaganite America by emphasizing the corruption of elites who are in collusion with

the drug-traffickers, it nevertheless clearly associates the decay of America’s

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downtowns with a rising criminality attributed to ethnic minorities. Indeed, RoboCop

directly refers to the financial crisis affecting US cities in the 1980s, abandoned by

those who could move to the suburbs and deeply affected by the federal cuts to urban

renewal subsidies approved by Reagan,11 where insecurity became a major issue. For

Roger Ebert, reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, part of the film’s social satire comes

from the proximity between Robocop and Bernhard Goetz,12 a white man who killed

four black men in 1984 in New York’s subway because he thought they were going to

attack him. Goetz, who gave himself up to the police while pleading self-defense, was

dubbed “the subway vigilante” and became a hero in the eyes of many New-Yorkers

and Americans sick of the rising criminality and the inefficiency of the police.13 In spite

of itself, RoboCop falls partly into a Reaganite discourse which opposes a

hypermasculine white protagonist to ethnically marked criminals, in a context of

violence where lone vigilantes are celebrated as heroes.

The Dark Side of Hypermasculinity

8 However, through its satire of the excesses of Reaganism, RoboCop also underlines the

negative and coercive aspects of hypermasculinity – the transformation of the male

body into a machine is imposed to the hero by a corporation which has no regard

whatsoever for human dignity and treats policemen like disposable human resources to

be replaced by technology. In fact, Murphy’s (Peter Weller) transformation into

Robocop is harrowing and pathetic, as it insists on the character’s powerlessness and

passivity through the use of subjective camera erasing the hero’s presence. Murphy is

seen arriving to the hospital by ambulance, transported on a stretcher, while the

camera alternates between close-ups on his bloody face and subjective shots on oxygen

balloons and hospital figures. Doctors can be heard speaking off-screen, their words

resonating at a distance, while the camera is on Murphy’s open but vacant eyes.

Subjective shots again show faces bending down over him, tubes being inserted into his

mouth and a flashlight shone in his eyes. His last human memories of his wife and son

are dissociated from the soundtrack, which is still dominated by the intensive care

staff’s barely comprehensible dialogue. The camera then tracks out quickly, leaving in

the distance his wife and son waving goodbye, highlighting the arrival of death and the

corollary erasure of Murphy’s past, to finish on a close-up on Murphy’s fixed stare. His

final memory is one of pain, the pain of his execution revived in a flashback by the

electric shock of the defibrillator, before a final fade out to the prosaic words of a

doctor announcing, “All right, I think that’s all we can do, let’s call it. What’s the

time?”. At the end of a painful process of erasure depriving the protagonist of any

agency and heroism, the human Murphy is dead.

9 The next scene shows his rebirth as a robot, but again, Robocop is completely passive,

childlike. Technicians have replaced the doctors and are also filmed in subjective shots,

only this time through a computer screen reproducing Robocop’s digital vision. They

can be seen bending over him to adjust his screen, before a technician proudly

announces to the project manager that they have been able to save Murphy’s left arm,

only to be rebuffed, “What? I thought we agreed on total bodily prosthesis! Now lose

the arm.” The company’s project is clear: all traces of Murphy’s humanity must

disappear so that only the machine is left. Robocop is constantly belittled by the team

who built him – the manager contemptuously snaps his fingers to attract his attention

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– and is considered as an object or at best as a child, which visually translates into

repeated low-angle shots on characters bending over him, like the manager, whose face

is shot in a distorting extreme close-up as he exhorts Robocop to be “a bad

motherfucker”, projecting his own hegemonic fantasies onto him. Hypermasculinity in

RoboCop is thus shown to be the result of a long and painful process which transforms a

human being into a machine, an object owned by the company which initiated the

process. The hardening and mechanization of the male body is indeed fulfilled in the

absence of any conscious decision on the part of the hero, who remains motionless and

powerless throughout his operation, introducing an element of pathos in this unwilling

robot.

10 The characteristics of hypermasculinity become even more problematic, and

frightening, in The Terminator, which pushes the logic of male hegemony to the extreme

– the hypermasculine male loses all humanity, seeking to eliminate a woman who is a

threat because of her reproductive capacities. The Terminator is indeed characterized

by its invulnerability, relentless determination and complete indifference to suffering,

transforming the hypermasculine male into a terrifying monster and exploring the

perils of hegemonic fantasies of male omnipotence. As James Cameron himself

underlines, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s embodiment of the Terminator is all the scarier

because he represents “a perfect male figure”.14 The Terminator indeed shows the flip

side of an ideal model of masculinity built as hard, violent and invincible. The cyborg

looks like a human being and is played by one, but the film reveals that its human skin

hides a computer-programmed metallic endoskeleton.

11 Moreover, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s naked body is itself akin to a machine, a body

sculpted and molded by years of bodybuilding. Jérôme Momcilovic15 convincingly

demonstrates the fundamental otherness of Schwarzenegger’s body and the influence

of the doctrine of mechanism on its representation, two aspects which are clearly

underlined in his first appearance in The Terminator. The film opens on the continuous

noise of machines over close-ups on the metallic parts of a garbage truck, highlighting

from the start the film’s insistence on mechanization. After a bolt of lightning, a naked

body appears, kneeling in a foetal position before slowly unfolding to reveal sculpted

pectorals and glinting skin, the low angle shot emphasizing its massive build. The head

then slowly turns from right to left, scanning its environment methodically, without

any emotion showing on an inexpressive face. Finally the body walks forward beyond

the camera to end in a long shot where Schwarzenegger’s body stands stiffly like an

illuminated statue of a conqueror examining the city lying at his feet. Masculine

perfection is so terrifying that it becomes horrific as the indestructible Terminator

lacks any feelings of pity, compassion or remorse. Yet, this cyborg is unquestionably

virile and embodies certain qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, such as

physical strength, terseness and tenacity.

12 Like a monstrous Hercules, the Terminator unveils the dark side of masculinity, as

evidenced by the film’s editing, which goes back and forth between the Terminator and

the other white man of the film, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). Kyle’s arrival is also

announced by lightning, he is naked and immediately goes hunting for clothes and

weapons, like the Terminator. Kyle is so traumatized by the victory of the machines

that he has become mechanical himself and is incapable at first of understanding

human emotions, like Sarah’s initial fear and then growing tenderness towards him.

Kyle dangerously resembles the Terminator, whom he stalks, flees and imitates, valuing

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fighting and violence over emotions, even though the film also insists on his human

weaknesses, especially his physical pain. Too close to the machines, Kyle will therefore

not be the savior of humanity, a role delegated to Sarah, whose feminine qualities are

more clearly opposed to the machines – innocence and naivety at first, then her ability

to express emotions and finally (and most importantly) her female ability to bear a

child.

Revising Hypermasculinity

13 One can wonder if the terrifying aspects of the hypermasculine Terminator were so

problematic that the character had to be revised and transformed in a second opus,

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, released in 1991. The Terminator who seeks to eliminate

Sarah Connor in the first film indeed comes back in the second (still played by

Schwarzenegger) as a ‘good guy’ whose mission is to protect the teenage John Connor

(Edward Furlong), Sarah’s son. The change is certainly a result of Schwarzenegger’s

success and career move away from violent and ‘serious’ action films into the realm of

comedy, starring in films such as Twins and Kindergarten Cop (Ivan Reitman, 1988, 1990)

where he is no longer a menace but a reassuring presence. As GQ put it in May 1990,

“[Schwarzenegger] transformed the image of bodybuilding from one of excessiveness

and narcissism to one of heroism and health”.16 But it is also linked to changing

definitions of masculinity in US public discourse at the time, which turned away from

rugged, aggressive and determined fighters to celebrate sensitive “New Men” more in

tune with Bush’s “gentler, and kinder nation”.17 The generally-accepted definition of

the New Man in the 1990s is summarized as follows by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo et

Michael A. Messner, “He is a white, college-educated professional who is a highly

involved and nurturant father, ‘in touch with’ and expressive of his feelings, and

egalitarian in his dealings with women”.18 Even if the Terminator is not quite the

college-educated professional, Terminator 2 does reorient the focus of the franchise onto

the relationship between the Terminator and a teenager and his mother, centering on a

reconstituted nuclear family. The Terminator’s protective and increasingly fatherly

relationship to John thus allows him to change from a violent and emotionless

machine, the embodiment of hypermasculinity gone bad, into a nurturing and

humanized father-cyborg.

14 The Terminator’s metamorphosis is interestingly played out in his first confrontation

with his enemy, the T1000 (Robert Patrick), when both are looking for John. When the

Terminator appears to John, he is shot in slow motion on a musical theme dominated

by percussions recalling the first film (although the presence of bells hint at a

transformation by adding a melodic touch to the harsh drum rolls of The Terminator).

He strides forward with the same determination as in the first opus, and takes out a

shotgun from a box of roses, trampling the flowers in his stride as a symbol of his

contempt for human emotions and organic fragility. John’s terror at his sight seems at

first to validate the reappearance of the Same, yet his flight confronts him to a much

more dangerous Other, musically announced by the replacement of the bells by the

repetitive purring of a machine, the T1000’s theme, as the latter appears at the end of a

corridor. As the T1000 manifests an otherness even more inhuman than the

Terminator’s, his fluid body pierced by holes immediately coagulating and

regenerating, the Terminator’s superhuman and menacing body becomes a protective

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one. Lethal weapon turned shield, the Terminator indeed uses his bulletproof metallic

body to protect John, holding him in his arms away from the T1000 as a protective

father would. Playing with the principle of repetition at the core of a franchise,

Terminator 2 pretends to repeat but in fact reverses, so that it redefines the monstrous

hypermasculinity of the first episode as vigilant paternity, validating the hegemonic

hypermasculinity of the 1980s that the first opus criticized.

15 The relationship between the Terminator and John indeed becomes increasingly close

and even tender, as the two characters repeatedly touch each other, be it when John

initially puts his fingers in the bullet holes in the Terminator’s back and presses the

‘skin’ of his cheek, or in the final hug, when the Terminator presses John against him

before going to his death. The Terminator becomes the embodiment of exemplary

fatherhood, an ever-present protector who is close to his ‘son’ yet always ready to

defend him, as underlined by the many shots of him standing watchfully, legs apart,

gun in hand, scanning the horizon day and night. The Terminator’s terrifying

determination in The Terminator thus becomes his primary quality in Terminator 2. He

displays only the advantages of hypermasculinity: he uses his strength to defend his

family and never turns against it, contrary to Sarah’s past macho, violent and

irresponsible boyfriends. By combining the best of hypermasculinity and of the New

Man, the Terminator represents an ideal father, loved by John and even validated by

Sarah in her voice-over (he is also nicknamed “Uncle Bob”, i.e. Sarah’s lover), enabling

the formation of a united nuclear family and revising the hypermasculine man of the

1980s to present him as a responsible and integrated father.

16 Moreover, associating a massive, rigid and mechanical Terminator to a diminutive,

mischievous and alert teenager allows the film to take its distances from

hypermasculinity and safely demasculinize, to a certain extent, the character played by

Schwarzenegger. The film indeed includes many humorous touches from the moment

when John realizes that the Terminator has to obey him. The killing machine becomes a

toy, a harmless robot who stands on one leg when ordered to, a simple thus likeable

hulk. Whereas The Terminator used horror to harden its Terminator, Terminator 2 turns

to comedy to soften him, as when the Terminator stiffly repeats what John teaches him,

like a father learning the language of his teenage son. “Hasta la vista, baby”,

pronounced staccato and in a wooden voice by the Terminator, actually became one of

America’s most famous movie quotes, a humorous answer to The Terminator’s terrifying

and equally famous “I’ll be back”.19 Terminator 2 incorporates parody to mitigate the

Terminator’s hypermasculinity – John ridicules his unflinching seriousness by calling

him a ‘dork’, while the film mocks Schwarzenegger’s 1980s warrior persona in films like

Predator and Commando in a short freeze frame shot on the Terminator posing with a

huge machine gun, half smiling, to which John nods, declaring “That’s definitely you!”.

The pairing of the Terminator with John brightens up the serious hypermasculine

heroes of the 1980s and offers a revised, less domineering, more flexible model of

masculinity – the Terminator learns to say “no problemo” instead of the traditional

military term “affirmative”, derided by John.

17 Terminator 2 thus refocuses midway on the humanization of the Terminator, who

becomes the narration’s main center of attention. First, his body is humanized. As

opposed to the gory scene in The Terminator where the Terminator repairs his own eye,

in Terminator 2, he is nursed by Sarah and the audience does not see the machine under

the skin, since his wounds are covered by bandages. During the course of the film, the

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machine is uncovered little by little, revealing the metal under the skin, but his body

remains recognizably human until the end, contrary to the metallic skeleton at the end

of The Terminator and the subhuman T1000, a shapeless body of liquid metal. In spite of

his wounds, the Terminator keeps the same distinctive humanoid body throughout the

film, and affirms human dignity by remaining upright until the end, which the camera

celebrates by a final close-up on his upturned thumb. The last sequence gives the

Terminator the moral high ground by emphasizing his experience of physical pain (the

new Terminator does register pain as digital information) and mental sorrow,

canonizing him as hypermasculinity’s martyr.

18 The ultimate confrontation between the Terminator and the T1000 becomes the

former’s martyrdom, as he is thrown against the walls, dismembered, clubbed and

crushed before collapsing on the floor and crawling desperately, arousing the viewer’s

pity. The camera zooms in and focuses on his mutilated and bloodied face, then on the

stump of his arm. His difficult progress is halted by the T1000 piercing his body with a

stake, his intense pain underlined by a discomforting soundtrack dominated by

discordant chords interrupted by cymbals. The T1000’s last strike comes with lightning

and thunder and the Terminator stops, to a suspended musical cadence, the length of

the last chord indicating the end of the scene and the Terminator’s (apparent, hence

the suspended cadence) death. Nailed to the ground as Jesus was to the cross, the

Terminator is thus presented as an expiatory victim. After his resurrection, physical

pain is superseded by moral anguish, marking him as human and as a New Man capable

of expressing emotion. The Terminator indeed realizes with deep sadness that he will

never be able to cry and therefore be fully human. In a scene full of pathos, as John sobs

and is comforted by the Terminator who wipes the tears off his cheek, the latter is able

to see the limits of his mechanical being, and this consciousness raises him above the

machine to make him partly human. This human dimension is confirmed by a self-

sacrifice which transcends the limits of his program – the Terminator acquires his

humanity by becoming its savior.

19 Whereas the Terminator was presented mainly as a terrifying object in The Terminator,

he becomes a subject in Terminator 2, a process hinted at in his very first appearance

and fully confirmed in his ultimate one. Indeed, in The Terminator’s opening scene, the

camera adopts a contemplative stance, presenting the Terminator in long and steady

shots, often medium or medium-long shots. In Terminator 2 however, the camera moves

and the shots become shorter, and most importantly, the Terminator, after the same

close-up on his head scanning the horizon from right to left, is granted a subjective

shot – we see what he sees, and the image shows not his body, but his digital vision of

motorcycles parked in front of a bar. The audience is thus given access to his

consciousness. The film is dotted with such digital shots showing the Terminator’s

specific point of view, for example when he recognizes John or when he comes back to

life. Yet, they disappear from the ultimate scene showing the Terminator’s death. The

final shots and reverse shots alternate between what Sarah and John are seeing, the

Terminator descending to certain death in molten metal, and the last visions of the

Terminator, notably a low-angle point-of-view shot showing Sarah and John on the

platform above, at a distance. This shot is not digitalized and thus completes the

humanization of the Terminator, who can finally see the world with human eyes.

20 The Terminator thus becomes the focal point of the second opus, overshadowing the

other characters. He may be a sensitive father included in a nuclear family, a tolerant

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and responsible cyborg willing to cooperate with others, yet these Others – African-

American Dyson, female Sarah, teenage John – are systematically presented as weaker,

being as they are ‘inferior’ on a hegemonic ladder still dominated by the strong white

male. Thus the fatherly Terminator finally replaces Sarah as John’s guardian,

outshining her both as a parent and as a warrior. Previously fiercely combative and

source of the voice-over, Sarah remains mostly silent during the whole of the last

sequence, even losing her voice to the T1000, who impersonates her to attract John.

Confronting her evil alter ego, she runs out of bullets and is unable to defeat him and

protect her son. Only the arrival of the better-armed Terminator eliminates the T1000

and saves John. Aggressive and lacking in maternal tenderness, Sarah cannot compete

with the Terminator’s fighting skills, and therefore loses on both fronts. The

Terminator thus sidelines his female partner while appropriating her parental function

and maintaining his male power – validating Lynne Segal’s claim that “the

contemporary revalorisation of fatherhood has enabled many men to have the best of

both worlds”,20 emotional well-being as well as continued dominance. Terminator 2

nevertheless represents a turning point in the representation of masculinity, reflecting

the evolution of gender norms in contemporary American society as it marks the

transition from 1980s hypermasculinity to the New Man of the 1990s. By ‘terminating’

hypermasculinity and introducing a partnership with a masculinized woman, it paved

the way for a change in the representation of the male body and gender relations

initiated in such films as Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995), Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995) or

Gattaca (Niccol, 1997), culminating in the huge box office success of the end of the

decade that was The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999).

The End of Hegemonic Hypermasculinity? A NewModel

21 The Matrix’s mise en scène of its hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves), presents an image of

masculinity in complete contrast with the visibility of hypermasculinity, blurring the

stereotyped distinctiveness of the male body and inverting traditional gender roles.

Moving away from the mechanically-enhanced ‘invincible armored cyborgs’ without

relying on the comforts of fatherhood, The Matrix thus seems to offer an alternative to

hegemonic masculinity by presenting a feminized hero constructed as a mirror image

of his female counterpart, fulfilling perhaps the egalitarian promise of the New Man.

22 The beginning of the film subverts the stereotypes of the active male and the passive

female, as the opening sequence showcases the action feats of a woman, Trinity (Carrie-

Anne Moss), while Neo first appears asleep. The first shot of Neo indeed shows a

beautiful face which the spectator is invited to contemplate through the use of a very

slow track-in and a trip-hop soundtrack. The next tracking shot follows in close-up the

curve of his neck, first presented blurred and then in focus, to sensual effect. Keanu

Reeves gives himself up passively to the camera, without seeking to offset his

objectification by an active pose, contrary to the traditional representations of

masculinity analyzed by Steve Neale or Richard Dyer.21 Rather than flexing his muscles,

Reeves displays a feminine type of beauty with his white skin, regular features and

graceful movements, which will be underlined throughout the film. In fact, his beauty

was commented on by all critics, mostly derisively. Variety mocked him as boring “eye

candy”22 while Janet Maslin sniggered that “Keanu Reeves makes a strikingly chic Prada

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model of an action hero”.23 Charles Taylor, one of the few critics to defend Reeves,

provides an interesting explanation for the general sarcasm directed at the actor: “

Reeves is one of the few contemporary male stars whose presence acknowledges that

people are out there in the dark looking at him. […] his slight languidness encourages

looking. That willingness to be looked at evokes […] a homosexual panic”.24 Reeves

indeed transgresses the taboo of passive male objectification, adopting the position

traditionally assigned by Hollywood to women and famously described by Laura Mulvey

as “to-be-looked-at-ness”,25 a clearly unsettling experience for many reviewers. The way

Keanu Reeves is filmed especially in the first half of The Matrix, insisting on his physical

beauty and passivity, indeed subverts the conventional representation of both genders

and the dominant norms assigned to them.

23 Neo’s very first visitor, who knocks on his door to buy illegal data, almost immediately

comments on his appearance, remarking that “[he] looks even whiter than usual”. The

image indeed contrasts the two men, Neo appearing against the cold green of the

Matrix while his red-haired and rosy-cheeked visitor stands in a corridor suffused with

golden lighting. Contrary to Hollywood convention, according to which the hero’s skin

should not be too pale and should in any case be darker than the woman’s,26 in The

Matrix, Neo always appears whiter than the others, his paleness enhanced by his dark

clothes, his association with dark backgrounds and very dark-skinned characters such

as Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) or the Oracle (Gloria Foster). Even more interesting

is the tonal similarity between Neo and Trinity’s skin color, which is underlined in

shots where their faces are shown right next to each other, as in the nightclub scene at

the beginning of the film or the kiss at the end. In the latter, their two faces are

positioned symmetrically, both in profile, so that the light shines on them in the same

way, the center of their faces in the shadows while the corners of the shot (Neo’s

forehead and Trinity’s chest) are lit, the two faces merging in the same shaded and

pearly white in a shot which erases sexual difference.

24 The scene of the kiss also underlines Neo’s passivity – throughout the film he is shown

asleep or lying down, willingly or unwillingly. When taken by the agents of the Matrix,

Neo is undressed and stretched on a table by two agents who forcibly insert a repulsive

insect in his navel, evoking a rape scene. His pale, skinny and hairless body appears

vulnerable and penetrable – most visibly when he emerges naked from the cocoon of

the Matrix only to be engulfed in its core when detached from its cables, leaving gaping

holes in a limp body. This weakened and perforated body must be reinforced by

technology, not to turn it into an invincible cyborg, but simply to ensure its viability:

Neo’s atrophied muscles are rebuilt by needles planted in his inert body lying on a

hospital bed. Neo and his body are thus the focus of all the other characters’ attention –

always observed, commented on and sustained. Excepting Morpheus, Trinity and

Cypher the traitor (Joe Pantoliano), the other members of the crew appear mainly as

logistical support and internal spectators.

25 Moreover, Neo is also passive from a narrative point-of-view. He is often silent, not

because he represents the strong silent type but because he is unable to express

himself, as the image of his lips glued together by the agents symbolizes. Neo is

generally shown listening avidly to others more knowledgeable than him – in fact,

Trinity’s and Morpheus’s first orders are for him to be quiet and listen carefully.

Presented as an ignorant naïve who has to be initiated, Neo is repeatedly compared to

fairy tale heroines like Alice (his first order is to “follow the white rabbit”), Dorothy

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(Cypher warns him mockingly, “Buckle your seatbelt Dorothy, because Kansas is going

bye-bye”) or Sleeping Beauty, woken by Trinity’s kiss. The Matrix insists on Neo’s

alternative masculinity by contrasting him with more virile and robust characters

(Morpheus, Dozer), displaying traditional masculine attributes like facial hair (Cypher).

Furthermore, Neo is submitted early on to women’s authority, ordered about by Trinity

and threatened by Switch (Belinda McClory), the other female crew, a masculine

woman with hard features and cropped hair who points a gun at him and commands

him to undress, addressing him scornfully as a “coppertop” still plugged into the

Matrix. This scene in the limousine repeats and inverts the rape-like torture inflicted

by the agents, with this time a woman in charge: Trinity again takes off Neo’s shirt to

extract the bug inserted by the agents. Neo thus loses control over his body which is

first manipulated by the agents and then disinfected by women narratively and

iconographically on top.

26 Neo therefore embodies, as his name suggests, a “new man”, who rejects the norms of

traditional masculinity at the same time as he abandons his Matrix-given identity

preceded by a masculine title, Mr Anderson. His feminization subverts the binary

division between masculine and feminine, especially since his character mirrors

Trinity’s, his female alter ego. The two characters look very similar, their radiant and

angular white faces contrasting with their analogous black costumes. This similarity is

underlined during the attack on the agents’ headquarters. Indeed, they are presented

almost as duplicates in the first freeze frame which ironically follows the agents’ call to

“Freeze!”, matching from head to toe in their black pants, belts and long coats, their

dark sunglasses and slick black hair combed back. Their movements are perfectly

synchronized, their heads turning at the exact same moment before each darts to one

side. The film then cuts from one to the other as they perform the same moves, such as

a cartwheel filmed in slow motion and amplified by their long coats, before freezing on

them again as they stand next to each other in the elevator at the end of the carefully

choreographed battle.

27 However, until this scene which finally gives a slight advantage to Neo in terms of

physical performance and screen time, Trinity leads the way – as Pat Mellecamp

remarks, “It will take the entire film before Neo gets up to his woman’s speed, fighting

skills, awareness and black-leather fashion”.27 The Matrix indeed begins with a

spectacular action sequence on Trinity, whose voice opens the film, recalling Sarah’s

opening voice-over in Terminator 2 but giving access to her emotions and desires. She

demonstrates a number of physical feats which Neo will then have to learn – she

delivers kicks while suspended in the air, climbs walls, leaps across buildings and

propels herself into very small openings, ridiculing the condescending police captain

who thought his force “[could] handle one little girl”. Moreover, Trinity is presented as

a desiring subject, who comes into the Matrix to get the one she wants and then saves

him from his death. The film highlights her desire, while Neo is only a receptacle. In

the nightclub, she walks over to him with confidence, bare-shouldered, her big blue

eyes steadily boring into his. She draws very close and whispers in his ear in a low

sensual voice. The shots focus on her face, lit-up, smooth and collected, while the

reverse shots, still centered on her neck and head, corner Neo’s mobile face in half-

darkness, insisting on his uncertainty and confusion. Reminiscent of film noir’s femmes

fatales, Trinity however is a positive character whose desire breathes life rather than

brings death. She is the one who kisses Neo, bending over his dead body, the camera

focusing on her mouth and eyes in extreme close-up. Unconventionally, she is the

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bearer of the look and the eyeline match positions Neo as the one being looked at and

desired, while Trinity herself is not sexually objectified. Moreover, as she resuscitates

Neo, Trinity’s power to give life outside the Matrix makes her, in a way, the sole real

agent within the narrative logic of The Matrix, so that one can argue, like Christopher

Williams, that she is the real heroine of the film, “who has made all worlds subject to

herself”.28

28 This seems to me to be an ‘optimistic’ reading of the film, which focuses more on Neo’s

progression and celebrates him as the true hero, the savior of humanity, aka “the One”.

He is the only one capable of beating the agents, as the film demonstrates in a 10-

minute-long stunt-packed one-on-one fight scene between Neo and Agent Smith.

Furthermore, Neo’s performance is especially magnified by the film’s special effects –

the visual effect of bullet time, The Matrix’s major innovation, is used repeatedly and at

length for Neo’s fights, emphasizing his total control of space and pointing to his

omnipotence.29 However, these highly visible and unrealistic special effects also call

attention to the artificial nature of the image. As he becomes the One, Neo indeed

appears less human and more and more virtual, resembling a videogame character. In

his last fight his movements are slow and broken-up, like an action figure’s: after

kicking Agent Smith, his leg stays stretched out in the air for more than 5 seconds, then

pivots 90 degrees before coming down. Neo’s last attack confirms his virtual nature as

he dives into Agent Smith’s body, shatters it and replaces him, appropriating the

agents’ ability, as computer programs, to embody anyone in the Matrix. The invincible

and omnipotent savior of humanity that Neo has become is thus clearly marked out as a

product of cinematic special effects belonging to the realm of science fiction.

29 The 1980s witnessed an increased visibility of masculinity, notably in science fiction

films, which revised the genre’s central dichotomy between humans and non-humans,

including machines, to present mechanically-enhanced paragons of hypermasculinity.

These hypermasculine cyborgs can be seen to embody hegemonic masculinity,

responding to and sustaining a cultural ideal that emphasized male power through the

highlighting of muscles, reasserting white male domination over women and

ethnically-marked men. However, the characters of Robocop and the Terminator

embody both “the best of” and the worst of hegemonic masculinity, revealing how

constricting gender norms can transform tough indestructible warriors into inhuman

monsters. Yet, as the unwilling robot-cop and the Terminator become conscious of

their transformation and ontological status, the films turn them into victims, using

pathos to make their continued hegemony acceptable. The evil Terminator is thus

reprogrammed into a self-sacrificing protective giant whose emotional awareness and

fatherly instincts introduce the New Man in the invincible armored cyborg. By revising

hypermasculinity, Terminator 2 paradoxically celebrates it, focusing on the Terminator’s

humanization at the narrative expense of the other characters, especially the initially

proactive Sarah Connor. Nevertheless, the film sparked a turn away from

hypermasculinity in the 1990s and the emergence of a less visible, feminized

masculinity strikingly embodied by Neo in The Matrix. By subverting conventional

gender representations, The Matrix offered a new androgynous model uniting

masculine and feminine representations within more equal gender relations. However,

the androgynous man partnered with an active woman seems to have been a window in

science fiction history, as the resurgence in the last decade of visibly virile and solitary

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heroes in films such as I, Robot (Proyas, 2004), I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007), Iron Man

(Favreau, 2008) or Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) seems to suggest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Review of The Matrix, Variety, 29 March 1999.

Dyer, Richard. “Don’t Look Now.” Screen 23, 3-4 (1982): 61-73.

Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.

Ebert, Roger. Review of RoboCop. Chicago Sun-Times, 17 July 1987.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette and Messner, Michael A. “Gender Displays and Men’s Power, the

New Man and the Mexican Immigrant Man.” In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry Brod and

Michael Kaufman. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994, 200-18.

Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University

Press, 1994.

Joyrich, Lynne. “Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity.” In Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural

Criticism, edited by Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 156-172.

Maslin, Janet. Review of The Matrix. The New York Times, 31 March 1999.

Mellencamp, Pat. “The Zen of Masculinity – Rituals of Heroism in The Matrix.” In The End of Cinema

as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, edited by Jon Lewis. New York: New York University

Press, 2001, 83-94.

Momcilovic, Jérôme. “L’homme extraordinaire du cinéma : Remarques sur l’œuvre d’Arnold

Schwarzenegger.” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan, edited by Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb. Paris:

Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007, 181-191.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16, 3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.

Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Screen, 24,

6 (1983): 2-17.

Patterson, James T. Restless Giant, the United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005.

Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1990.

Springer, Claudia. “Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Armored Cyborg in Cinema.” Genders 18

(Winter 1993): 87-101.

Taylor, Charles. “Something in the way he moves.” Salon, 29 April 1999.

Williams, Christopher. “Mastering the Real: Trinity as the ‘real’ hero of The Matrix.” Film Criticism,

27, 3, (March 2003): 2-17.

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NOTES

1. Lynne Joyrich, “Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity”, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural

Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 165,168.

2. Varda Burstyn, Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1999), 4.

3. “Bodies were deployed in two fundamental categories: the errant body containing sexually

transmitted disease, immorality, illegal chemicals, ‘laziness’, and endangered foetuses, which we

can call the ‘soft body’; and the normative body that enveloped strength, labor, determination,

loyalty and courage – the ‘hard body’ – the body that was to come to stand as the emblem of the

Reagan philosophies, politics and economies.” Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the

Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 24-25.

4. My understanding of hegemonic masculinity comes from R.W. Connell, who defines it in

Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) as “a way of theorizing gendered power relations

among men” (xviii), “the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of

gender relations, a position always contestable” (76) and “the configuration of gender practice

which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination

of women” (77).

5. See Richard Dyer, “Don’t Look Now,” Screen, 23, 3-4 (1982): 61-73.

6. See for example Claudia Springer, “Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Armored Cyborg in

Cinema”, Genders, 18 (Winter 1993): 87-101.

7. Susan Jeffords, “Can Masculinity Be Terminated?”, in Screening the Male, Exploring Masculinities

in Hollywood Cinema, eds Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), 245-62.

8. Richard Dyer, “Don’t Look Now,” Screen, 23, 3-4 (1982): 71.

9. Dyer, ‘‘Don’t Look Now,’’ 71.

10. A satiric tone noted by Rita Kempley in her review for The Washington Post (17 July 1987) and

Roger Ebert in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times (17 July 1987). Michael Miner, one of the

scriptwriters, explicitly describes RoboCop as social satire in the “making of” section of the MGM

Video DVD bonus (2002).

11. André Kaspi, Les Américains, tome 2, les Etats-Unis de 1945 à nos jours (Paris : Seuil, 2002), 594.

12. “And there is pointed social satire, too, as the robocop takes on some of the attributes and

some of the popular following of a Bernhard Goetz.” Roger Ebert, review of RoboCop, Chicago Sun-

Times, 17 July 1987.

13. James T. Patterson, Restless Giant, the United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005), 172-73.

14. “I think [the public] see [Arnold] from the beginning as this implacable, sexless, emotionless

machine – in the form of a man, which is scary, because he’s a perfect male figure.” James

Cameron, interviewed by David Chute, Film Comment, 1 (January/February 1985): 57-59.

15. Jérôme Momcilovic, « L’homme extraordinaire du cinéma : Remarques sur l’œuvre d’Arnold

Schwarzenegger », in Le Cinéma des années Reagan, ed. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (Paris: Nouveau

Monde éditions, 2007), 181-91.

16. Alan Richman, GQ, May 1990, 204. Quoted in Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, Gender, Genre

and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), 81.

17. George Bush, 1988 Republican National Convention Acceptance Address,

www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/georgehbush1988rnc.htm, accessed 21 December 2011.

18. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A. Messner, “Gender Displays and Men’s Power, the

New Man and the Mexican Immigrant Man,” in Theorizing Masculinities, eds Harry Brod and

Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994), 200-18.

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19. “I’ll be back” is ranked 37th in the AFI’s top 100 movie quotes of all times, while “Hasta la

vista, baby” is ranked 76th. http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx, accessed 20

December 2011.

20. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1990), 58.

21. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” Screen,

24, 6 (1983): 2-17; Dyer, “Don’t Look Now”.

22. “he brings no more or less than he ever does to his role, which translates into agreeable eye

candy for some and boredom for others.” Review of The Matrix, Variety, 29 March 1999.

23. Janet Maslin, Review of The Matrix, The New York Times, 31 March 1999.

24. Charles Taylor, “Something in the way he moves”, Salon, 29 April 1999,

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/04/29/keanu, accessed 15 January 2010.

25. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 16, 3 (Autumn 1975): 10.

26. See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997).

27. Pat Mellencamp, “The Zen of Masculinity – Rituals of Heroism in The Matrix”, in The End of

Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York University

Press, 2001), 83.

28. Christopher Williams, “Mastering the Real: Trinity as the ‘real’ hero of The Matrix”, Film

Criticism, 27, 3, (March 2003): 17.

29. See Aurélie Ledoux, “Le cinéma américain peut-il être sceptique ? Les effets de « trompe-

l’œil » dans le cinéma américain contemporain (1984-2001)” (Doctoral dissertation, Université

Paris I, 2009), 162.

ABSTRACTS

Science fiction films of the 1980s, including The Terminator and RoboCop, seem to foreground

hypermasculinity as a new ideal of masculinity, relying on the display and promotion of

muscular white male bodies. However, the films also highlight the negative aspects of

hypermasculinity, embodied especially by the Terminator, the terrifying antagonist of the first

film of the franchise. Already in the 1980s, hypermasculinity was indeed associated with a loss of

humanity, so that it became incompatible with the cultural prominence of the sensitive and

nurturing ‘New Man’ of the 1990s. Hypermasculinity was thus revised in Terminator 2 to present

the formerly fearsome Terminator as a protective father undergoing a process of humanization,

paving the way for new representations of masculinity and more equal gender relations in The

Matrix, which plays on traditional gender roles by matching a beautiful passive hero and an

athletic action heroine. The evolution of science fiction films in the 1980s and 1990s thus

underlines a striking change in the representation of masculinity, from very visible and

differential hypermasculinity to gender-blending androgyneity.

INDEX

Keywords: science fiction, masculinity, hypermasculinity, RoboCop, The Terminator, Terminator

2, The Matrix, United States

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AUTHOR

MARIANNE KAC-VERGNE

Marianne Kac-Vergne is an Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université de Picardie

Jules Verne. She has published several articles on masculinity and Hollywood genres, most

recently on contemporary gangsters in the last issue of CinémAction (n°143). She is currently

writing a book on masculinity in contemporary science fiction (IB Tauris, forthcoming).

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The Reluctant Patriarch: TheEmergence of Lads and Lad Mags inthe 1990sNick Growse

1 In contemporary British culture, there seems to be a demand for representations of

weak men. As John Beynon observes in Masculinities and Culture, published in 2001

“Popular films and television shows, videos, advertisements and magazines are full of

images and narratives of weak men unable to cope with the demands made on them.

[…] These representations of men are very different from the former male paradigms of

husband and breadwinner”.1 This representation is particularly associated with

humour. The ‘hopeless man’ has been an essential characteristic of British television

comedy since Dad’s Army,2 developed subsequently in Some Mothers Do Have em,3

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads,4 Fawlty Towers5 and Only Fools and Horses6 and the

award-winning Men Behaving Badly.7 In all these cases it is the essential incompetence of

the masculine protagonist that produces the comedy. In the most recent of these, Men

Behaving Badly, the two protagonists Gary and Tony, although presented

sympathetically, are not only incompetent and absurd, but also selfish, inconsiderate,

cowardly, vainglorious, emotionally undeveloped and unprincipled. The inclusion of

feminine partners, as in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Fawlty Towers, the third

series of Only Fools and Horses and Men Behaving Badly serves to highlight the peculiarly

masculine nature of the incompetence. The male protagonist is afraid of his partner’s

judgement; he seeks to hide evidence of his weakness or incompetence, by

dissimulation, bluster and lying, until finally all his absurd efforts are laid bare. The

feminine partner, on the other hand, is continually disappointed or exasperated by her

‘man’ but forgives him in the end, as she would a child, because she loves him. This

attitude is epitomised by a comment in the six part series Micawber8, based on the

character from Charles Dickens; at the end of the third episode, Mrs Micawber, having

saved her pompous and vain husband from a ‘situation’, says to him indulgently: “Like

all men you are foolish and weak”. The Mrs Micawber of Charles Dickens was

unfailingly courteous towards her husband and did not express such thoughts. We may

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take her harsh view of men to be more a reflection of contemporary attitudes not those

of Dickens.

2 More recently, it has been suggested that this negative perception of men has become a

dominant theme in the media. An article about advertising in The Observer in 2002

claimed that “men are fed up being depicted […] as incompetent, brow-beaten slobs,

who cannot express themselves, hold down a job, clean the house or keep a girlfriend”.9

The television critic Chris Dunkley complains that men on television “are seen as inept

nerds, useless except for providing women with canned beer and not even the

occasional orgasm, which is quite beyond them”.10 This perception is not restricted to

television. A book review in the Independent Magazine complains about the recurrent

theme of “hopeless men” in the contemporary genre of novel called lad literature or

ladlit, inaugurated by Nick Hornby11 and Tony Parsons 12 and the reviewer Brandon

Robshaw, notes that “the female lead mainly functions as a personified super-ego,

frowning on the lads’ wayward behaviour”.13 Although a female equivalent of the lad,

the ‘ladette’, has been documented, it receives little representation in drama and

women are more generally represented as victims of laddish excess or inadequacy. An

American writer, Gary Taylor, having spent a week in London theatres in 2003 and

describing the experience in The Guardian, concludes that in Britain “the women never

have orgasms, the men are all assholes”.14

3 Popular science writing seems to endorse this view of men. In The Essential Difference,

Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Cambridge Autism Research Centre, argues that if

autism is considered as a sliding scale of emotional response on which everyone tends

to cluster round a mid-point, men tend to be above the mid-point, generally displaying

more signs of autistic behaviour than women. Neo-Darwinian thinking,15 perhaps best

exemplified in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor of zoology,

sees the male sex throughout the animal kingdom as a sexual parasite, seeking to

minimize its share of the work of reproduction, although Dawkins himself does not

directly relate his conclusions to humanity. The geneticist Steve Jones’s Y: The Descent of

Man (2002) about which the Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer, known for her

outspoken views, comments on the back cover, “Steve Jones is much harder on men

than I am”. There is evidence that this representation of men has affected the way

people think about gender. Following the recent statistical successes by girls and

women at school and University, newspapers have often chosen to focus on masculine

failure, with headlines such as: “So, it’s a woman’s world. The future looks to be female

as women continue to perform better than men at school, in university and in the

workplace.”16 A sociological study by a team from the University of Kent shows that

school children as young as four, boys as well as girls, believe that girls are more

successful and more focused than boys.17

4 In theoretical terms, this representation of men might well seem anomalous. In

sociological analysis, gender has most usually been seen as an ideology that is to the

advantage of men and to the detriment of women. For example, the American

sociologist R. Connell wrote that the “collective interest of heterosexual men” is

“broadly to maintain the existing system”.18Arthur Brittan calls this ideology

“masculinism”, argues that social discourse is masculine19 and that, however varied,

masculinities are to do with the exercise of power.20 Hegemonic masculine power or

“masculinism” is often supposed to operate invisibly and pervasively, as Pierre

Bourdieu argues in La Domination masculine:

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The strength of masculine order is apparent in the fact that it does not requirejustification: the androcentric worldview has successfully passed itself off asneutral and has no need to legitimate itself overtly through discourse. (Mytranslation)21

5 By appropriating language itself, masculinity can define its own characteristics and

become synonymous with strength, prestige and power. In Masculin/Féminin: La pensée

de la différence, the French anthropologist Françoise Héritier traces the polarisation of

gender characteristics through African and Far Eastern ethnic cultures and languages,

concluding that the masculine principle is systematically associated with warmth,

action and completeness, whereas the feminine is left with cold, passiveness and

incompleteness.22 She goes so far as to suggest that this linguistic polarisation in favour

of men may be considered as a fourth pillar to be added to the three identified by

Claude Lévi-Strauss as common denominators of all human society.23 The greater value

conferred on masculinity serves to underpin and justify the structural inequality

between the sexes.

6 The English language, though not included in her study, would tend to support her

thesis. Although Doctor Johnson’s first English dictionary, published in 1786, does not

even mention masculinity, the adjective “masculine” includes the definition “virile, not

soft, not effeminate”, while “manliness” includes “dignity” and “manly” includes the

synonyms “brave, stout, undaunted, undismayed”. “Feminine”, on the other hand, after

“soft, tender, delicate”, is defined as “effeminate, emasculated, wanting”. The notion of

“wanting” or “lacking” is illustrated by a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which

the feminine sex is described as “this fair defect of nature”.24 Although recent editions

of the concise Oxford dictionary (revised 11th edition, 2008) avoids these synonyms, a

glance at Roget’s Thesaurus (6th edition, 2002) shows that they are still in currency.

7 If social discourse is masculine, if men have universally appropriated language and

definitions to their advantage, then how do we explain the representation of the weak

man? Chris Dunkley, the television critic quoted above by the Observer, thinks that

feminism, or else an increasing feminization of society, is at the root of this negative

masculine image. This view has a certain non-academic support. In France, writers and

journalists like Eric Zemmour and Alain Soral, have written polemical books about the

feminization of society to the detriment of men. Robert Bly, the American poet and

writer, founder of the “mytho-poetic” men’s movement25, writes in the introduction to

his best-selling book about men Iron John: A Book About Men that he began to notice

increasing numbers of “soft” and “unhappy” men in the 1970s, often accompanied by

radiantly strong women,26 with the obvious implication that men are being dominated

by their women. A common theme in mytho-poetic and neo-Jungian writing, and the

central image in Bly’s Iron John, is that the key to a man’s masculinity has been taken by

a woman in his life, whether mother, wife or girlfriend. As another neo-Jungian writer

Sam Keene, author of Fire in the Belly, asserts in a chapter entitled “It’s a woman’s

world”, and a section entitled “Man’s Unconscious Bondage to WOMAN”, “we never

acknowledge the primal power WOMAN wields over us. The average man spends a

lifetime denying, defending against, trying to control, and reacting to the power of

WOMAN” (his capitals).27 A book published in 2002 by two Canadian academics from the

field of Religious Studies, entitled Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in

Popular Culture, attributes popular contempt for men specifically to the influence of the

feminist movement.28

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8 The problem with this argument is that in every case cited above, in which the male is

represented as weak, whether a television comedy, West End play, novel or other book,

the author is a man (and in the case of the television comedies, the producers are also

men). It would also seem that amongst writers on the subject of gender, it is above all

men who emphasize masculine weakness, fragility or vulnerability; Andrew Tolson

talks of “the fragile masculine identity”,29 Arthur Brittan of “the extreme vulnerability

of the masculine identity”,30 Pierre Bourdieu of “the immense vulnerability” of “the

impossible ideal of virility” (my translation), John Beynon of “conventional

masculinity” being “more often than not a false skin hiding deep insecurities”,31

Mairtin Mac an Ghaill of heterosexual masculinity as “a highly fractured and fragile

construction”.32 Steve Jones, the geneticist, talking of the biological foundations of

maleness, says that “masculinity emerges as a fragile and uncertain thing which is

often forced to reinvent itself.”33 Even Eric Zemmour, an apologist for unreconstructed

and atavistic masculinity, asks: “What is more fragile and mysterious than masculine

desire?”34 The militant feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, writing in the 1970s, complains

with apparent exasperation that “men dare to claim not only that they are fragile but

that the power of women over them is immense and real”.35

9 Perhaps more significantly, the men’s magazine market that took shape in Britain in

the 1990s36 seems to show that the representation of the weak man is not only

produced by men but also appeals specifically to a masculine audience. As Frank Mort

has shown in Cultures of Consumption, there was, over the course of the 1980s, a

sustained attempt by magazine publishers and advertisers to find a formula for a

successful, generalist men’s magazine which would serve as a marketing platform to a

unified masculine market.37 As Mort shows, most of the magazines, even those with big

promotion budgets like Cosmo Man or The Hit, closed after a few issues or else, like The

Face or Arena, settled into a relatively small niche market of men’s fashion. Many

publishers believed that men did not wish to identify with their gender.38 Cruelly for

Mort, his study just missed the spectacular success in 1994 of two magazines that

finally seemed to have found a successful formula: Loaded from the publishing house

IPC, and FHM from EMAP Metro. Loaded, the first, passed 100,000 copies sold on its

ninth issue.39 The real, longer-term success, however, belonged to its rival, FHM, whose

monthly sales went from approximately 60,000 in 1994 when EMAP took the title over,

to over 750,000 in 1998,40 inspiring a number of imitators and creating a vast new

publishing market. The editorial of the first issue of Loaded in May 1994, captures the

tone of both magazines:

Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink,football and less serious matters. […] Loaded is for the man who believes he can doanything, if only he wasn't hung over.41

10 At face value, both Loaded and FHM were constructed in a spirit of popular, masculine,

working-class hedonism, reminiscent of that of Paul Willis’s “lads” in Learning to

Labour42, and in contradistinction to middle-class, politically correct values of self-

control and moderation, although the target of both magazines included middle-class

and successful professional young men. As Tim Southwell, one of the founding editors

of Loaded, wrote later in his history of the magazine: “Loaded had clocked onto the fact

that there was another kind of Britain than the Beefeater, fucking around in Florence,

that kind of high-brow Britain”.43 Both magazines quickly became known as ‘lad mags’

and became emblematic of a new atavistic and ‘laddish’ masculine culture, appealing to

all social classes, based on male camaraderie, drinking and the pursuit of pleasure.

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Carolyn Jackson, in her book on masculine failure at school, Lads and Ladettes in School:

Gender and a Fear of Failure, claims that laddism is a “hegemonic masculinity”.44

11 Most studies of lad mags, such as Making Sense of Men’s Magazines,45 have tended to

emphasize the riotous and hedonistic side of laddism. However, in Loaded and FHM, as

well as their weekly successors Nuts and Zoo the representation of the weak man plays

an important part. According to an Observer Review report in 2005, marvelling at the

rise and continued success of these magazines “their message was: ‘Don’t take us

seriously. We’re blokes and we’re useless’.”46 Prior to the launch of FHM in France in

2001, focus groups of French men seem to have spotted and rejected this message,

which suggests that it appeals to a specifically English or English-speaking culture.

Amongst the key recommendations of the launch report presented to the management

board of EMAP France, we find the following: “L’autodérision est à consommer avec

modération"47 (“self-mockery is to be taken in small doses”). This is firstly apparent in

the magazine’s representation of the male body. Unlike Men’s Health, which claims to be

the best-selling men’s magazine in Germany (and which generally shows a worked-out,

semi-naked male body on the front cover), FHM has no interest in male beauty. The

front cover is reserved for a beautiful female body, and any men pictured inside the

magazine tend to be homely at best, often with a noticeable beer gut, in the image of

the magazine’s star reporter in the 1990s, Grub Smith. It is the same with masculine

character. There are various columns and spaces – “True Stories”, “Vital Signs”, “FHM

Confession” – to which readers are invited to write in recounting their most shameful

or demeaning moments. These may concern social or sexual humiliation, such as one

man whose plan to spice up his sex life by dressing up as a baby for his girlfriend,

ended so badly that he not only lost his girlfriend but he also had to leave the village

where they lived.48 More often, however, the confessions deal with more banal and yet

more revealing events. For example, a confession sent to “FHM’s incessant Laundromat

of honesty” in November 200049, is about a man who wanted to get rid of two goldfish as

he was going to move to a new flat. It turns out that he had originally bought the

goldfish to show his girlfriend that he had a ‘nurturing’ side to his character. Wishing

to hide the deed from her, he tries to stage a fatal accident, but finds that he is too

squeamish to kill an animal ‘properly’ (as his father had taught him). Eventually, afraid

that his girlfriend will discover the truth, he flushes the fish down the toilet. He turns

out to be guilty of dishonesty, cowardice, hypocrisy, unfeeling cruelty, incompetence

and spinelessness, but the magazine offers no judgement. The girlfriend in both stories

appears, to borrow the phrase of the Independent book critic Brandon Robshaw quoted

above, as “a personified superego”.

12 In interviews with celebrities and stars there is a similar interest in uncovering

unpalatable truths and the ‘real man’ behind the mask, which is totally unlike the

soapily avuncular tone that FHM adopts with the beautiful actresses or female pop stars

who model for the magazine. When it interviews sports stars, it would like to know

about deliberate violence and cheating50 or secret homosexual longings in the baths

after the match.51 When talking to celebrities, it wants to know whether they take

advantage of “dangerously young” female fans.52 More generally, the magazine likes to

ask about attitudes to masturbation and farting.53 It can be deliberately provocative in

order to unsettle the interviewee, often playing ironically with the tropes of traditional

masculinity; for example in an interview with the singer Jose Washbourn, the

interviewer starts by asking: “Have you always had that incredibly bouffant hair style –

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as in big, curly and more than a bit girlie?”54 If an interviewee becomes angry with their

needling style, the interviewer might ask, as he did to Corey, the lead singer of the

American band Slipknot: “Do you want a hug?”55 There is a long-standing column called

“The Bloke Test” in which two stars are pitted together, answering the same questions

and marked according to FHM’s value system “to decide who is least like a big girl”.56 A

man who is not like a “big girl”, however, is apparently one who can confess to

anything without shame, who is without pretension, who is at ease with his weakness.

A classic example of this is the closing exchange of an interview with the singer of

American punk band Blink 182, Mark Hoppus in December 2000. FHM says: “Clearly you

are a man of little shame. Fancy a career in porn if the band goes belly up?” Hoppus

replies calmly that his penis is too small and he lacks sexual endurance. In FHM’s world,

it is the perfect reply.57

13 In other words, the representation of the weak man, within Britain at least, would seem

to be generated by men for consumption by men. If we assume that there is an

interactive relationship between supply and demand, then it would seem that British

men want to consume (and perhaps even identify with) these images of weak

masculinity, which are so far removed from the patriarchal ideal. What is more, the

magazines belong, as we have seen, to a wider cultural phenomenon called “laddism”

or “new laddism”.58 According to The Observer, laddism is “the defining male attitude of

the decade” .59 This would put the image of the weak man at the heart of a very

widespread complex of contemporary heterosexual British masculinities.

14 From this brief overview of the magazine it might appear that there is at the heart of

British masculinities in the 1990s and 2000s a popular critique and a deconstruction of

masculine mythology, created by men for men. In other words, the representation of

the ‘hopeless bloke’ in popular culture, which is experienced on an immediate level as

funny, could reflect a deeper desire amongst men to unmask, to reveal the truth and to

‘debunk’ the myths of masculinity. However, this hypothesis leads to the question

posed in the opening paragraph: why would men want to challenge a masculine

ideology and representation which has traditionally been to their advantage? Is it, as

Rowena Chapman might suggest,60 another protean mutation of the dominant

masculine discourse, endlessly adapting to new circumstances and social environments

in order to hold on to power, assimilating new critiques into its own structure, taking

the weapons of its enemies and making them its own? The problem here is that if this is

a cunning plan, it is perhaps too cunning for the ordinary men who buy the magazine.

And it is not clear how a discourse of masculine weakness and irresponsibility can lead

to social power and control.

15 Or could this be a genuine male liberation movement, utterly unlike the one inspired

by second wave feminism in the 1970s, but similarly motivated by a desire to shed the

mask, to stop the performance, to discover a real, authentic self? The problem here is

that “laddism”, or “new laddism”, is almost pure performance; on one level public

displays of masculine drunkenness and excess, but also literally a popular performance

of masculinity on television shows such as Men Behaving Badly, and finally, of course, a

commercial discourse dreamt up by the advertising agencies and publishers.61 As the

term “new laddism” suggests, the behaviour it represents is an imitation, a copy,

inspired by the working class lads that the cultural theorist Paul Willis describes in

Learning to Labour. However genuine the desire for authenticity, we end up with yet

another performance.

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16 I would like to examine another possibility suggested to me during the course of my

own research into lad culture. I used my study of FHM to construct a survey of the

magazine’s target group – which I defined as British men who had left school, aged

between 17 and 35, and were not married or with children. My intention was to

examine to what extent the interests and concerns of FHM, which I had identified

through a contents analysis of twelve issues over a three-year period, corresponded to

those of its supposed readership. There was no formal questionnaire, but a series of

subjects – manhood, couple relationships, violence, friendship, family, work, marriage,

happiness – on which I sought to elicit the interviewee’s attitudes. The interviewees

were under the impression that I was simply recording their life-history. Instead of

asking leading questions I tried to follow the interviewee’s own discourse by picking up

or ‘echoing’ interrogatively his own words. I recruited my first interviewees through

informal contacts from different geographical environments and socio-economic

backgrounds and then used the ‘snowball’ technique of gaining access to the initial

contact’s entourage. For reasons of convenience I concentrated my interviews in the

South East of England, going no further north than Birmingham and no further west

than Bath. In the end I managed to complete 60 interviews lasting between 90 minutes

and 3 hours.62 Perhaps unsurprisingly, compared to the 2001 Census,63 the sample was

representative in terms of family background, ethnicity, home environment (big city,

town or village) and educational background.

17 During the course of these interviews, I was struck by two particular common threads

that emerged in the discourse of the interviewees. The first concerns the notion of

manhood.64 While 9 had no notion of what manhood might mean or else rejected the

concept as outdated, a majority of the rest thought that being a man meant

responsibility. 22 spontaneously used the word, while 9 others talked about being

financially responsible for a family as a necessary criterion for manhood. Implicit in the

idea of responsibility seems to be a notion of getting a good job, buying a house and

entering into a steady relationship, as emerges in this exchange with Brian, a 28-year

Londoner who claimed to have been amongst the first to buy Loaded, a first adopter of

laddism so to speak, and who was currently working as a musician in a band:

N.G. Do you consider yourself to be a man?B. Not necessarily no, because a lot of people’s perception of what being a man is,there’s a certain amount of responsibility. I think it comes with being a man and Iwouldn’t say that I am that responsible. N.G. Responsibility?B. Yeah.N.G. What sort of responsibility?B. Like having a good job, house, mortgage, car and family, kids.65

18 Brian’s definition of being a man is very reminiscent of the “masculine role”, identified

in the 1940s and 1950s by American functionalists such as Talcott Parsons66 and Mirra

Komarovsky.67 In this view, given that we have no natural instincts of reproduction,

society inculcates certain behaviour patterns to regulate the work that reproduction

entails – the “feminine role” of the homemaker and the “masculine role” of the

“provider”.68 Second wave feminists deconstructed sex roles to show that they were a

structural element in gender inequality. For example, the American feminist writer

Gloria Steinem, in an essay entitled “The Masculine Mystique”, argues that the

masculine role implies “masculine superiority” while the “feminine role” implies

second-class status.69 We can go further and see the hand of Calvinist patriarchal

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theology which places men in the bounded context of work and family, as Max Weber

describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.70 In the contemporary

masculine role as in the Puritan model, certain key concepts are inextricably linked:

manhood, masculine status and success, work, responsibility, domesticity, self-

discipline, continence. Brian’s laddism, far from being a hegemonic masculinity, would

appear to be a form of countercultural resistance to the “masculine role”.

19 This last point leads us to the second common thread, which is that this prospect of

settling down inspired almost universal dismay and even dread within my sample. Of

the 27 interviewees with jobs, only 7 claimed to enjoy their work, and it should be

noted that 5 of these had managerial responsibilities. Of those who were unemployed

or studying, not one regarded the prospect of work or a career with enthusiasm,

although the degree of antipathy varied greatly. Chris, a 22-year old student from a

medium-sized town, expresses the mildest antipathy:

N.G. How do you see yourself in five years’ time?C. Erm... Five years’ time... probably in a well-paid but quite boring job I expect.Erm...N.G. You don’t mind that? A boring job?C. No, just as long as it’s, sort of, just nine to five, Monday to Friday. I can spend theevenings and weekends... I see myself with my girlfriend still. I expect we’llprobably get married and get a house.71

20 It should be noted that there seems to be an association between the job and settling

down with his girlfriend. On the other side there is Ben who threw in his good

programming job and his girlfriend, went travelling and was unemployed and single at

the time of the interview:

I don’t know, I was kind of sick of spending 8 hours a day just tapping on a keyboardor doing something really, really dull [...]. I didn’t feel at all satisfied with what Iwas doing. It was kind of depressing. I’d just come home feeling really bowed downand the days would just go by and go by and go by with the same nothing.72

21 Apart from the seven already mentioned, who said they enjoyed their jobs, and two

who did not question the need to work hard in life (both from traditional working-class

country families), the rest of the sample, 85%, can be situated between these two

positions. This perhaps is hardly surprising. Sigmund Freud argues that the pleasure

principle in the human psyche leads to a “natural aversion to work”73 and Karl Marx

argues that work under capitalism is “alienating”.74 However, this leads to a

disconcerting syllogism; if being a man means exercising responsibility through work

and if work is alienating, then being a man is alienating. In this light, it is significant

that 23 of my sample of 60 did not qualify themselves as men, usually because they did

not consider themselves responsible, usually because they were going out drinking and

clubbing too much and had not ‘settled down’. Avoiding the status of manhood creates

a space in which pleasure and self-indulgence is allowed. At the same time, it was clear

that work is not only a functional imperative, but is also connected to self-esteem. Ben,

the ex-programmer, questioned materialist values but was at pains to emphasize that

he was not “lazy” or a “scrounger”.

22 Complex issues coalesce and overlap around the subject of work, emerging in the

discourse of the interviewees in very different ways and at different levels of

consciousness, and often leading to self-contradictory statements. The most common

‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of work was to combine work and pleasure. 18 interviewees

were trying or had tried to make money from what they enjoyed, usually music or

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making films, usually with disappointing results. Each knew that if they failed they

would have to get a “proper job”, which represented failure. The most poignant

example was a young agricultural labourer, living with his father on the edge of a

picturesque village, who thought he could be a rap star and every day went into an old

caravan in his garden to practice. His father said he was being unrealistic.

23 A small minority, 6 out of 60, railed against the system and had developed coherent,

although often anguished, personal philosophies, like Ben, who had started to question

materialist goals, or Jonathan, who had a job assembling furniture in a North London

depot and was a biker in his free time:

J. Life isn’t exciting and people need to find something that they like doing andthat’s exciting and is not mundane. I mean working every day and life in general isvery mundane.N.G. Mundane?J. It’s grim.N.G. Why is it grim?J. Because you’re locked into a system, you need to be working the system to keepaway from it, you need to enjoy yourself, you need to work as hard as possiblewithin the system and then you need the get-out which is escapism. Escapism isgreat for me.75

24 Jonathan and three other interviewees sought adrenalin rushes – bungy-jumping,

snow-boarding, downhill speed skiing and, for Jonathan, taking bends at speed – to

offset the tedium of their work lives. Perhaps also to be included in this category were

two who worked hard during the week and spent the entire weekend in London clubs

such as The Ministry of Sound, taking drugs such as ecstasy, dancing and looking for

sexual partners. Alternatively, three interviewees had 5-year or 10-year plans. They

would work hard now and earn the money to live fully later, like Chota, of British-

Indian origin, on his way to becoming a trader in the City:

I want everything I’m filtering out now to come out in ten years. I want the resultand the dividends in ten years. I’m not a very short-term person, I always think tenyears’ ahead. I have done since the last couple of years anyway. I always ask myself,if I don’t make it, is there any point living past thirty.76

25 Four, of whom three from the estates of South East London, were drawn to crime,

mostly drugs. Here’s one mulling it over:

I’ve thought about it but I can’t make up my mind. It’s really difficult. [...] I don’twant to get a job where I’m ‘oh, I hate this’... cos I feel that’s terrible [...]. I hatework. I want something that I love going to do, something I enjoy doing... and at thesame time earning my money. […] I don’t want to take the wrong sort of path.There’s so many different ways to earn money. I know inside out ways to makemoney. Stuff like that. But... I prefer to do it legally. […] Doing it illegally there’salways a chance you’ll get caught, there’s always the risk. [...] I don’t want to haveno stress, basically, I want a lot of money and no stress. And just be relaxed andfree. Worry about no-one, nothing, I’ve got no problems. It’s just paradise.77

26 Such conscious, albeit naïve, calculation is rare, however. From most of the others, both

the problem and the solution were much less defined. Of the 23 that did not define

themselves as men, 19 thought they would have to “grow up”, apparently under the

impression that once they had grown up everything would be clear, and they would

“want” to settle down with a good job and a family. In the meantime, they sought the

means to postpone that day, usually by invoking their need to travel. Compare the

following three students, who don’t know each other, each nearing the end of his

studies:

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N.G. You’re looking forward to having a career?Michael Yeah, I do want to do it, yeah I do, but I just don’t want to do it at themoment. [...] I want to go for a year, like, go to Asia, work in Australia for 6 monthsor whatever, or New Zealand and then go to South America and Canada. […] I’ve justgot it in my head that that’s what I want to do. [...] I just can’t get on with doinganything else until I’ve done that. [...] I don’t know how it will affect me, goingaway. I’d like to get a job which allows me to go travelling. I always think I don’twant to work in England, but it’s not as if I want to leave it altogether. But I justreally don’t want to work too hard.78

Don: I’m going to grow up a bit I think. I’m going to have to. Do the travelling. Andthen when I come back I’m going to have nowhere to stay, no job, nothing. I’mgoing to have to sort myself out. From then on I’m going to have... that’s the pointwhen I’ll start to think about what I’m really going to do. Forcing myself to dosomething. [...] I think when I come back, I think I will have changed, and I don’tknow, I could be a completely different ... not a completely different person, buthave different goals. N.G. Travelling for you is more than just travelling?Don: Yeah. I think after I’ve done that... travelling is sort of the thing I want to dobefore I actually completely grow up.79

Harry: I definitely want to get married, but not for a long, long time. I don’t want tosettle down until I’m at least thirty, you know. I haven’t got, you know, I’ve not gotplans to get a “proper” job for a while yet. I want to do some more travelling, seethe world.80

27 Travel, however, like the other strategies, is a temporary solution. The pressure to

conform involves not only ideological issues of self-esteem and social acceptance, but

also, by extension, purely practical considerations of survival; as such it is almost

impossible to resist. Here is Phil in his thirties, a great clubber and hedonist, preparing

to change his ways:

P. The good times have to come to an end. N.G. Why? P. Because nothing lasts forever. N.G. But you’d still like to be having those good times?P. I’d like to be having the good times, but the effects of the good times I wouldn’twant.81

28 Although he didn’t say what the effects were, I was reminded of Hogarth’s rake, who, at

the end of his adventures, finds himself rejected and despised by his community, as

well as depleted and impoverished by his own excesses.

29 There was a similar masculine ambiguity about getting involved in a ‘serious’ or ‘long-

term’ relationship. Of the 26 in a relationship at the time of the interview, only 6 spoke

of love or enriching companionship. The attitudes were complex and layered. Of the 54

heterosexual interviewees prepared to talk about their relationships, almost all

considered that having a ‘serious’ girlfriend was normal and a sign of being a man, just

as a ‘proper’ job was, and something they would all in principle aspire to. Apart from

being an approved manner of obtaining access to sexual activity, it conferred self-

esteem and social recognition and security. 3 interviewees who had not yet had a

‘proper’ relationship, and 2 who were in their thirties and did not have a ‘proper’

girlfriend were embarrassed about the fact; and 3 with little sexual experience were

proud of having had one. I felt, too, that those interviewees with issues of self-

confidence, or whose lives were in some way disordered (family break-up, prison,

financial difficulties) enjoyed the security and support of a regular girlfriend. On the

other hand, a ‘serious’ girlfriend was also associated with responsibilities and was

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considered to be an important step in the process of ‘settling down’, which a majority

of the interviewees seemed to be trying to push off in one way or another. Perhaps

unsurprisingly then, the majority of interviewees tended to contradict themselves

when talking on the subject. Here is 27-year-old George from London worrying about a

relationship that has lasted on and off for two years and which he had now decided to

commit to:

And to be with a girlfriend in the long term, we’ll probably have to marry. Which isfine, but which does carry the idea of … [pause]… boredom.82

30 Or 22-year old Michael from a small town, who has been going out with his girlfriend

for a few months:

M. Girlfriends. Like you always think you want one, but when you’ve got one youthink I could do with being by myself for a little while. Yeah, I’m happy I’ve got agirlfriend.N.G. So what’s the problem?M. Nothing really, it’s just, like, someone else to worry about, someone else you’vegot to keep happy.83

31 Or alternatively, here is 21-year-old, middle-class Harry from a medium town who did

not have a girlfriend at the time, who actually lowered his voice and glanced around

furtively as he spoke these words, as if afraid that someone might overhear, although

we were completely alone:

Sometimes it’s nice just to... personally at the moment I don’t want to get agirlfriend at all. All of my mates have... Actually my best mate hasn’t got agirlfriend, I don’t know if that’s just a coincidence. [Lowers voice.] I don’t actuallywant one, do you know what I mean? I’m quite happy just having a good time andmeeting people and... having a laugh with people. And just getting along as it were.I just think it’s nice to er... sort of... not have to worry about the consequences. Nothave to think ‘oh gawd I haven’t phoned her for a while’.84

32 It should be noted firstly that these feelings were so private that he had not discussed

them with his “best mate” and secondly that I heard indirectly that, despite his

misgivings, he was going out with a steady girlfriend the following year.

33 What is most striking in these comments is the lack of emotional commitment or even

response to sexual relationships, which emerged in various manners. 3 had an

aggressively macho ‘love em and leave em’ approach to sexual relations, which seems

also to be the recommended attitude of FHM85. 6 others talked, somewhat legalistically,

about having a girlfriend who was not actually a ‘proper’ girlfriend, with whom they

slept more or less when it suited them but without any formal responsibility or

obligation (although each of them recognised when questioned that this arrangement

did not suit their ‘unofficial’ partner). 8 talked of their “fear of commitment” which

was generally felt to be a “bloke thing”. 5 believed in love but for some reason had not

experienced it. 4 had declared love but not actually felt it. 12 were worried about their

lack of emotion and felt there might be something wrong with them (and a few were

clearly taking advantage of the anonymous interview to talk about the “problem”).

34 My point is here that if social discourse is a masculine discourse, and if men enjoy a

structural advantage, why would we find within this admittedly small but

representative sample of British men such reticence towards society and its

expectations? If being a man brought benefits in terms of enjoyment, self-expression

and prestige, why do the great majority of interviewees not seem to feel them? Why is

there so often a feeling of dispirited resignation when talking of life within social

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43

structures and a wild elation, however transitory, at any departure from those

structures? There might be indications that social discourse and structures in Britain

are not or are no longer especially ‘masculine’. For example, the popular and academic

discourse which presents masculine emotion as ‘autistic’ might be seen as a

fundamental shift of social discourse; in the past, emotional reserve or reticence was

considered to be a sign of masculine strength and the expression of powerful emotions

was associated with ‘female’ hysteria. Could this be taken as a sign that the masculine

linguistic hegemony, which feminist writers such as Françoise Héritier and Mary Daly86

considered so universal, has been lost? We can also point to the emergence of counter-

cultural movements in Britain since the 1960s, such as Mods, Skinheads and Punks. As

Fiona MacDonald points out in The Graffiti Subculture,87 these movements have

traditionally been interpreted in the light of Marxist analysis as forms of social protest,

which ignores the fact that they are also predominantly masculine movements. In “Girls

and Subculture”, the British sociologists Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber argue that

women do not create their own subcultures.88 If this is the case, could this be an

indication that it is above all men who are unhappy with social structures? And, once

again, could this be an indication that social discourse is not necessarily ‘masculine’ or

constructed in the interest of men?

35 What is more, a general impression gained from the young men of my sample is that

the main spokespersons for the discourse of settling down and growing up and being a

man are not other men, but ironically the women in their lives, usually mothers or

girlfriends, who often appear in their discourse as a “a personified superego”, to

borrow the television critic Brandon Robshaw’s phrase. Of the 12 interviewees who

discussed their ambitions in life, in 7 spontaneously mentioned the mother as a guiding

and inspirational force. It would also seem that mothers and girlfriends seek to correct

behaviour that they disapprove of. They reprimand and militate against tasteless jokes

(5 cases), insensitive and selfish behaviour (17 cases), childishness (8 cases), time- and

money-wasting games and activities (13 cases), they urge their boyfriends to get

‘proper’ jobs (7 cases), to go out less with their male friends (9 cases), and generally to

“grow up” and accept their responsibilities. 21 interviewees expressed the view that a

girlfriend in particular or girlfriends in general wished to change them or their

behaviour. Some, usually talking about a current girlfriend, were appreciative of this

role:

She keeps me on the straight line.89

36 Or ruefully accepting:

She actually... she knows me a lot more than I actually know myself. I know that.She can read me like a book sometimes. And she knows when I’m lying, I’ll tell youthat.90

37 Or understanding at least:

I think she has an ideal vision of what a couple should be and she wants to direct usas close to that as possible, I think.91

38 Most were, to varying degrees, resentful or baffled:

The things that my Mum and girlfriend moan about, they’re things which just can’tbe helped. I think that moaning about little things is pointless, because life’s tooshort to be miserable.92

39 It should be noted that whereas the mother most usually played an important and

active role in the interviewee’s life, communication between father and son was most

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44

often seen as not as good as with the mother, or else poor. In 19 cases he had left home

at some time during the interviewee’s upbringing, most frequently unlamented. Of

those that had lived in a traditional family unit, only 7 got on better with their father

than with their mother, and in 4 of these cases it was not because they communicated

verbally a lot, but because they shared a ‘masculine’ hobby or activity, such DIY or

cycling. It is also worth noting that, even when the father fulfilled the traditional

masculine role as main breadwinner, which was almost always the case when both

parents lived together, the mother was usually seen as the dominant presence in the

family, who had the final word on family matters (21 cases). 6 fathers who were

considered to be dominant were also considered to be bullies, tending towards

violence. Only 2 fathers were seen as being powerful, loving and communicative figures

in the interviewee’s life. Generally speaking fathers did not represent for the

interviewees an encouraging or enviable role model.

40 What emerges from these interviews is a strong impression that the masculine role,

based on work and family responsibilities, which second wave feminists such as Gloria

Steinem considered an essential component of masculine domination93, is not an

enticing prospect for men but is nevertheless considered to be unavoidable. It seems

that, as a result, various delaying tactics, often characterised as ‘laddish’, are deployed,

whether consciously or unconsciously, involving a subversion of patriarchal

representations and values, a refusal to engage in work, to engage emotionally in

sexual relationships, a refusal of the status of manhood, a refusal to engage in society

or accept responsibilities. In this light we can better understand the desire to debunk

or unmask ideal masculine values, which is so evident in FHM. More generally, it can be

argued that politically incorrect humour is used subversively to undermine dominant

social values.

41 At the heart of laddism is the creation of masculine space, where men can ‘be

themselves’. This most famously takes the form of the ‘lads’ night out’, whether a stag

party in Dublin or an ordinary Friday evening in the local pubs and clubs. To

understand just how formulaic these evenings are supposed to be, it is sufficient to

compare the following two passages, the first from FHM, the ‘lad mag’ par excellence, the

other taken two years later from an article about laddism in a regional newspaper:

In order to amuse himself on a night-out, the fun-loving gentleman will embarkupon a course of heavy alcohol consumption, accompanied by a few cheeky phraseslevelled at a bored barmaid and a fight involving pork scratchings and kebab meat.94 A typical evening for a rugby player is supposed to consist of 14 pints of lager, around of sexist songs, a fistfight and a greasy kebab.95

42 Heavy alcohol consumption breaks down conditioned constraints. In both cases it is

implied that there are no women present, apart from the “bored barmaid” and

masculine behaviour is anti-social, involving sexism and fighting. Another key element

is the male group. For the interviewees of my sample, membership of a masculine band

of friends had great importance. It was my impression, admittedly subjective, that the

18 who were part of such a group were the happiest of my sample and those that had

no masculine friends were the unhappiest. In the words of one of my interviewees, the

group of male friends was “magical and reassuring”.96 Typically, they had become

friends at school, where they formed a powerful clique and neglected work in favour of

“having a laugh”. After school they still meet regularly, usually at weekends to go out

drinking together. The participation of girlfriends, although tolerated, is disapproved

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45

of (and can lead to bad feeling within the group), as in their presence the men cannot

“be themselves”. All communication within the group tends to take the form of

“merciless piss-taking”97, debunking any personal pretensions revealed by a member of

the group, making politically incorrect and frequently sexist jokes and sometimes

forcefully debating political issues which may range from Britain’s place in Europe to

the local controversy of a road being built through a protected wetland. They do not

share their feelings or discuss personal problems. It seemed to me that part of the

success of FHM and Loaded is that they imitated the dynamic of such a masculine group.

However, the masculine bonded group, too, seems to be also a temporary solution, as

33-year old Jim suggests:

We talk about our relationships not in the way I would discuss it with my girlfriend.Fair bit of ribbing going on about who’s most under the thumb or settled down,those sorts of things. […] I think we’re all getting to an age where it’s prettyinevitable that we’ll be settling down, having kids and maybe getting married. Ithink there’s a bit of like ‘you go first’, ‘no you go first’, seeing who’s ready to startthat off. Whether it’s like a collective anxiety thing, I don’t know.98

43 Jim is the main breadwinner in the couple, but did not at all give the impression of

being the dominant partner. On the contrary, it seems as if he is acceding reluctantly to

his girlfriend’s discourse and grumbling about it secretly to his friends. It is perhaps

significant and related that Jim enjoys video games, but because his girlfriend finds the

activity childish, he waits until she leaves the flat before playing. It seemed to me as if

not only the home but the relationship itself might be interpreted as a feminine space.

44 This analysis of the interviews challenges the traditional feminist assumptions that

patriarchy and patriarchal masculinities are necessarily maintained by men in the

interest of men. The dominant discourse may be about men and about masculine success,

without being a masculine discourse. On the contrary, it may even be argued that

masculinities are actively shaped by women according to a feminine ideology of the

home. This is not necessarily a new observation in Britain. For Andrew Tolson, the

pioneer of masculinity studies in Britain, the mother is “the principle representative of

the middle class family.”99 According to Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and

Kinship in East London, in the Bethnal Green area of East London in the 1950s “the

mother is the head and centre of the extended family.”100 Nor is this phenomenon

restricted to Britain. The feminist writer, Barbara Ehrenreich in The Hearts of Men,

argues that American men since the 50s frequently experience the process of settling

down as a surrender of volition to a feminine world.101

45 We can trace this analysis further back in time. As the literary critic Frank Kermode

points out, D.H. Lawrence believed that women were the real “social agents” and that

the miners of his generation had been “got under and made good” by their wives.102 In a

speech delivered in 1955, later published as an essay under the title “The Condition of

Women in Primitive Societies and in Our Own”, the British anthropologist E.E. Evans

Pritchard expresses his belief that English men have lost a great part of the authority

that they used to enjoy as head of the family and have adopted a passive and defensive

attitude within the home.103 The theme can be traced further back in time. F.M.L.

(Michael) Thompson, the British social historian of the 19th century, suggests that “the

father wielded the strap but most of the rules emanated from mother”104 and that

feminine control of marriage arrangements led to feminine definitions of acceptable

masculinity:

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It is clear that the effective determination of marrying standards, and theirenforcement, were substantially women’s business, with authority and influencebeing exercised by wives, mothers and grandmothers [...]. It was women whocomposed the invitation lists for social events and thus decided which young mencame within the pale of the socially acceptable. And it was womenfolk whodeveloped the appropriate classificatory vocabulary about where to draw the line,chiefly for application to young men.105

46 John Tosh, studying 19th century masculinities, argues that for many middle-class

Victorian men, “domesticity […] meant submitting to a feminized ambience”.106 Tosh

argues that this masculine perception led to the creation of homosocial spaces that

allowed men to escape the influence of women, not just masculine clubs and rooms

reserved for men in domestic architecture (the gun-room, the smoking room etc.), but

also, more generally, colonial adventure,107 in which analysis the former British empire

must be considered the ultimate masculine space. Generally he notes the rise of homo-

sociality and so-called “Uranian” friendships between men.108 The theme can be traced

back further. Historians of the Early Modern period, such as Laura Gowing, Patricia

Crawford and Jacqueline Eales have explored how women of this period used

patriarchal institutions such as the Calvinist sects, the Church generally and the

Ecclesiastical courts to militate against masculine drunkenness, infidelity, physical

abuse and laziness and generally to ensure that men lived up to their patriarchal

pretensions. Laura Gowing suggests that women acquired at this time “a verbal and

legal authority that was at once powerful and fragile”109 and Jacqueline Eales speaks of

the feminine role as “moral arbiter of acceptable social behaviour”.110 The historian

Anthony Fletcher, speaking of the onset of patriarchal Calvinist masculinity in the early

17th century, emphasises its drawbacks for men:

47 This manhood in itself was more questionable, it is suggested, than we have realised:

more problematic to achieve, more problematic to retain and exercise according to the

rules that society laid down. For the core of early modern patriarchy was household

order and much was expected of men in that regard.111

48 This would perhaps suggest that Calvinist patriarchy, while ostensibly reinforcing

masculine domination, in fact came at a price, by expecting men to live up to their

patriarchal pretensions and therefore, so to speak, to earn their status. It may be added

that, according to Jacqueline Eales, it was agreed amongst Calvinist theologians and

theoreticians that women should obey their husbands “unless their commands

conflicted with those of God”.112 If this is the case, women would have had considerable

influence as arbitrators of masculinity.

49 This analysis encourages us to think of patriarchy not as a solid and monolithic

structure imposed by men, but as a precarious, shifting interaction between gender

ideologies that have emerged around the work and responsibilities involved in

reproduction. Although men have most usually obtained the advantage in any contest

over the division of labour in child-care (as women are literally left holding the baby)

and sought to naturalise the advantage through masculinist ideologies, this would not

preclude the emergence of feminine ideologies and practices that seek to minimise the

feminine disadvantage and masculine abuse of power. We can imagine that direct

confrontation would not produce the best results and therefore envisage the evolution

of subversive strategies which seek to influence masculine conditioning or even define

masculinities according to perceived feminine interests. In this scenario, the prestige

women accorded to a man would be conditional on his behaviour. Such feminine

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participation in the construction of masculinities is not unusual or limited to the

English-speaking world. In the collection of ethnographical gender studies entitled

Dislocating Masculinity,113 a number of contributors note this practice. For example,

Chenjerai Shire, speaking of the Shona in his native Zimbabwe, says that “women

constructed masculinities right through the lives of men, from birth to adulthood.”114

Lin Foxhall challenges Michel Foucault’s analysis of masculine domination in Periclean

Athens and suggests that women, by marrying young, spanned the generations of men

and provided cultural continuity, which constrained masculine freedom of action.115 In

“The Paradoxes of Masculinity”, Deniz Kandiyoti perceives among young Turkish men a

reaction against patriarchal masculine identities which are inculcated or encouraged

by the women of their families.116

50 We can therefore imagine that through this subversive or recuperative process the

advantages accruing to men in patriarchy may be whittled away until they are not

experienced as advantages at all but as constraints. This masculine perception would

not necessarily take place on a conscious level, but would perhaps most likely emerge

in self-contradictory discourse, as we have seen in the interviews of my own sample,

and would be filtered through issues of self-esteem, perceptions of right and wrong,

calculations of self-interest and the sublimation of desires. If hegemonic masculine

discourse has really been subverted by a feminine ideology, we can also imagine the

emergence of equally unconscious masculine counter-strategies or counter-practices,

emerging through fashion and humour, which seek to undermine hegemonic

patriarchal ideals and set up alternative ‘authentic’ models of masculinity which allow

for greater freedom. This scenario might shed light generally on the meaning of post-

war countercultural movements in Britain but particularly on the emergence of new

laddism in the 1990s, with its emphasis on masculine pleasure-seeking, its impatience

with social constraints, its ridicule of masculine pretensions, its self-lacerating

representation of the weak man and more generally its use of subversive humour.

Ironically, this interpretation would ostensibly have lads and feminists fighting for the

same cause. However, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests in “The Decline of Patriarchy”,117

the dismantling of patriarchy might lead to new and worse forms of masculine abuse. It

would be provocative and sensationalist to suggest that patriarchy is a feminine

construction, but it might be considered, from a feminine point of view, as an

ideological means, faute de mieux and in the absence of reproductive instincts, of

containing masculine abuse and obtaining masculine contribution, however unequal, to

the work that reproduction entails.

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NOTES

1. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press,

2001), 94.

2. Dad’s Army, BBC, 8 series and 12 “specials”, 1968-1977. Script writers: Jimmy Perry and David

Croft. Producer: David Croft.

3. Some Mothers Do Ave Em, BBC, 22 episodes, 1973-1975, 1978. Scriptwriters: Raymond Allen and

Michael Crawford. Director: Sydney Lotterby. Producer: Michael Hills.

4. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? BBC, 26 episodes in 2 series, 1973,1974. Scriptwriters: Dick

Clement and Ian Lefrenais. Producers: Bernard Thompson and James Gilbert.

5. Fawlty Towers, BBC, 12 episodes in 2 series, 1975, 1979. Scriptwriters: John Cleese and Connie

Booth. 1st series producer: John Howard Davies. 2nd series producer: Douglas Argent.

6. Only Fools and Horses, BBC. 52 episodes in 8 series and 14 “specials”, 1981-1996. Writer and

editor: John Sullivan. Producers: Ray Butt, Gareth Gwenlan, Louis Heaton.

7. Men Behaving Badly, Hartwoods Films. 1992-1994 on ITV, 1995 on BBC1. In 1995 the show won

the “Most Popular Comedy Series” television award.

8. Micawber. ITV. 4 episodes. December 2001. Creator: John Sullivan. Executive Producer: David

Reynolds.

9. John Arlidge, “Men Fight Back over Sexist TV Adverts”, The Observer, January 16, 2002, 4. These

advertisements usually show men as slow-witted compared to the female target.

10. Sue Summers, “Has TV had a Makeover?”, The Observer Review, March 2, 2003, 12.

11. Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch (1993) and High Fidelity (1995).

12. Tony Parsons, author of many novels such as One For My Baby (2001), Man and Wife (2003) and

The Family Way (2004).

13. Brandon Robshaw, “How to be Good. Has Ladlit Reached its Closing Time?” The Independent

Magazine, August 24, 2002, 18.

14. Gary Taylor, “You Vile, Hopeless, Incompetent Brits”, The Guardian, December 12, 2003, G2, 10.

15. Unlike sociologists, Neo-Darwinians consider that human behavioural characteristics are

fundamentally governed by the same opportunistic evolutionary principles as govern those of

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other animals. Their major tool of analysis is Game Theory, which studies the outcome of

competitive interaction. The Harvard zoologist E.O. Wilson founded a new hybrid discipline in

the 1970s, which he called “Sociobiology”, the object of which was to integrate the study of

human society with the wider study of animal behaviour. Since the 1990s, the controversial term

“Sociobiology” has been abandoned in favour of “Evolutionary Psychology”, best represented by

such writers as Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct (London: Penguin, 1995).

16. The Observer. “So it’s a woman’s world”, The Observer, 15 August, 2004, 3.

17. The study was carried out in 2009 with 238 children at two primary schools in Kent.

According to the University website, “Bonny Hartley, of the University of Kent, who presented

the research, said: ‘By seven or eight years old, children of both genders believe that boys are less

focused, able, and successful than girls – and think that adults endorse this stereotype.’”

University of Kent, http://www.kent.ac.uk/news/stories/girls-believe/2010, accessed 2010.

18. R. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 31.

19. Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 131.

20. Brittan, Masculinity and Power, 5.

21. “La force de l’ordre masculin se voit au fait qu’il se passe de justification : la vision

androcentrique s’impose comme neutre et n’a pas besoin de s’énoncer dans des discours visant à

la légitimité.” Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 15.

22. Françoise Héritier, Masculin/féminin: la pensée de la différence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 19-22,

72-86, 143.

23. The three pillars as conceived by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté

(1949) are the prohibition of incest, the division of labour between the sexes, and the existence of

some socially recognised form of sexual union.

24. Oh why did God

Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven

with spirits masculine, create at last

This novelty of earth, this fair defect

Of nature.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X, L. 888.

25. The mytho-poetic movement, founded by Robert Bly, is a men’s movement inspired by the

thinking of the psychologist Karl Jung. It holds, in particular, that men need to be ritualistically

initiated into manhood, and that masculinity can take any of several ‘archetypal’ forms, as are

found and exemplified in traditional folk legends (for example, king, jester, warrior or magician).

A number of men’s groups sprang up in the USA and the UK over the course of the 1990s, seeking

to put their members in touch with their masculinity.

26. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading: Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1990), 2.

27. Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly (New York and London: Bantam, 1991), 14.

28. P. Nathanson and K. Young, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in popular

Culture (New York: McGill Queen’s UP, 2002).

29. Tolson, The Limits of Masculinity (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 69.

30. Brittan, Masculinity and Power, 28.

31. Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 66.

32. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling (Buckingham:

OUP, 1994), 179.

33. Steve Jones, Y: The Descent of Men (London: Abacus, 2002), 23.

34. Eric Zemmour, Le Premier sexe (Paris: Denoël, 2006), 72.

35. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1979), 65.

36. As David Hepworth, former editorial director of Emap Metro, explained to me in an interview

in 2006, FHM, through a process known as “saming” (“the swift adoption of best practice”),

became the template for all subsequent men’s magazines, including the popular men’s weeklies

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Zoo and Nuts. In other words, although FHM has lost pride of place to the weekly magazines, its

spirit lives on. (Nicholas Growse, op. cit., Appendices, 24)

37. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century

Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 15-22.

38. Mort, Cultures of Consumption, 20.

39. The first issue sold 59,400 copies and Loaded broke the 100,000 sales barrier with its ninth

issue. Its first audited yearly sales figure was 96,000 and this rose by 82% to 174,763 for the period

Jul-Dec 1995.

Magazine and Magazine Publishers’ Website, http://www.magforum.com, “Men’s magazines”,

accessed August 2006.

40. ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations), http://www.abc.org.uk.

41. “Editorial,” Loaded, May 1998.

42. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Brookfield and

Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1977). Willis’s thesis is that the working class “lads” of his

study in a Midlands school felt that the long-term benefits of hard work and good behaviour did

not outweigh the immediate pleasure of avoiding work and doing as one pleased.

43. Tim Southwell, Getting Away with It: The Inside Story of Loaded (London: Ebury, 1998), 61.

44. Carolyn Jackson, Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and a Fear of Failure (Maidenhead: Open

University Press, 2006), 9-11.

45. Peter Jackson, Nick Stevenson and Kate Brooks, Making Sense of Men’s Magazines (Cambridge:

Polity, 2001).

46. Tim Adams, The Observer Review, May 25, 2005, 1-2.

47. Nicholas Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad dans les magazines spécialisés pour hommes: l’état de la

masculinité en Grande-Bretagne (PhD. Diss. Université de Paris 7, 2008) Appendices 3. The

appendices are numbered independently of the main body of the thesis.

48. FHM, October 2000, 98.

49. FHM, November 2000, 154.

50. For example, in a question and answer with Stuart Pierce and Steve Cram 5 questions out of

10 are concerned with morality:

Ever twatted a fan?

Ever taken advantage of a groupie’s offer?

Have you ever tripped up a detested rival?

Ever used your name to get yourself out of trouble?

Ever feigned an injury?

FHM, November 2000, “Sin Bin”, 349.

51. For example in the “Sin Bin” question and answer column;

“Finally, do you ever jump in the bath with the boys after a big win?” (FHM, October 2000, 343)

“Ever thrown soap at another player’s genitals?” (FHM, December 2000, 399)

52. To the singer Corey:

Do you recall the day you realised that naïve strangers would let you fiddle with them?

FHM, November 2000, “Quote Unquote: Corey”, 82.

53. For example in an interview with Al Murray the comedian in December 2000, we find the

following questions:

What about toilet breaks – you must have a bladder of steel to keep all that liquid in for 2 hours?

How long into a relationship does it become ok to fart in front of a lady?

As a public schoolboy, were you as secretive at masturbating as you are now at farting?

FHM, December 2000, “Quote Unquote: Al Murray”, 124.

54. FHM, December 2000, “Quote Unquote: Jose Washbourn”, 70.

55. FHM: Do you want a hug?

Corey: No, I don’t want a fuckin’ hug!

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FHM, November 2000, 82.

56. FHM, July 2002, 42.

57. FHM, December 2000, 74.

58. The expression “new laddism” is used, especially by sociologists, to distinguish the

phenomenon that arose in the 1990s from the earlier notion of young working class masculinity

as described by Paul Willis in Learning to Labour.

59. Adams, ‘‘Why is this the biggest…,’’ 1-2.

60. Rowena Chapman, “The Great Pretender”, in Unwrapping Masculinity, eds Rowena Chapman

and Jonathan Rutherford (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1988).

61. As both the first editor of FHM, Mike Soutar, and his immediate superior, EMAP editorial

director David Hepworth made plain to me in separate interviews, FHM was produced at the

behest of the advertising agencies, who were looking for a marketing platform that could access

young men collectively. The magazine’s goal, before its extraordinary success became known,

was simply to satisfy the advertisers. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, appendices B1 and B2.

62. The transcripts are published in appendices C and D of Nicholas Growse, op. cit. 10 are

complete, the remaining 50 are composed of key extracts. The appendices are numbered

independently of the main body of the thesis.

63. Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2001 Census, http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census/

64. I began each interview with the rather strange but fruitful question: “Do you consider

yourself to be a man?”

65. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 403.

66. The Harvard professor of Sociology Talcott Parsons developed the functionalist principles of

Role Theory in works such as The Structure of Social Action (1937), Essays in Sociological Theory, Pure

and Applied (1942) and The Social System (1951).

67. Mirra Komarovsky, a former student of Talcott Parsons, developed Sex Role Theory in two

articles published in the American Sociological Review, “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles”

(1946) and “Functional Analysis of Sex Roles” (1950).

68. Mirra Komarovsky, “Functional Analysis of Sex Roles”, American Sociological Review, August

1950, 511.

69. Gloria Steinem, “The Masculine Mystique”, in Men and Masculinity, eds Pleck and Sawyer

(Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1974), 135.

70. Max Weber, L’Éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme (Paris, Plon, 1967 (1964)) 101.

71. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 388.

72. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 329.

73. Sigmund Freud, Le Malaise dans la culture, trans. (Paris: Quadriges/Presses Universitaires de

France, 1998) 23.

74. Karl Marx, ‘L’Idéologie allemande’, in Marx: études philosophiques (Paris: Editions Sociales,

1977).

75. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 237.

76. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 243.

77. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 277.

78. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 326.

79. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 335.

80. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 85.

81. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 68.

82. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 281.

83. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 325.

84. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 83.

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85. Just look into her eyes when she tells you that she loves you. Now picture the same face, with

20lbs hanging from the chin, and smothered in wrinkles … Leave the witch. FHM, November 2001,

“Love”, 207.

86. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (London: The Women’s Press, 1991).

87. Nancy MacDonald, The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York

(Basingstoke et New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 45.

88. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, “Girls and Subcultures”, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken

Gelder and Sarah Thornton, 112-20.

89. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 217.

90. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 52.

91. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 118.

92. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 448.

93. For example, Gloria Steinem, in an essay entitled “The Myth of Masculine Mystique”, argues

that the masculine role implies for men “perpetuating their superiority over women”, and the

feminine role implies for women “suppressing their intellect, accepting their second-class

position and restricting all normal ambitions to the domination of their children”.

Gloria Steinem, “The Masculine Mystique”, in Men and Masculinity, eds Joseph Pleck and Jack

Sawyer (New Jersey: Spectrum, 1974), 134.

94. FHM, November 2000, 43.

95. East Anglian Times, August 19, 2002, 32.

96. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 260.

97. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 260.

98. Growse, Le Phénomène du New Lad, 288.

99. Tolson, The Limits of Masculinity, 26.

100. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth:

Pelican, 1957), 49.

101. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New

York and London: Anchor, 1983).

102. Frank Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1973), 8.

103. I have paraphrased here from a French translation of the English text.

Edward Evans Pritchard, « La condition de la femme dans les sociétés primitives et dans la

nôtre » in La femme dans les sociétés primitives et d’autres essais d’anthropologie sociale, trans. Anne

and Claude Rivière (Paris: PUF, 1965) 44.

104. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900

(London: Fontana Press, 1988), 131.

105. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, 103.

106. John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, London and New

York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 206.

107. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 200.

108. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 206.

109. Laura Gowing, “Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern

London”, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. J. Kermode and G. Walker

(London: UCL Press, 1994), 127.

110. Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (London: UCL Press, 1998), 107.

111. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1995), 202.

112. Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 96.

113. Andea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne eds, Dislocating Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994).

114. Chenjerai Shire, “Men Don’t Go to the Moon”, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne eds, op. cit., 153.

115. Lin Foxhall, “Pandora Unbound”, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne eds, op. cit., 133-46.

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116. Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Paradoxes of Masculinity”, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne eds., op. cit.,

198.

117. Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Decline of Patriarchy”, in Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon

Watson eds, Constructing Masculinity (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

ABSTRACTS

This paper examines the representation of the ‘weak man’ (or ‘useless bloke’) in contemporary

popular British culture, most visibly in television comedy, but also apparent in men’s magazines

such as FHM and Loaded, in popular ‘confessional’ novels of the genre inaugurated by Nick

Hornby, and even noted in theatre and popular science writing. While many writers and

commentators have attributed this tendency to a rise in feminism and feminine power, this

paper suggests that the representation is primarily produced by men for masculine consumption.

It argues that it might be symptomatic of a masculine rejection of patriarchal values which are

no longer felt by men to be in their interest.

INDEX

Keywords: lads, laddism, lad mags, Loaded, FHM, British masculinities, weak men, blokes

AUTHOR

NICK GROWSE

Nick Growse is English but has lived in France for over 20 years. He spends most of his

time travelling between the Dordogne, where he lives with his family, and Paris where

he teaches marketing and related business subjects at Ipag. The subject of his doctoral

thesis was the rise of popular British men’s magazines such as Loaded and FHM in the

1990s and their relation to the popular British masculine culture called ‘laddism’ or

‘new laddism’. Since then he has carried out research on connections between

masculine identities and racial identities, the history of modern masculinities in the

modern period of British history and the history of gender theory. His publications

include “The Ideology of Emotion” (Etudes Lawrenciennes 43, Presses Universitaires de

Paris Ouest, Paris, 2012) and “L’empirisme anglo-saxon : approche objective ou

idéologique ?” in Mankin Robert (ed.), Travaux en cours, No. 5, December 2009.

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Seducing Women to Assess EachOther: Male Hierarchies within theSeduction CommunityMélanie Gourarier

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I would like to thank Marie-Elisabeth Handman and Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski

for their detailed comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Guilia

Zanini for her proofreading.

“To seduce women was first and foremost to

assess each other. Men assessing men.” (Sam, 24

years old, Paris)1

1 Drawing from an ethnographic inquiry2 involving a group of men who place the

acquisition of seduction skills at the core of their relationships, this paper questions

how community bonds are structured through the apprenticeship of masculinity. The

fieldwork was conducted within a specific group: the Seduction Community – as its

members call it – which is indeed an exclusively male and heterosexual community

where learning to seduce is also and primarily learning to be a man. Despite the fact

that the first purpose of the group is to establish an effective method to seduce women

– known as the Game within the Community – respondents seem more interested in

masculinity and male relations than in women and feminine conquest. These

hypotheses need to be verified and confronted to ethnographic data. To this aim, I shall

firstly explore how the Community is structured and organized in order to determine

how it functions as a male group. Then, I shall discuss the process of assessment of

masculinity. Finally I shall explore the articulation between male bonds and the

hierarchy of masculinity via the confrontation of opposite models of masculinity

mobilized within the Seduction Community.

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Between Men

2 Firstly appearing in the late 1990s in California, the Seduction Community is structured

around a discussion group started by founder Ross Jeffries during which participants

discuss their difficulties in seducing women and seek strategies to become ‘good’, if not

‘great’ seducers. Ross Jeffries’s techniques seemed particularly innovative at the time

due to his adaptation of Neuro-Linguistic Programming methods3 to the practical

apprenticeship of seduction. With Ross Jeffries, seduction became a separate domain

within the self-help movement, then a synonym of development and self-achievement.

By using a terminology pertaining to personal development, certain members of the

group, well-known for their mastery of seduction techniques, refer to themselves as

“seduction coaches”. They usually share their knowledge with novice members by way

of group seminars or individual coaching, where they integrate, in addition to

instructions on the specifics of masculine seduction, makeover and lifestyle advice (e.g.

culture, daily organization, health, etc.). The development of the Seduction

Community, a society based on the model of college fraternities and fictional secret

societies, such as Fight Club,4 was formed through the Internet. This particular group is

structured around masculine bonding and its organization is kept a close secret. In

1994 Lewis de Payne, a student of Ross Jeffries and an associate of Kevin Mitnick,5

founded the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast. Its purpose was to organize meetings and

discussions among group members, reinforcing ‘community’ bonds as well as the

confidential nature of exchanges between members. Following the success of this first

newsgroup, many forums, mailing lists, websites and blogs emerged, participating in

the worldwide display of the Seduction Community. Thus, the Internet is the first mode

of recruitment of new members as well as the preferred medium for group interaction.

The Seduction Community is composed primarily of young men aged from 18 to 30.6

Due to their young age, they are digital natives and tend to treat the internet as their

favorite, if not exclusive, means of communication, socialization and information. All

Community members who have taken part in the investigation were registered on

more than three social networking websites7 and held an account with at least two

discussion forums (outside of the Community). Their entrance into the Seduction

Community is also part of a ‘digital trajectory’ that corresponds to the use of the

Internet as a major relational mode. Composed entirely of young men, Community

organization appears essentially as a structure of production of male bonds.

3 Though the primary and explicit function of the Seduction Community is the

development of a guaranteed method of success with women, which is generically

named the Game,8 the results of this inquiry lead me to consider that its implicit but

essential function is to develop sociability among men. These homosocial practices are

so important within the Community that the time devoted to them greatly surpasses

time devoted to the seduction of women. Despite the difficulty of precisely quantifying

the time group members spend on the various Community activities, the inquiry

showed that they devote themselves mainly to developing their relationships with

other men. As a matter of fact, during seduction-training sessions, relationships with

women remain secondary if compared to the construction of male bonds. For example,

during a night-session organized by some of the novices in order to seduce women in

the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, only one of the four hours that I

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58

spent with the group was actually dedicated to approaching women in the street. The

rest of the time the men went to a bar to develop their male friendships.

4 This leads us to ask if the pre-eminence of homosocial practices constitutes a paradox

in a Community which is supposed to focus entirely on the affirmation of heterosexual

inclination. For what reasons would a group that devotes itself primarily to the

conquest of women allot so little time to them, to the point of excluding them from the

Community’s social spaces? I hereby propose to resolve this apparent contradiction by

shifting the terms of the issue: what if seducing women was not the aim but the method

by which to achieve the acquisition of masculinity with the support of a peer group?

Quantifying Masculinity : Making Visible the InvisibleMen

5 Becoming a great seducer is first of all to fulfill oneself as a ‘real man’. This occurs

through the acquisition of skills which are perceived by the Community as specifically

masculine. At the heart of the Seduction Community, the ‘real man’ is subject to at least

two antagonistic definitions of masculine ideals, which result in rivalry within the

group. Community trajectories aim to teach these ideal masculinities through the

acquisition of seduction techniques. Upon their entry into the Community, individuals

are identified as novices. The more theoretical knowledge and empirical experience

they acquire, the closer they come to the masculine ideal, the ultimate achievement

being the promise to become an Alpha Male. The few who reach this level are

designated as the group’s elite, and often become coaches, reinvesting their knowledge

for the benefit of the novices. Considered this way, masculinity is a process that

requires continuous refinement. As the level of masculinity acquired determines

hierarchies between men inside the group, the object of the Seduction Community is

thus to develop a rational system of measuring masculinity. If one of the issues of the

Community trajectories is to make men, then masculinity becomes the subject of

exhibition strategies and showy practices. The challenge is to make male invisible

qualities observable in order to better quantify them.

6 If, to paraphrase Anne-Marie Sohn, the ‘complete man’, that is to say a man of adult

age, rarely lets himself appear as a man and proceeds to inhabit an invisible

masculinity, invisible because perfectly interiorized,9 can one still “consider man as a

poster stuck to a wall to be read”, as it was put by an English phrenological journal at

the end of the nineteenth century?10 These two approaches, formulated in different

contexts and eras, still inform how we analyse the way the masculine stereotype

functions. On the one hand, masculinity should be considered invisible insofar as it is

the result of a process of normalization. This is the thesis that Michael Kimmel defends

when exposing the socio-historical process that shapes ‘men as men’, that is men that

are invisible in the accounts of American history. According to Kimmel, men remained

invisible because of their neutral gender quality as a referential point:

American men have come to think themselves as genderless, in part because they can

afford the luxury of ignoring the centrality of gender. […] That men remain unaware of

the centrality of gender in their lives perpetuates the inequalities based on gender in

our society, and keeps in place the power of men over women, and the power of some

men, which are among the central mechanisms of power in society.

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59

Invisibility reproduces inequality. And the invisibility of gender to those privileged by

it reproduces inequalities that are circumscribed by gender.11

7 Thus, normative masculinity, which is characterized by R.W. Connell as hegemonic

masculinity, gains its power from the fact that it passes for ‘normal’, as opposed to

“subordinate masculinities”12 which are, on the contrary, specified and characterized.13

Connell’s analysis that sociological effects of the production of the countertypes, can

also be found in the work of Monique Wittig. Wittig is particularly interested in groups

which are marginalized because they occupy an outsider position related to the norm.

[…] To constitute a difference and to control it is an “act of power because it is an

essentially normative act. Everyone tries to present others as different. But not

everyone manages to do so. One must be socially dominant to reach this point”.14

8 Therefore, it would appear that masculinity cannot be legible except on the margins.

This is the argument put forward by Anne-Marie Sohn and Judith Halberstam, who

consider masculinity to become visible when it leaves the hegemonic form. According

to Anne-Marie Sohn, masculinity becomes more easily observable via the process of

becoming a man at the moment of adolescence when masculinity is at the peak of its

construction.15 In her seminal work dedicated to “Feminine Masculinity”, Judith

Halberstam shows that the study of “masculinity without men”, allows for the

deconstruction of the norms pertaining to masculinity:

I claim […] that far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually

affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity. In other words,

female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in

order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing […] Masculinity […]

becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class

body.16

9 On the other hand, discursive regimes of politics, religion, medicine, etc. abound in

descriptions of what masculinity should be.17 These different discourses never cease to

construct masculinity in terms of stereotypes such as the homosexual or the effeminate

man.18 And yet, how should a stereotype function, if not by objectifying human nature,

making it immediately visible and able to be judged, as assumed by Georges Lachman

Mosse?

The public nature of a stereotype needs emphasis. It made the invisible both visible and

public, and it was in this manner that stereotypes gained their social and political

importance.19

10 Masculinity, which Judith Haleberstam and Anne-Marie Sohn claim to be invisible

except on the fringes of society, must resort to discursive practices in order to become

perceptible and appreciable. This is precisely the work of a stereotype that, in fixing

characteristics, authorizes comparison and evaluation. In a community where, as I have

stated, the major issue is to ‘become a man’, the ability to measure this process is

absolutely necessary. Thus, as a whole, the Seduction Community is structured around

modalities of assessment, which permit each member to place himself in relationship to

other members according to the degree of acquired masculinity. More than just a

conquest, the seduction of women serves as an instrument to measure masculinity.

Knowing how to make oneself desirable to a woman is commonly understood as the

result of the appropriation of masculine qualities. In such a context, figures such as the

great seducer and the ‘real man’ become conflated.

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Male Hierarchy

11 Within the Community, techniques of seduction are classified according to their

supposed difficulty on a scale of seductive practices. In fact, within the Seduction

Community, the seduction techniques required from a novice are not the same as those

required to become a confirmed member. These techniques are tested daily during

training sessions on the field, sometimes with the assistance of a coach. The goal of

such a test is to verify, through practice, whether a method has been thoroughly

assimilated by a Community member before he passes on to the next level. For

example, a novice is advised to begin his training by approaching girls in the street

with the goal of obtaining nothing but their first names. As this exercise is considered

to be the basis of the practice of seduction, the coaches recommend this method as a

way to mold the more timid novices. This first goal seems easy to attain and the

evaluation may be optimized by the introduction of a temporal restraint. For example,

the aim might be to obtain at least three first names during a one-hour training

session. Once this first test is passed, the novice will be invited to move on to the next

level. The different levels that must be validated by the Community members during

their seduction apprenticeship correspond to the interaction between couples as they

go through the different stages of traditional dating rituals,20 producing a hierarchy

within the degrees of intimacy.21 Therefore, after having obtained the name of a

woman, a man will be required to ask for her phone number, embarking on the next

step in the process of seducing her. Once the telephone number has been acquired, the

level of difficulty increases and involves obtaining a first kiss. Finally, the closest

degree of intimacy, which precedes the establishment of a long-term relationship, is to

ask to engage in the act of sexual intercourse. Those who achieve this level are

considered to be great seducers and reach the highest level of the group’s hierarchy.

12 These steps, which correspond to various degrees of masculine skills, are coded within

the community vocabulary with the terms numclose, kissclose, or fuckclose, with the

suffix ‘-close’ inferring that the act has been completed. The validation of each stage is

subjected to peers acting as eyewitnesses who post Field Reports22 on Internet forums as

soon as each step has been completed. It is, for that matter, not unusual to see the

phrase “Mission accomplished!” appear as a conclusion to these testimonies. Once the

‘cycle’ of seduction is completed, the seducers are rated both by the number of

conquests and the ‘level’ of the women they have seduced. In fact, women are classified

according to a grading scale from 0 to 10, which is based on esthetically subjective

criteria and calls the top category the Hot Babe to indicate the girls rated as the ‘

sexiest’. An experienced seducer explained to me that he considers the seduction of just

one beautiful girl to be more “noble” than the seduction of ten “better than average”

girls, because he sees it as “technically more difficult”. “The challenge has to be at my

level”, he concludes.23 It is not enough for him to achieve feats; he must also

communicate them, preferably in written form. The ‘legible’ characteristic of

masculinity mentioned by Judith Halberstam is visible here in its literal form, as each

group member must solidify his skills in a narrative form by writing a Field Report in

order to evolve within the Seduction Community.

13 Among these individual trajectories, however, certain men will be valued above others.

A certain number of the apprentice seducers, being perceived as ‘elite’, will reach the

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highest level of the Community scale. The rivalry between members is therefore an

important factor in the organization of the group. Indeed, its structure is based on a

strict hierarchy of individual trajectories. The use of websites by members of the

Community of Seduction is regulated according to a hierarchical distribution. On the

Community websites, one can count no fewer than three levels of accessibility, from

the most visible to the most secret. ‘Visitor’ status is granted to all the guests. Though

guests can consult a plethora of articles they are never able to interact with

Community members nor read messages posted on their forums, because access is

limited to members only. To participate in the Community you have to create a

personal account. Most of the time newcomers are expressly invited to introduce

themselves in the “Welcome newcomers” section by stating their identity and

indicating their reasons for wishing to join the Seduction Community. The degree of

engagement on the part of the individual within the group is also evaluated, as each

message posted in the forums leads to a collegial vote indicating the popularity of its

author. Those who obtain the most votes are thus recognized by their peers as the best

seducers in the group and the most ‘virile’ ones. They can also accede to a third level of

the website which is kept secret from the large majority of the apprentice seducers. It

is forbidden to speak of this area which is concealed and reserved to the elite. Only the

website administrators are entitled to decide on the acceptance of a new member into

this particularly closed circle.

14 The seminars given by the Community’s coaches are spatially governed by the same

strictly structured divisions. Novices are grouped in the back rows, while the regulars

occupy the front seats. For the more high-profile seducers, there is no question of

sitting among the audience. On their way to becoming coaches themselves and

attaining the highest community level they remain close to the stage, always ready to

lend a hand to those officiating.

15 In addition, the terminology created by the Seduction Community allows for a

classification among its members. I have only given three examples that correspond to

the most significant steps of progression, but there are a number of intermediate

levels, which complicate the hierarchical Community scale. The term player, for

example, refers to members who have recently entered the Community and are only

just beginning to play the seduction game. They are, therefore, at the novice level. The

next term, the pick up artist, is a player who has acquired a high level of technique and

whose seductive qualities are recognized by his peers. Finally, at the top of the

hierarchy, the guru is someone who embodies the Community’s ultimate level, someone

who has gained the whole set of masculine skills and who might therefore be

assimilated with the figure of the Alpha Male.

16 Acquiring the status of the Alpha Male, however, is never a unanimous decision. Critics

appear on all sides, suspecting or opposing the model of masculinity presented by one

of the Community’s members. If the evaluation process through which impartiality is

maximized via the process of rational judgment, allows for the establishment of a

masculine hierarchy, it is on the definition of masculinity as well as on the modalities

of its expression that opinions differ. At the heart of the Community, therefore, many

models of masculinity enter an “arena” of rivalry, to use Connell’s terminology (2005),

in order to maintain their hegemony.

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Desirable Masculinity. A Hegemonic ModelQuestioned

17 Justifying his use of the term “hegemony,” Connell engages in an analysis of Gramsci’s

concept where he wishes to “empathize the dynamic character of […] hegemony, which

is not the functionalist theory of cultural reproduction often portrayed. Gramsci always

had in mind a social struggle for leadership in historical change.”24 For Connell,

hegemonic masculinity is by necessity dynamic, contextual and contestable.

18 To understand the dynamics at play within the Seduction Community it is necessary to

discuss the contestable character of hegemony. For Judith Halberstam, hegemonic

masculinity “depends absolutely on the subordination of alternative masculinities”.25

Thus, hegemonic masculinity maintains an interdependent link with the other

masculine regimes. Georges Lachman Mosse, in his analysis of modern virility, goes so

far as to view the formation of a countertype as intrinsic to the model’s function.

Countertypes are thus “enemies against which the masculine ideal sharpened his

image.”26 A veritable repellent and threat to the stereotype, the countertype is above all

a core element that determines and establishes them as a model. Within the French

Seduction Community, there are two models in permanent rivalry, which I characterize

as hegemonic. At times, as Demetriou suggests, a certain number of their properties

interpenetrate in a process which he identifies as “hybridization”,27 but these models

are most often apprehended in their opposable dimensions. In the Seduction

Community, the first model put forward by respondents corresponded to “American

masculinity”, while the second possesses French particularities. The first corresponds

to the stereotype of the Pickup Artist of college campuses, and the second to the artiste

de la drague, resulting in the French lover myth. Among members of the French

Community, those claiming American origins are easily qualified as Pickup artists.

Through the name Pickup Artist they are identified with the American model of

masculinity, based on rules of seduction. They adopt an ethos of controlled masculinity:

an athletic build and sports culture are particularly valued among them. On the other

hand, certain members praise the uniqueness and superiority of the French model over

the American one. The French model seems to represent the reverse of the American

model's qualities. Rather than valuing technical competencies, French model

supporters praise the art of improvisation. Referring to the dandy’s aesthetic,

appearances are particularly elegant and the language is formal.

19 These two stereotypes are set against countertypes which act as repellents. The

countertype to the American masculinity is the ‘social robot’ who systematizes the

rules of seduction without reflecting their use, whilst the countertype to the French

masculine model is the homosexual or effeminate man, whose flirtatious manners

cause him to lose his virility. In characterizing what a ‘real man’ is not, these two

countertypes indeed reinforce hegemonic masculinity.

20 If the notion of hegemonic masculinity affirms the dynamic processes of power and

resistance at work in the regimes of masculinity, it seems to me that it does not allow

us to address the functions of the “heroic masculinity” stereotype discussed by Judith

Halberstam28 nor the “ideal virility” described by George Lachman Mosse.29 And yet an

ideal is precisely that which can never be attained. Fixed in stereotype, the masculine

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ideal cannot be achieved. Its expression thus results in a parody, a copy without an

original that is doomed to failure. In Butlerian terms:

The notion of gender parody […] does not assume that there is an original which such

parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as

the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a

fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a ‘figure’ in that double

sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions

itself is an imitation without an origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in

effect – that is, in its effect – postures as an imitation.30

21 The impossibility of personifying a ‘real man’ not only opposes the different models of

hegemonic masculinities at the heart of the Seduction Community, but it also

challenges each individual’s attempt to achieve the masculine ideal. The ‘usurper’ of

masculinity is a recurring figure, threatening the group by his deceit. The issue is to

unmask imposters, thereby making the Alpha Male both ideal and suspect.

22 One can notice a Community malaise around which the group is structured. If the ‘real

man’ cannot be embodied, it remains necessary to go on performing him. To avoid the

danger of seeing the Alpha Male dissolve in favor of masculine countertypes, the

community’s system of evaluation is a product of performative repetition, producing

the masculine being rather than judging it.

23 It remains to be determined what is the Alpha Male model that the Community

members aspire to become. I would like to quote a laconic and significant response

given by one of the interviewees when I asked him his own definition of the Alpha

Male: “An Alpha Male is a man who dominates other men”.31 He could not be more

explicit: defining the Alpha Male is first and foremost a matter concerning men, or

rather a matter concerning relationships between men. Although devoted entirely to

the seduction of women, the Seduction Community is more structured around

homosocial relationships between men. The principal goal of community

apprenticeships is thus to structure relationships between men, by placing each

member within the hierarchy of masculinity. The question then is that of conquering

virility rather than simply conquering women, and this virility must be confirmed by

one’s peers and for one’s peers: “Virility must be validated by other men […] and

certified by the recognition of affiliation to the ‘real men’s’ group.’’32

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailey, Beth. From front porch to back seat: Courtship in twentieth-century America. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Bourdieu, Pierre. La Domination masculine. Paris: Seuil, 1998.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

“Character Reading”, Phrenological Magazine, 3 (1882).

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Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

Connell, R.W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.”

Gender Society, 19 (2005): 829-59.

Demetriou, Demetrakis. “Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique.” Theory and

Society, 30 (2001): 337–61.

Fassin, Éric. “Un échange inégal: sexualité et rites amoureux.” Critique, 596 (1977): 48-65.

Faugeron, Claude, and Philippe Robert. La Justice et son public et les représentations sociales du

système pénal. Paris: Masson, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité, t. I, La Volonté de savoir. Paris : Gallimard, 1976.

Halberstam, Judith. Female masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Kimmel, Michael S. The History of Men. Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities. New

York: State University of New York Press, 2005.

Le Rider, Jacques. Modernité viennoise et crises de l'identité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1994.

Mosse, Georges Lachman. The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Sohn, Anne-Marie. “Histoire des hommes et des masculinités.” Historiens & Géographes, 394 (2006):

167-78.

Sohn, Anne-Marie. “Sois un homme !” La Construction de la masculinité au XIXe siècle. Paris: Seuil,

2009.

Wittig, Monique. La Pensée straight. Paris: Éditions Balland, 2001.

Zelizer, Viviana A. “Transactions intimes.” Genèses, 42 (2001): 121-44.

NOTES

1. This sentence comes from an interview conducted with one of my respondents and establishes

a direct link between the seduction of women, male bonds and the assessment of masculinity.

2. This paper is based on ethnology fieldwork experiences (2007- 2010) in France during a study

conducted within the Seduction Community. The method adopted consisted primarily in

participant observation of the different community social areas such as seminars, boot camps

and other seduction meetings led by different group coaches. I also accompanied a small group of

members on the seduction-training “field” and participated in meetings held in Paris where

members meet in order to strengthen their community bond. A significant collection of data was

taken from various web sites, blogs, and group forums on the Community’s web sites as

Frenchtouchseduction.com or Spikeseduction.com. Finally, semi-directed interview sessions were

conducted with a sample of ten respondents aged from 18 to 34 to complete this body of work. As

a result, most of the data is of a qualitative nature.

3. ‘‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is aimed at enhancing the healing process by changing

the conscious beliefs of patients about themselves, their illness, and the world. These limited

beliefs are ‘reprogrammed’ using a variety of techniques drawn from other disciplines including

hypnotherapy and psychotherapy […] NLP was originally developed during the early 1970s by

linguistics professor John Grinder and psychology and mathematics student Richard Bandler,

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both of the University of California Santa Cruz”. http://

medicaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/neurolinguistic+progamming (accessed May 4, 2010).

4. Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, adapted for the screen by director David Fincher

in 1999. The fiction’s protagonists create a fight club restricted to men and kept secret.

5. An internationally recognized hacker condemned several times by the American justice

system.

6. A survey conducted in February 2010 among 100 registered members on the

Frenchtouchseduction.com web forum shows 57% were aged from 18 to 25.

7. Facebook, Myspace and Twitter were systematically cited.

8. The Game is also the title of the most famous book of the Seduction Community considered the

bible of the seducer. See: Neil Strauss, The Game. Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (Los

Angeles: Regan Books, 2005).

9. Anne-Marie Sohn. “Sois un Homme!” La Construction de la masculinité au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil,

2009), 9.

10. “Character Reading”, Phrenological Magazine, 3 (1882): 18.

11. Michael S. Kimmel, The History of Men. Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities

(New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 6.

12. Subordinate masculinities is a concept employed by R.W. Connell (1995) in relation to

hegemonic masculinity in order to indicate its opposite.

13. R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 78.

14. ‘‘Car constituer une différence et la contrôler est ‘un acte de pouvoir puisque c’est un acte

essentiellement normatif. Chacun s’essaie à présenter autrui comme différent. Mais tout le

monde n’y parvient pas. Il faut être dominant pour y réussir’’’ Claude Faugeron and Philippe

Robert, La justice et son public et les représentations sociales du système pénal (Paris: Masson, 1978),

cité in Monique Wittig, La pensée straight (Paris: Éditions Balland, 2001), 58. (My translation)

15. Sohn, ‘‘Sois un homme’’

16. Judith Halberstam, Female masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 2.

17. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, t.I, La Volonté de savoir (Paris : Gallimard, 1976).

18. George Lachman Mosse, The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996); Jacques Le Rider, Modernité viennoise et crises de l'identité (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1994).

19. Mosse, The Image of Man, 6-7.

20. Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Éric Fassin, “Un échange inégal: sexualité et rites

amoureux,” Critique, 596 (1977): 48-65.

21. Viviana Zelizer, “Transactions intimes,” Genèses, 42 (2001): 121-44.

22. Within the Seduction Community, Field Reports is the storytelling of a seduction experience.

23. Interview extract, Lynx (pseudonym), coach in seduction, 36 years old, Paris.

24. Connell, Messerschmidt, ‘‘Hegemonic Mascuminity’’, 77.

25. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1.

26. Mosse, The Image of Man, 12.

27. Demetrakis Demetriou, “Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and

Society, 30 (2001): 337–61.

28. Halberstam, Female Masculinity.

29. Mosse, The Image of Man.

30. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity (New York: Routledge,

1990), 137.

31. Interview extract, Tom (pseudonym), 26 years old, engineer, Paris suburb.

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32. ‘‘La virilité doit être validée par les autres hommes […] et certifiée par la reconnaissance de

l’appartenance au groupe des ‘vrais hommes’.’’ Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination masculine (Paris :

Seuil, 1998), 59. (My translation)

ABSTRACTS

Drawing from an ethnographic inquiry involving a group of men who place the acquisition of

seduction skills at the core of their relationships, this paper questions how community bonds are

structured through the apprenticeship of heterosexual masculinity. First appearing in the late

1990s in California, the Seduction Community is structured around the assessment of masculinity

built upon a hierarchy of novice seducers from the group.

INDEX

Keywords: male bonds, heterosexuality, seduction, hegemonic masculinity

AUTHOR

MÉLANIE GOURARIER

Mélanie Gourarier is a PhD student in Social anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Études en

Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her current research area focuses on the relation between masculinity

and heterosexuality by the study of the Seduction Community in France. (For more information,

see: http://www.melaniegourarier.com/)

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67

Midlife Pop Masculinities in the Hereand NowChris Tinker

1 The UK, like other Western countries, has witnessed in recent years an increase in

popular music nostalgia with a particular focus on the 1980s. 2001 saw the launch of the

Here and Now show by the promoter Tony Denton, following his earlier shows, which

featured musicians associated with the 1970s, known as The Best Disco in Town. In 2011

Here and Now celebrated its tenth anniversary with a line-up including Boy George,

Jason Donovan, Jimmy Somerville, Belinda Carlisle, Midge Ure, the duo Pepsi and

Shirlie and the band A Flock of Seagulls. The show features a number of sets by

individual artists and groups who perform their greatest hits rather than new material.1 Over the years the line-up has changed regularly while the number of individual acts

featured has varied. Here and Now has been staged as a series of arena tours as well as

single events in large indoor and outdoor venues, and has developed an international

profile, including dates in Australia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Portugal and

Switzerland.2 The show has also generated regular coverage in the British national,

regional and local press, providing a mix of entertainment and human interest3 for

what Marion Leonard terms “a broad base of readers” rather than “niche” audiences

associated with the specialized music press.4 As Leonard observes, press coverage also

serves as a promotional tool and “frames the public and artistic personas of musicians.”5 Interviews, in particular, may be “understood as performances rather than moments

where the ‘real’ or ‘true’ person behind the star persona is revealed.”6

2 The coverage of musicians in the press may have significant implications in terms of

gender. For example, Leonard considers in her 2007 study of gender, rock and the

music industry how the “notion of mental torment is used in reviews of male musicians

to construct a profile of the tortured romantic artist and how in other examples,

associations with mental ill health are called upon by journalists to ‘dismiss’ or ‘other’

female performers.”7 While the relationship between masculinities and popular music

has been extensively examined in Freya Jarman-Ivens’ 2007 edited volume, and her

own chapter highlights the narratives of “degenerating” and “neutered” masculinity

associated with the middle-aged Elvis Presley, the issue of midlife masculinities

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remains to be explored in greater depth. As this article will show, the press coverage of

male pop musicians taking part in the Here and Now shows (October 2001- July 2011),

notably Boy George (George O’Dowd, 1961-), Rick Astley (1966-), and Jason Donovan

(1968-) provides a distinct set of midlife representations suitable for analysis.8 Although

newspaper coverage of Here and Now features reference to and comment from other

male artists associated with the 1980s including Nik Kershaw, Jimmy Somerville, Midge

Ure and Paul Young, issues of midlife are particularly prominent in press coverage of

Boy George, Astley and Donovan. To use P. David Marshall’s terms, the well-established

“celebrity status” of Boy George, Astley and Donovan “confers” upon them “a certain

discursive power” where midlife masculinities are concerned: “within society the

celebrity is a voice above others, a voice that is channelled into the media systems as

being legitimately significant.”9

3 Boy George, Astley and Donovan all came to prominence in the UK during the 1980s.

Boy George achieved mainstream success in 1982 as the lead singer of the band Culture

Club, having contributed to the development of the New Romantic scene with its

“gendered ambiguity”10 and “feminized masculinity.”11 However, as Laurence Senelick

comments, “While gender was being outraged” during the early 1980s, “sexuality

remained opaque, a carefully guarded precinct of privacy.”12 Indeed, in 1983 at a time

when the mainstream media in the UK was much less enlightened where the question

of homosexuality was concerned, Boy George famously evaded questions regarding his

sexuality stating in an interview that he “preferred a cup of tea to sex.”13 Following the

initial break-up of Culture Club in 1986, Boy George pursued a career primarily as a solo

vocalist and club DJ, and has also developed over the years a visible and activist gay

identity.

4 Rick Astley launched a pop career in 1987 as part of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman

(SAW) ‘hit factory’ of singers following his discovery by the music producer Pete

Waterman. The following year, Jason Donovan, a former star in the Australian soap

opera Neighbours, joined the SAW stable. Both Astley and Donovan were cast in quite

conventional heterosexual terms as romantic boy-next-door types who would appeal to

teenage girls. This was reflected strongly in their musical output. Astley scored chart

success with “Never Gonna Give You Up,” “Whenever You Need Somebody,” “Together

Forever,” and “When I Fall In Love” (a cover of the Nat King Cole classic), while

Donovan’s hits included “Nothing Can Divide Us,” “Too Many Broken Hearts,” “Sealed

With A Kiss,” a cover of Bryan Hyland’s 1962 hit, and “Especially for you,” a duet with

his Neighbours co-star and fellow SAW artist Kylie Minogue. Television viewers had

indeed previously been gripped by the on-screen romance between the characters that

Donovan and Minogue played in the soap.

5 Following his success with SAW, Donovan went on to develop further his career in

acting, singing and radio DJing. In 1990 Astley changed record company and direction,

wishing to develop further his profile as a singer-songwriter as well as his long-

standing interest in soul music, and in 1993 decided to retire as a performer to spend

more time with his wife and young daughter. In 2008 Astley’s media profile was given

an unexpected boost when he became the subject of the ‘Rickrolling’ craze, an Internet

meme/prank in which unsuspecting web surfers were tricked into watching his 1987

music video of “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

6 Over the years the popular media has charted the ups and downs in the personal lives

of Donovan and Boy George and particularly their struggle to overcome drug addiction

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as well as their legal difficulties, for example, Donovan’s successful libel action against

The Face magazine for claiming that he was gay, which was said to have had a

detrimental effect on his career at the time;14 and Boy George’s 2006 community service

in New York for drug possession and, in the UK, his 2009 prison sentence for false

imprisonment of an escort (which led to his replacement in the Here and Now line-up by

Rick Astley).

7 Newspaper interviews with Boy George, Donovan and Astley, which reflect their

participation in the Here and Now show, exhibit a range of approaches to masculinity

and midlife. While traditional masculinities are maintained in terms of rationality and

developed through discourses of midlife maturity, they are also challenged through the

importance attached to emotion and sensitivity, a reduction in work-related

competitiveness and the expression of a more detached, light-hearted, even flippant,

attitude. Finally, certain ‘new’ masculinities, which gained currency during the 1980s,

are in evidence, particularly the emphasis on fathers-as-nurturers and on equality in

heterosexual partnerships.

Rationality and Maturity

8 Traditional masculinities are maintained in newspaper coverage particularly in terms

of rationality and self-control. Donovan expresses a need to “draw the line” under the

1980s, “move on,” and look to the future after re-connecting with the decade briefly

during the Here and Now shows.15 Astley is presented within the context of the show as

an artist who has taken and still retains control over his personal life and career, which

was “once meticulously managed by the Hit Factory of Stock Aitken and Waterman, but

is now firmly back in his own grasp”; “these days Rick’s work schedule is very much on

his own terms”.16 He regards his participation in the show in conscious, calculated, and

detached terms as a “weekend job”;17 “It’s a bit like turning it on and turning it off”;18

“This has nothing to do with my life.”19 Such a desire for control is not, however,

limited to representations of male artists. Indeed, in newspaper coverage Toyah

Willcox, a female member of the show line-up, recognizes her own power to shape her

career.20

9 Astley’s own relationship with celebrity and anonymity is also presented in rational,

controlled terms: “I’ve said you can’t have it both ways but I kind of do”; “I’ll come up

to Liverpool and I’ll do a gig and for that moment you’re on stage you’re famous again,

then you walk off stage and you’re not”; “I’ll be driving down the M6 [motorway] and

I’ll go and fill up the car with fuel and not one person will recognise me.”21 Astley’s

defence of his personal privacy in press coverage is presented as a strategy for

maintaining the kind of ‘normal’ life that international ‘icons’ such as Madonna are no

longer able to experience.22

10 Astley is represented as rational not only in the present but at earlier points during his

career and life history. A controlled, at times, dispassionate approach is expressed

towards his early career as a pop star: “I enjoyed the job I did and part of the trappings

of fame which went with it. But I wanted to be able to turn fame on and off like a tap.”23

A desire for control is also cited by Astley as a reason for his decision to leave the

limelight and ‘retire’ from the music business: “While I appreciated how lucky I was, it

catapulted me into a completely new world and simply took over my life. When I

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realized it was turning me into someone I didn’t like – doing something I didn’t want to

do – I decided to walk away.”24

11 In one particular interview, Astley attempts to explain and rationalize his drive to

perform and achieve recognition by looking back further in life to his childhood,

attributing much of his and other people’s drive for fame and subsequent withdrawal

from the public eye to what he perceives as an atypical experience – his parents’

separation, limited contact with his mother and a need for attention:

12 He had therapy to help him understand what had happened.[...] “When you look at

people who’ve ended up performing one way or another, look at their childhood and

very few of them come from a mum and dad, 2.2 kids and a Ford on the drive. There’s

usually a crack. [...] I even think, when performers fall off the wagon, often it’s because

of that twist within them that’s made them want to perform.”25

13 While coverage of Astley rationalizes his past life so as to develop an understanding of

his life and career to date, coverage of Boy George and Donovan contributes towards a

sense of optimism and purpose both in the present and in the future. In interview,

Donovan expresses a clearer sense of selfhood and destiny, having succeeded in

articulating his own uncertainties regarding his identity earlier in his career when he

played the lead role in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Joseph and the Amazing

Technicolor Dreamcoat:

14 When I looked at myself in a loin cloth and a fluffy coat I sort of thought is this really

where I want to be? I was listening to Nirvana records and, you know, I wasn’t that guy.

[...] I wasn’t Joseph and I wasn’t Kurt Cobain. What I didn’t realise was that I was me and

I should have been proud of being me. It is sort of a psychological rebellion against

success. [...] The great positive is that I now know what I don’t want to do with my life.26

15 Similarly, Boy George discusses how he has regained control and calm in his life

following his prison sentence: “‘It was a major epiphany. I’d been waiting to go for trial

for almost a year. I was thinking a lot about what was going on in my life, thinking:

“Come on, I need more than this.”’ The significance was that George realized he could

take control.”27 Control and precision are also evident in representations of Boy

George’s health regime and detoxification as he recalls the date he became free of

alcohol and drugs.28 A particular feature of Boy George’s more controlled and

restrained persona is a calmer, simpler approach to life: “Now, I’m the person I should

be. I cherish the moderate life now: I don’t want drama or complication.”29 Moreover,

according to press coverage, Boy George seeks to curb his tendency to speak openly and

honestly about other figures in the music and entertainment world such as the singer-

songwriter Elton John and the actor Matt Lucas,30 or about his personal relationships:

“People ask me if I regret anything and there’s nothing I lose sleep over, but I do

sometimes wish I’d said less.”31

16 Coverage attributes Boy George’s self-control to the kind of “mature masculinity” that

the psychologist and psychoanalyst Michael J. Diamond associates with men in early

and later middle age.32 This maturity reportedly informs Boy George’s approach to the

reunion of his band Culture Club as it prepares for its thirtieth anniversary album

release and concerts: “I don’t know what the album’s going to be like, something kind

of a bit more grown up. We’re not going to try and wear trousers we wore when we

were 20, we’re not going to try and recreate anything. [...] a bit mature and elder

statesmanlike.”33 Boy George’s new mature self comes as a clear contrast with his

‘former’ younger self, who, in his own words, “was quite belligerent and self-

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71

destructive.”34 Temporal markers such as the thirtieth anniversary of Culture Club and

Boy George’s fiftieth birthday provide an opportunity to reflect on and underline the

changes and improvements that he has made to his life.35 In interview, Boy George

refers explicitly to the benefit of hindsight which informs his more moderate

behaviour: “I’d love to be able to experience all that I did with the knowledge I’ve got

now.”36

17 While Boy George, Astley and Donovan all effectively review to varying degrees their

own “life stories,” to use Dan P. McAdams’ term,37 the accounts of Boy George indicate a

more distinct process of what Abigail Stewart (1996) terms “midlife correction,” or as

Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields put it, “reevaluating one’s roles and dreams and

making the necessary corrections.”38 Rather than a ‘normative’ ‘midlife crisis,’ it is also

more constructive to talk of progression towards what the psychiatrist Martin Kantor

refers to within the context of gay midlife experience as “midlife competence” - a crisis

with positive outcomes:

18 Though the term ‘midlife crisis’ implies an undesirable condition, a ‘midlife crisis’ can

in fact be a positive event should it culminate in an epiphany and so become a time not

of involution but of evolution, where new solutions to old problems develop; where

ways of coping not formerly realized, acknowledged, or incorporated into a life plan

newly evolve; and where as old pleasures vanish, new satisfactions take their place,

leading to midlife competence enhanced, say, by the successful resolution of earlier

crises, such as those associated with coming out and being rejected.39

19 While coverage of Boy George, Donovan and Astley maintains the traditional notion of

masculinity as rational, other traditional masculinities are challenged, namely, to use

the terms of Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer, a “lack” of “sensitivity and emotions,”

the position of the male as “head of family and household,” and the male who

“primarily defines himself through his work.”40 Indeed, competitiveness within the

context of work is represented as decreasing in importance during midlife. In certain

instances, this is accompanied by a heightened sense of detachment, if not flippancy, as

performers appear increasingly reluctant to take themselves seriously.

Emotionality

20 Traditional masculinities are challenged in coverage via an emphasis on emotion and

sensitivity. For Jason Donovan the Here and Now show allows him as well as audiences to

engage emotionally: “Being associated with that period is great. It’s an opportunity to

reconnect with an emotional period in my life”; “Music is an incredibly emotional thing

and it gives people great memories.”41 It is, however, coverage of Boy George that

particularly emphasizes the value of emotion and sensitivity through his reference to

his own song repertoire:

21 I like the title of the tour: Songs That Make You Dance And Cry. A lot of my favourite

music makes me dance and cry - hopefully at the same time! I just think that I work in

those two fields. Either I’m being quite melancholy, with things like “Generations of

Love,” or quite joyous, with things like “Bow Down Mister”.42

22 In addition, the emotional dimension of Boy George’s musical output is effectively

represented in coverage as an alternative to traditional heterosexual masculinities - he

identifies his work with Culture Club in distinct terms as his “gay love songs.”43 In

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72

interview, he also highlights the emotional qualities in the work of other artists,

notably Amy Winehouse:

23 When I hear the music, it makes me feel something. It makes me sad; it makes me

emotional. [...] she’s expressing what a lot of us can’t express - and that’s the sign of a

great singer. If you hear a song on the radio like “Love Is A Losing Game” or “You Know

I’m No Good”, and it touches your heart, you know that she’s doing something right.44

24 For Boy George, Winehouse’s emotional power contrasts with the work of other pop

artists (such as “Don’t Cha” by The Pussycat Dolls, 2005), which is “clever, it’s witty, it’s

designed for radio - but there’s no feeling in it.”: “It’s not about human relationships as

they really are. It’s a commercialised version.”45

Creativity and Levity

25 In newspaper coverage of the three performers, “experiencing” work during midlife, to

use Diamond’s terms, “takes precedence over the excitement of striving and reaching.”46 Astley’s work is viewed strongly in terms of “enjoyment”47 and the satisfaction that

can be derived from the “tingle” experienced when playing music,48 “the camaraderie

of the 80s tours,”49 writing for movies, and playing music with a group of friends in a

local band, the Luddites.50 The importance of creativity through work is also

emphasized in coverage of Donovan: “I’m very lucky doing a job where I get to practise

my craft every day, there’s lots of people stuck behind desks”; “I think the most

important thing for me is to be passionate about my craft, to care about singing.”51 The

importance that Boy George places on creativity is cited as a reason why he could not

conceive of a Culture Club reunion tour without himself as singer: “It just proved to me

once again that my motivation was entirely different to theirs [his band mates].

Because my thing is not about career; it’s about creating things that I care about.”52

26 The traditional masculine notion of work-related competition is also challenged in

coverage. As Boy George comments in an article: “What’s nice about these kinds of

tours is that you get to work with these people when you’re older and more settled.

When you’re 19 or 20, you think everything’s a competition.”53 Similarly Rick Astley

observes how “the ego has gone out of it”; “We are all a bit more relaxed and chilled

out about it and therefore having more fun.”54 In interview, Donovan also expresses a

relaxed approach which is attributed to ageing: “The older I get the less stressed out I

get about these sort of things because I realize that noone’s going to die and if they do

then I’m in the wrong business!”55 Such a view is not limited to male interviewees in

press coverage of Here and Now - female performers also highlight the camaraderie and

relaxed, non-competitive atmosphere of the show.56

27 In interview Astley exhibits a particularly strong sense of detachment from himself and

his participation in the Here and Now show: “Honestly, there are times when I look at

the audience and I’m thinking, ‘What are you doing? What the bloody hell are you

doing?’”57 A similar sense of detachment (and ultimately dissatisfaction) is also

expressed in his account of his television appearances during the height of his success:

28 Every country you go to has their funny bonkers Saturday evening show, and you’re

the guest and you come off and think, “What the hell was that?” In the end, I didn’t

even like myself. I used to look at myself and think, what the bloody hell are you doing?58

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73

29 Astley also refuses to take the renewed media and public attention seriously, dismissing

the Best Act Ever at the MTV Europe Music Awards that he received in 2008 following

the Rickrolling internet phenomenon as “ridiculous” and “daft,”59 and regarding Here

and Now as “hardly a serious show.” 60 Astley also expresses disengagement with the

contemporary music industry and its long-established figures of authority: “I’m not

relevant in that world anymore. I just think it’s slightly embarrassing to throw U2 into

that category and then you’ve got Bono there giving an award to Paul McCartney and

somebody like me wins that...”61 Like Astley, Boy George exhibits a reluctance to take

life too seriously, for instance in humorous comments which play on the strong

association between his public persona and his well-known attention to visual style:

“The veteran of countless tabloid stories, says he is far less concerned about what the

press say about him than in his younger days […] ‘As long as the pictures are good, I

couldn’t care less what they write about me.’”62 Such a desire not to take life too

seriously is not, however, limited to representations of male artists.63 Indeed, Kim

Wilde makes a nuanced distinction between performers not taking “themselves” too

seriously and taking “what they do” seriously.64

Generativity and Equality

30 The traditional view of masculinity, which, according to Milestone and Meyer, sees a

man “primarily define himself through his work”65 is seen no longer to apply

particularly in coverage of Donovan and Astley, which represents both as nurturers.66

As Diamond comments, this nurturing form of masculinity is particularly evident

during midlife: “For most men, early and later middle age is the time when their

nurturing and ‘feminine’ sides are more fully integrated into their notion of mature

masculinity.”67 Such nurturing may also be viewed as part of a broader phenomenon of

generativity (Erik Erikson, 1982), which is also closely associated with midlife. As

Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields comment,

31 The struggle occurs between a sense of generativity (the feeling that people must

maintain and perpetuate society) and a sense of stagnation (the feeling of self-

absorption). Generativity is seen in such things as parenthood; teaching, [...]; or

providing goods and services for the benefit of society. If the challenge of generativity

is accepted, the development of trust in the next generation is facilitated, and the

psychosocial strength of care is obtained.68

32 One report views Donovan in terms of domestic bliss (he “says he likes nothing better

than ordinary chores and spending time with the family.”) and British/English

gardening stereotypes: “chart-topper Jason Donovan dreams about cutting his lawn.”69

In her regular column the television presenter Lorraine Kelly congratulates Donovan

on the birth of his third child.70 Coverage also emphasizes Donovan’s father-as-nurturer

role, which is informed by his past drug addiction: “he hopes his experiences with

drugs will help him guide his children later in life.”71

33 Astley is represented in terms of family life, domesticity and material wealth and

comfort: “I define myself now as a dad with a Land Rover and a nice house and a nice,

comfortable life and I’m lucky and that’s about it.”72 His decision to participate in the

Japanese leg of the Here and Now show is influenced by his family who wished to

accompany him.73 For Astley, the prioritization of family life is also emphasized by

reaffirmation of his earlier decision to leave the music industry: “I wanted to be home

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with my lovely partner Lene and my new baby girl Emilie”;74 “The decision came when

he was so busy with work that he missed his daughter’s first steps”;75 “He’s been around

to watch her grow up, which matters to him enormously.”76

34 Coverage also challenges traditional masculinities by representing Astley’s wife Lene

Bausager in nurturing terms as an equal partner.77 In interview, Astley expresses clear

support for his wife and her career following her nomination for an Oscar for her short

film Cashback: “Lene had worked so hard and she deserved all the lunches with the

nominees and it was important to me to support her.”78

35 While the nurturing of children and/or partners is emphasized in coverage of Donovan

and Astley, other family relationships are reinforced. Astley describes his parental

family, based in Newton-le-Willows, as a “priority,” particularly his mother who is

credited with instilling within him a “love of music” and who joined him on stage to

sing “When I Fall In Love” at a 2011 Haydock Park concert.79 In a lengthy 2011 article

published in the Daily Mail by Spencer Bright, the co-writer of the first volume of Boy

George’s 1995 autobiography Take It Like A Man, the importance of Boy George’s

parental family, “his bedrock,” is highlighted: “he admits that without them, he may

not have survived.” His mother is described as “amazing,” while his brother and sister

are viewed in close terms: “Today it’s a scene of cosy domesticity as his sister Siobhan

vacuums and his brother Kevin does some office work in the kitchen.” Despite his

problematic relationship with his late father, Boy George also retains “all the great

things about my dad, little things like him singing in the car. Funny stuff, rather than

all the turmoil. I think that’s a good thing.”

36 Newspaper coverage thus represents various forms of family nurturing which are

attributable not only to the influence of the ‘new man’ but also to the phase of midlife,

which, according to Diamond, is generally a time of increased “connection” with and

“nurturance” of others.80

37 Newspaper coverage of Here and Now effectively reinforces the view of men and

masculinities, to use the terms of Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn and Robert W. Connell,

as “variable and changing across time (history),”81 maintaining and challenging

traditional masculinities while incorporating ‘new’ masculinities and practices

associated with midlife. Traditional masculinities are maintained via representations of

rationality as well as control over the careers and lives of pop musicians. Such

rationality is combined with an increased sense of “understanding” of “self, emotions

and motivations” (Diamond) as well as “gains in cognitive complexity” (Cavanaugh and

Blanchard-Fields) and “insight” (Diamond), as musicians look to the past as well as the

present and future. Accounts of Boy George are particularly extensive in conveying a

sense of midlife “correction” and “competence” rather than crisis. Traditional

masculinities are challenged via emphasis on emotion and sensitivity, particularly in

coverage of Boy George and Donovan. Such an increased understanding of emotions is

indeed, as Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields suggest, a typical feature of midlife.

Moreover, coverage conveys a decreasing sense of work-related competitiveness and an

increasing reluctance to take life too seriously. New masculinities also figure via

representations of gender equality within male-female relationships as well as images

of the father-as-nurturer. In coverage, the family is viewed more generally as a

nurturing environment by musicians. Indeed, such generativity is strongly associated

with midlife.

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75

38 The coverage of male midlife discussed in this article is something of a departure from

the newspaper representations of men and men’s practices noted in a 2001 European

Commission study published in 2004. The study found that in various national contexts

(Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian

Federation and the UK) a high proportion of articles on men associated them with the

perpetration of violence and crime. In addition, UK newspaper coverage foregrounded

military masculinities via stories of bullying in the armed forces and associated men

with scandals involving sexuality and violence. The study also highlighted a general

lack of representations of men in family roles (fathers, sons, brothers etc.), which is

clearly at odds with newspaper coverage of Here and Now. Nonetheless, the relatively

strong emphasis on men’s health in UK coverage highlighted by the study is to some

extent echoed in references in the coverage of Boy George and Donovan to

detoxification and healthier lifestyles.82

39 While contemporary press coverage of Boy George, Donovan and Astley may be

understood in terms of an integrated approach to masculinity and midlife, further

research might consider the extent to which representations of midlife masculinities

are shaped by other identities, individual personality dimensions and traits,83 as well as

the interaction between journalists and their interviewees. Indeed, as Leonard

comments, “Little academic attention has […] been given to the ‘management’ of

interviews by musicians themselves.”84 Midlife masculinities may also be compared

across different media forms, print and audio-visual. Here and Now has, for example,

generated television coverage, including interviews with performers like Boy George,

Donovan and Astley on daytime magazine programmes such as Loose Women and This

Morning (both on ITV1; examples in Bibliography), which seem to reproduce many of

the themes and concerns identified in the present study. Cross-cultural comparisons of

midlife masculinities would also help to account for differences between media

cultures. For example, French newspaper coverage of RFM Party 80,85 a successful 1980s

nostalgia tour in France, appears to concentrate more on discussing the significance of

nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon than on relaying musicians’ accounts of midlife, as

seen in British coverage. While Here and Now provides a discrete case study and useful

starting point for examining media representations of male musicians during midlife,

further research could also usefully look beyond coverage of musicians associated with

the show to include a wider range of figures who are still active performers and whose

middle age has been or is currently being played out elsewhere in the media.

40 If we recognize that popular culture is an important vehicle for the mobilization of

masculinities, and that, as Stuart C. Aitken comments, “Popular representations […] are

particularly powerful forums for displaying cultural ideals about masculinity,”86 then

coverage of Boy George, Donovan and Astley effectively promotes a multi-faceted,

‘competent’ view of midlife masculinities, which is rational, mature, emotional,

creative, insouciant, nurturing and egalitarian.

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76

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NOTES

1. Indeed, the emphasis of the tour on well-known songs rather than new material is stressed in

press coverage. See Stuart Arnold, “Critics,” The Northern Echo, December 18, 2004; Johnny Davis,

“Never Gonna Give You Up,” The Times, May 16, 2009; Diane Parkes, “Midge’s pledge to play his

hits,” Birmingham Mail, January 14, 2011; Nigel Powlson, “Rick’s never gonna give up,” Derby

Evening Telegraph, May 21, 2010; Jonathan Rennie, “Tony’s just an old romantic at heart,” Evening

Times, April 18, 2002. For an example of a Here and Now setlist, see Mike Atkinson, “Here And Now

tour, Nottingham Trent FM Arena, Friday May 9,” Troubled Diva, 10 May, 2008, http://troubled-

diva.com/2008_05_04_troubled-diva_archive.html#5885785463623772144, accessed 13 August,

2012.

2. See “Here And Now,” http://www.here-and-now.info/hn_biography.html and http://

www.here-and-now.info/hn_tours.html, accessed August 13, 2012.

3. For further discussion of the journalistic categories of “entertainment” and “human interest,”

see Jane Taylor, “What makes a good feature? The Different Genres,” in Print Journalism: a critical

introduction, ed. Richard Keeble (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 122, 124-125.

4. See Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Ashgate:

Aldershot/Burlington VT, 2007), 65-66.

5. Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, 65.

6. Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, 90.

7. Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, 73.

8. As Margie E. Lachman comments, the age “boundaries for midlife are fuzzy with no clear

demarcation […] Those between the ages 40 and 60 are typically considered to be middle-aged,

but there is at least a 10-year range on either end, so that it is not uncommon for some to

consider middle age to begin at 30 and end at 75.” See Margie E. Lachman, “Introduction,” in

Handbook of Midlife Development, ed. Margie E. Lachman (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001), xx,

and Margie E. Lachman, “Development in Midlife,” Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004): 310-312.

9. See P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture Place (Minneapolis MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 1997), X, and Taylor, “What makes a good feature?’’125.

10. Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Aldershot:

Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), 20.

11. Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy, 118.

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12. Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London/New York: Routledge,

2000), 417.

13. See Senelick, The Changing Room, 417 and also Luca Prono, Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian

Popular Culture (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 39-41.

14. David Rolph, Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law (Ashgate: Aldershot/Burlington VT,

2008), 143-46.

15. Aidan Radnedge, “Neighbour moves on; Jason Donovan puts the 80s behind him - after trip

down memory lane,” Metro, October 8, 2010.

16. Dawn Collinson, “The King of Rick ‘n’ roll,” Liverpool Echo, January 30, 2009.

17. Simon Wilson, “Interview: Rick Astley,” Nottingham Evening Post, January 23, 2009; and Simon

Wilson, “Interview: Kim Wilde,” Nottingham Evening Post, May 1, 2009.

18. Laura Davis, “If you don’t like it then just quit,” Daily Post (Liverpool), April 3, 2009.

19. Johnny Davis, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

20. Simon Button, “Toyah Willcox is back on the road and singing new songs but that doesn’t

make her a has-been,” The Express, February 11, 2002; and Louise Rimmer, “It’s a mystery but no

new song required as the Eighties turns to gold,” Scotland on Sunday, April 28, 2002.

21. Davis, “If you don’t like it then just quit.”

22. “Never gonna regret giving up fame,” Sunday Sun, February 24, 2008.

23. “Never gonna regret giving up fame.”

24. Natalie Anglesey, “Family is Rick’s priority,” Manchester Evening News, July 20, 2011.

25. Emma Pinch, “I still get a tingle from singing,” Daily Post (Liverpool), May 13, 2008.

26. Gail Henderson, “Gail Meets Jason Donovan,” The Sunday Life, November 7, 2010.

27. Spencer Bright, “My life hasn’t always been a disaster but when it has, it’s been spectacular!”

Daily Mail, June 10, 2011.

28. Bright, “My life hasn’t always been a disaster”.

29. Bright, “My life hasn’t always been a disaster’’; see also Mike Atkinson, “Interview: Boy

George,” Nottingham Evening Post, January 9, 2009.

30. Anuji Varma, “I’m sorry... by George,” Sunday Mercury, October 12, 2008.

31. Tim Fletcher, “Drugs, prison, pop - and a boy that’s finally grown up,” Burton Mail, November

12, 2010.

32. Michael J. Diamond, “Masculinity and its discontents: Making room for the ‘mother’ inside

the male - An essential achievement for healthy male gender identity,” in Heterosexual

Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory, ed. Bruce Reis and Robert

Grossmark (London/New York: Routledge 2009), 44.

33. Andy Coleman, “George not fazed by 50th birthday,” Birmingham Mail, June 24, 2011.

34. Bright, “My life hasn’t always been a disaster.’’

35. Coleman, “George not fazed by 50th birthday.”

36. Bright, “My life hasn’t always been a disaster.’’

37. See Dan P. McAdams, “Narrating the self in adulthood,” in Aging and biography: Explorations in

adult development, ed. James E. Birren et al. (New York: Springer, 1996), 131-148.; Dan P. McAdams,

“The psychology of life stories,” Review of General Psychology 5 (2001): 100-22; and Dan P.

McAdams, and J.L. Pals, “A new Big Five: Fundamental principles for an integrative science of

personality,” American Psychologist 61 (2006): 204-17. For further discussion of McAdams’s Life-

Story model, see John C. Cavanaugh and Fredda Blanchard-Fields, Adult Development and Aging

(Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 2011), 338-40, and Joan T. Erber, Aging and Older Adulthood (Chichester,

UK / Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 242.

38. Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields, Adult Development and Aging, 337.

39. Martin Kantor, Now That You’re Out: The Challenges and Joys of Living As a Gay Man (Santa

Barbara CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2011), 110.

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40. Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer, Gender and Popular Culture (Cambridge UK / Malden MA:

Polity, 2012), 114.

41. “Jason’s Happy to Revisit the 80s,” Coventry Evening Telegraph, June 24, 2011; see also Catherine

Jones, “Jason Donovan talks The War of the Worlds and takes a look back at the 80s,” Liverpool

Echo, November 19, 2010.

42. “Eg interview: Boy George,” Nottingham Evening Post, February 1, 2008.

43. Sean Michaels, “Boy George to reunite Culture Club in 2012,” The Guardian, January 29, 2011.

44. “Eg interview: Boy George.”

45. “Eg interview: Boy George.”

46. Diamond, “Masculinity and its discontents,’’ 44.

47. “Never gonna give him up,” Nottingham Evening Post, May 7, 2009.

48. Pinch, “I still get a tingle from singing.”

49. Powlson, “Rick’s never gonna give up.”

50. “Rick Astley writing movie musical,” Guardian Unlimited, February 2, 2009.

51. “Everything is still rosy in Donovan’s garden,” Solihull News, April 29, 2011.

52. “Eg interview: Boy George.’’

53. Atkinson, “Interview: Boy George.”

54. Powlson, “Rick’s never gonna give up.”

55. Henderson, “Gail Meets Jason Donovan.”

56. “Carole’s life is on a roll,” Sunday Mercury, October 7, 2001; Jill Foster, “CD reviews and music:

heaven to hell,” Daily Mirror, July 30, 2004; “Kim Wilde keeps hangin’ on,” Derby Evening Telegraph,

February 20, 2009; and Powlson, “Rick’s never gonna give up.”

57. Davis, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

58. Pinch, “I still get a tingle from singing.’’

59. Davis, “If you don’t like it then just quit.”

60. “Showbiz: Rick pads up,” Sunday Mercury, November 18, 2007.

61. See Davis, “If you don’t like it then just quit;” and also Collinson, “The King of Rick ‘n’ roll,”

who refers to “a typically self-effacing comment from a man [Astley] who, despite more than 20

years of fame, has never felt truly at ease in the spotlight.”

62. Fletcher, “Drugs, prison, pop.’’

63. Gavin Allen, “Return of the one and only,” South Wales Echo, April 7, 2009; Davis, “Never Gonna

Give You Up.” and Aidan Smith, “Accepting the Eighties,” The Scotsman, July 18, 2011.

64. “She’s the real wilde child,” Nottingham Evening Post, April 2, 2009.

65. Milestone and Meyer, Gender and Popular Culture, 114.

66. Alongside the “new man as nurturer” also developed the “new man as narcissist,” John

Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002), 100-105, and

Milestone and Meyer, Gender and Popular Culture, 116.

67. See Diamond, “Masculinity and its discontents…,’’ 44; and also, with reference to Jung and

Erber, Aging and Older Adulthood, 237.

68. Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields, Adult Development and Aging, 329-30.

69. “Everything is still rosy in Donovan’s garden.”

70. Lorraine Kelly, “He’d Don So Well,” The Sun, October 9, 2010.

71. Henderson, “Gail Meets Jason Donovan.”

72. Pinch, “I still get a tingle from singing.”

73. “Eg interview: Rick Astley,” Nottingham Evening Post, April 4, 2008.

74. Anglesey, “Family is Rick’s priority.”

75. Pinch, “I still get a tingle from singing.”

76. Sophie Heawood, “Are we ever gonna give him up?” The Times, January 30, 2009.

77. Milestone and Meyer, Gender and Popular Culture, 116.

78. “Eg interview: Rick Astley.”

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79. Anglesey, “Family is Rick’s priority.”

80. Diamond, “Masculinity and its discontents,’’ 44.

81. Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert W. Connell eds, Handbook of Studies on Men and

Masculinities (London: Sage, 2005), 3.

82. See Jeff Hearn et al., The social problem of men: final report: Project HPSE-CT1999-00008. Vol. 1,

Luxemburg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2004, 80-82. http://

ec.europa.eu/research/social-sciences/pdf/socialproblemi_en.pdf

83. Erber, Aging and Older Adulthood, 243-51.

84. Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, 106.

85. December 2006-July 2011, Factiva database <accessed July 16 and 17, 2011>.

86. Stuart C. Aitken, “Culture and Representation,” in The Routledge International Encyclopedia of

Men and Masculinities, eds Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle

(London: Routledge, 2007), 120.

ABSTRACTS

This article shows how newspaper coverage of British musicians associated with the Here and Now

1980s nostalgia shows, particularly Boy George, Jason Donovan and Rick Astley, serves effectively

to promote a range of approaches to midlife masculinities. While traditional masculinities are

maintained in terms of rationality and developed through discourses of midlife maturity, they

are also challenged through the importance attached to emotion and sensitivity, a reduction in

work-related competitiveness and the expression of a more detached, light-hearted, even

flippant, attitude. Certain ‘new’ masculinities, which gained currency during the 1980s, are also

in evidence. Indeed, there is a particular emphasis on fathers-as-nurturers and on equality in

heterosexual partnerships.

INDEX

Keywords: masculinities, midlife, newspaper, popular music, nostalgia

AUTHOR

CHRIS TINKER

Chris Tinker is Reader in French at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He has research interests

in the development of popular music and media cultures in France and Britain since the 1960s,

and is author of Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel: Personal and Social Narratives in Post-war Chanson

and Mixed Messages: Youth Magazine Discourse and Sociocultural Shifts in Salut les copains (1962-1976).

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Varia

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British Party Election Broadcasts(2001, 2005 and 2010): IdeologicalFraming, Storytelling,IndividualisationDavid Haigron

1 Post-war television has established itself as the dominant medium of political

communication. In 2010, it was still cited as the privileged source of information about

the ongoing general election campaign.1 Since their creation in 1951, Party Election

Broadcasts (PEBs) have therefore enabled British parties to reach the largest possible

audience.2 Other television formats tend admittedly to be favoured: current affairs

programmes, interviews or debates (including the leaders’ debates first introduced in

2010). Parties nevertheless continue to invest large amounts of money in the making of

PEBs and the latter still afford them the opportunity to deliver their message direct to

the public without any interference by their opponents or any editing by the

broadcasters.3

2 PEBs have progressively adopted advertising production techniques, in terms of style

(slogans, jingles, editing, etc.) but also in terms of conception (target audience

identified by opinion surveys, pre-screening to focus groups, etc.). In this respect, the

Conservative Party’s advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, played a pioneer role in

bringing its “aggressive advertising style to politics” and turning PEBs into “long

commercials rather than short films”.4 This evolution is often interpreted as a

reflection of the ‘Americanisation’ of British political campaigns.5 Content analysis

studies carried out on the 2001, 2005 and 2010 PEBs yet reveal that, although there has

been greater focus on party leaders and emotional appeal, British productions remain,

on the whole, more issue-oriented than personality-oriented, and more inclined to self-

praise than attacks.6 P aid political advertising is unlawful in the UK and the

broadcasters have repeatedly turned down the parties’ requests for shorter PEBs on the

grounds that it would be “too reminiscent of instant packaging of political policies”.7

Party broadcasts are therefore officially considered as ‘programmes’, even though the

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Electoral Commission “urge[s] parties to be innovative in their design and production

of PPBs”.8

3 This article concentrates on this latter aspect to study how PPBs combine two

seemingly opposite elements. On the one hand, they are “clearly labelled as a

motivated, partisan piece of political communication”.9 On the other, they are

conceived to be as little disruptive as possible in a general flow of entertainment and

information. PEBs have therefore integrated TV codes and culture so as to try and

blend with the media background. They have borrowed from other mainstream genres,

such as advertisements, soap operas, documentaries, fiction films or reality TV

programmes, and use similar representational codes to produce a dynamic discourse:

‘mirror effect’, narrative techniques, character creation, individualization, etc.

4 This article describes the communication strategy and the persuasive techniques used

in the PEBs produced by the three main parties (Labour, the Conservatives and the

Liberal Democrats) at the general elections of 2001, 2005 and 2010.10 It follows a

semiotic approach and studies these programmes in terms of television genres. 11 It

shall first examine how audio-visual communication, through representation and the

construction of a distorted mirror, is used by parties to impose their ideological

framework. It shall then concentrate on the dramatization of issues, and show how

emotions are mobilised to maximise message recalls. Finally it shall argue that this type

of programmes tends to focus on individuals (party leaders, celebrities or ‘ordinary

heroes’) not only for communication purposes but also for ideological reasons.

Ideological Projection and Self-Identification: Framingthe Mirror

5 At electoral times, television “helps to shape and define the national campaign by

acting as a funnel: broadcasters collect the material and rearrange it for the benefit of

the national audience”.12 Their editorial line may however be at variance with the

parties’ communication strategies and they are likely to produce dissonant messages.

On the one hand, the broadcasters “strive to impose a structure on the materials […]

which reflects their perception of how the most outstanding elements can be fitted into

the day’s election jigsaw”.13 On the other, the parties use their free airtime to try and

impose their agenda (one speaks of ‘agenda setting’) and to produce an image of society

that reflects their own ideological view of it. The characters and the situations shown

in the PEBs are therefore shaped by a normative vision of society, even though the

party may claim that its policies are based on common sense, not on dogma (this was

especially true in the 2005 Conservative series). The target audience is expected to

acknowledge this image as a true reflection of their reality and concerns, and to see in

those characters a genuine mirror of their own selves. The aim is to circumscribe a

‘rhetoric community’ that includes the target electorate and the party defending its

interests. All the elements of the broadcasts (characters, setting, props, situations,

music, message, slogans, etc.) are signs that the viewers are invited to decode. Their

reading is however biased by prior beliefs and political sympathies.14 In semiotic terms,

“the ascription of meaning consists in mapping semantic fields onto textual items and

patterns” and implies “selective projection according to prior coordinates”.15 In other

words, the interpretation of PEBs is conditioned by ideology — understood as the frame

of mind within which the real is apprehended. In the context of political

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communication, ideology refers to the core values that shape the party’s identity, to

the main values conveyed by the mass media, and to the collective values shared by the

viewers/voters. Ideological codes therefore play an important role in structuring the

narratives and the characters in PEBs. Viewers should be able to identify with them in a

more or less rational way since watching a party broadcast mobilises both the viewers’

knowledge and affects. At the level of the individual receiver, ideology therefore

corresponds to “cognitive and affective maps on the one hand, and modes of self-

identification on the other”.16 This is why party broadcasts rely on devices that guide

the viewer’s reading in the desired way in connection with the general strategy

adopted by the party.

6 To that aim, the message may be general and rather vague to allow the largest part of

the audience to agree to it. In 2001, Labour’s first PEB portrayed a cheerful Britain and

announced that “the work [went] on” to the beat of The Lighthouse Family’s pop song

“Lifted”. In 2010, Scottish actor David Tennant used a ‘speaker-inclusive we’ to invite

people to renew their faith in the outgoing majority: “We’ve been through tough times

but, by staying on the right road, we can make Britain a country we all want it to be”

(12/04/10). The focus is on the party, which puts itself forward as the representative

and the reassuring protector of the nation’s interests. When the message is aimed at a

particular group, the attention will shift to some representatives of the target

electorate.

7 British PEBs most frequently feature ‘ordinary’ professionals filmed in their familiar

setting: a dedicated nurse or teacher praising the government’s achievements in health

or education (Labour, 01/06/01), a small business owner claiming that taxes prevent

him from creating jobs (Conservative, 13/04/10).17 Such characterizations assume that

nurses and teachers are traditional Labour voters, and show that the Conservatives see

themselves as primarily business-friendly. Gaining the favour of an opponent’s

supporters can be a complementary strategy. An identification process is also at work

but the characters endorsing the party’s message are usually not perceived as

supporters. Labour started courting the business world in the 1990s and, in 2005, the

incumbent government’s cause was defended by Sir Alan Sugar, a corporate manager

and a TV celebrity playing his own role in The Apprentice, a reality TV show aired on

BBC1 (3/05/05). For their part, the Conservatives opted for a similar strategy with

teachers and ethnic minority groups.18 In these examples, the characters’ physical

appearances, clothes, accents, and environments enable the viewers to identify them

and possibly to identify with them. The production style of the PEBs in which they

appear adds another dimension that may also influence how the message is received.

Some broadcasts are reminiscent of the style of reality TV (with people on the move

addressing a hand-held camera) or documentaries (with people standing still,

answering an interviewer who is off-screen). In 2001, Labour’s last PEB featured Terri

Dwyer and Gary Lucy, two actors starring in Hollyoaks, a popular soap opera amongst

young people. In this PEB, the characters decide to turn the TV off and go to the polling

station, though “it’s not always the most fun thing to do”. It is obviously no coincidence

that Hollyoaks’s audience was also the target of the party message. The choice of the

soap opera genre seems all the more relevant since it distinguishes itself by its specific

narrative and by its sense of “newness” that “invites the viewer to ‘live’ the experience

of solving the enigma, rather than be told the process of its already achieved and

recorded solution”.19 This perfectly suits election broadcasts as the future (the election

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outcome) still remains to be written by the viewers/voters, and it offers “a more

engaged and empowering reading relation” than other forms of narratives since the

viewers are asked to take part in the writing process.20 It also reveals that PEBs are

conceived as proper TV programmes and not as mere communication vehicle. As such

they have attracted renowned film directors (motivated by their political sympathies

and/or the artistic challenge) and have inspired a series of spoofs.21

Dynamic Narratives and TV Culture: Fear and Laughingin Westminster

8 As any other television genre (series, commercials, films, documentaries, etc.), PEBs

rely on ‘narratives’ (stories) involving ‘actants’ (characters and meaning-bearing

environments) interacting with one another (in a cooperative or conflicting way) in

various situations (usually a problem to solve or a quest to achieve). As seen in the

examples above, the mirror image designed by the parties in their PEBs offers different

facets of the ‘Self’ according to their communication strategy. But the communication

model would remain incomplete without a further element meant to create some

dialectic dynamics. In his study of Russian folktales, Vladimir Propp identified a

narrative structure that could be found in any story, as well as a given number of role

characters.22 Frank Biocca drew inspiration from Propp’s work to analyse American

political commercials and identify their ‘actants’, be they human (the candidate, the

worker, the taxpayer, etc.) or non-human (the White House symbolising the executive

power, the Bear representing Russia, etc.).23 These reading guidelines also apply to

British election broadcasts as they often tell the story of a ‘hero’ (a representative of

the target electorate) going out on a ‘quest’ (buying his own house, demanding better

social services, etc.). In doing so, he is helped by ‘supporters’ or ‘helpers’ (the party

defending his interests, opinion leaders legitimating his cause, etc.) and is hindered by

‘villains’ (the other parties, pressure groups, foreign powers, etc.).

9 The first 2001 Conservative PEB reiterated the argument that Labour’s lenient approach

to law and order was responsible for a rise in criminality, and attacked the

government’s early prison release scheme. It showed convicts being let out of jail only

to commit further offences: drug dealing, burglary, mugging, etc. The gloomy music

and the use of black and white recalled the infamous ‘Willie Horton’ spot produced by

the Republicans in 1988 to discredit the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis.24 In

terms of narrative, the Conservative Party poses itself as the ‘helper’ who warns the

‘hero’ (the electorate) of the threat posed by the ‘villain’ (the government associated

with the criminals). This type of broadcasts mainly relies on emotion rather than logic

or ethic.25 Fear is often used as a psychological lever in party broadcast narratives in a

similar way as it is used in other genres.26 In TV commercials for instance, fear is

created to draw people’s attention on a threat they might be unaware of. The party —

or the advertiser — can then suggest a remedy to thwart this menace so as to maintain

the status quo or improve the situation. Communication may also rely on deliberate

exaggeration, or refer to other television or cinematographic genres so as to create a

familiar audio-visual environment.

10 In 2001, Labour attacked the Conservatives on a theme that had long been

acknowledged as the Right’s ‘comparative advantage’, i.e. managing the economy

(23/05/01). The broadcast was entitled Tory Policies Will Hurt. Its introduction was in the

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style of a horror film trailer and multiplied visual references to this cinema genre. It

opened up on a dark tunnel bearing resemblance to the setting of George Lucas’s 1971

science fiction movie THX 1138. “They’re back”, a deep masculine voice warned, as

pictures of senior Tory members were blown away by the wind. It then referred to “

Economic Disaster: The Tory Years,” as though it were a motion picture and announced

“a series of sequels even more terrifying” to be released: Towering Interest Rates and The

Repossessed featuring William Hague (then leader of the Conservative Party) and

Michael Portillo (then Shadow Chancellor) as zombies. The broadcast described the

apocalyptic future that awaited Britain should the Opposition be returned to power.

The threat was materialised by a dark shadow looming over a street where a panicked

crowd ran for shelter. One of the scenes focused on a little girl wearing a pink coat in

an almost monochromatic environment, thereby reminding film aficionados of

Schindler’s List (1993) in which Steven Spielberg also made use of this technique. On a

political plane, this clearly hinted at the economic downturn of the early 1990s and at

the house repossessions that followed and were still fresh in people’s memory. On a

cinematographic level, it also made references to classic 1960s and 1970s blockbusters

such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), John Guillermin and Irwin

Allen’s The Towering Inferno (1974) or Jeremy Thorpe’s The Possessed (1977). This

broadcast stands out for its originality. It was also conceived to try and create a sense

of bonding between the sender (the Labour Party) and the receivers (the viewers/

voters), like the one that exists among film connoisseurs.27

11 Finally, humour can also be mobilised to mock other parties, or to create a relaxed

atmosphere in which the message might be better received. In this respect, two of the

PEBs produced by the Liberal Democrats in 2005 came over as rather innovative. The

first one (17/04/05) featured two second-hand car dealers verging on the crooked:

“Blair’s Bangers” selling red cars and “Michael’s Motors” blue ones. Both sellers

defended the Labour or Conservative policies displayed on their vehicles’ windshields

in blatant bad faith. This presentation made fun of the two major parties and their

respective leaders — Labour’s Tony Blair and the Conservatives’ Michael Howard — and

pointed out what the Lib Dems saw as empty promises. The second broadcast

(01/05/05) drew its inspiration from Aesop’s fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf. The main

character (played by a young actor wearing a red tie) had convinced “the boy who lived

across the road,” Howey (played by a boy with a blue tie), that a wolf lived in the forest.

Everyone stopped believing him when he continued to claim there still existed a “wolf-

like menace”, even after “the local woodsman Hans” had conducted a thorough search

in vain. The references to Tony Blair (the Prime Minister), Michael Howard (the leader

of the opposition), Hans Blix (the chief UN weapons inspector) and the unfruitful

search for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were obvious to the

viewers. The Lib Dems were trying to capitalise on the fact that they had always

opposed the most unpopular British intervention in Iraq. The purpose however is not

so much to convince with arguments but to hammer a point home and use humour to

maximise the memory impact of the message. The PEB addresses a ‘laughing

community’, and the figure of the ridiculed ‘Other’ helps define that of the ‘Self’.

12 In the aforementioned examples, the tone may be different, but the message is largely

negative in the sense that the qualities of the party are mostly revealed when

compared to the others’ defaults. Previous studies have concluded that negative ads

were more emotionally engaging and were therefore more likely to be watched,

understood and remembered.28 Emotional content, in general, may even enhance the

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credibility of the message.29 Personal attacks are not as systematic as in US political ads,

but in 2005, the leaders’ personalities became a campaign issue. In a PEB entitled

“Remember?” (15/04/05), Labour reminded voters of Michael Howard’s participation in

Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Cabinets, while the Conservatives urged the

electorate to “[s]end Mr. Blair a message” (26/04 and 2/05/05). Negative campaigns and

personal attacks have not become the rule, but one can observe a tendency to

personalise issues, parties and campaigns. This may be related to television itself as a

medium “better suited to the projection of personality than to the discussion of

complex ideas”, for producers tend to promote “the most authoritative ‘main player’.”30 Television singles out ‘personalities’: a charismatic leader or an ordinary hero. Group

confrontation and the notion of ‘social categories’ thus give way, in the political

discourse, to individual relationships and responsibilities in a context of ‘storytelling’.

Individualisation: The Charismatic Leader and theOrdinary Hero

13 The presidentialization of British politics has already been studied and more recent

works have pointed out that electoral campaigns have now entered a post-modern era

in which broadcasting is progressively giving way to narrowcasting and to a more

personalised form of communication via Internet social networks, text messages, direct

mail, etc.31 Television, however, still remains the major vehicle for general political

messages. The common point of these analyses is to shed light on the ‘individualization’

of political communication. This goes both ways. On the one hand, leaders try to single

themselves out and to appear charismatic, popular, authoritative, accountable,

transpartisan, etc. On the other, anonymous members of the public tend to be put in

the limelight at electoral times to tell their own personal stories.

14 As cultural goods produced for and within a given society, television programmes are

‘consumed’ by a large proportion of the population. The broadcasters’ offer is usually

meant to satisfy the majority’s tastes and expectations, and political parties are

generally worried that too much innovation might blur their message.32 Most

programmes (including PEBs) therefore conform to the cultural codes shared by this

majority. In this respect, television acts more as “a mirror reflecting our own reality

back to us” than as “a transparent window on the world”.33 The ‘uses and gratifications’

theory posits that mass media such as television are mainly used to fulfil basic

psychological needs.34 Individuals watch television for information but also to entertain

themselves and to experience emotional and aesthetic feelings, in search of a

communion in which they may integrate a larger community. In other words, they

actually take part in a collective action while watching television from the privacy of

their living room. Television (through its programmes) creates a virtual space — i.e. a

dematerialized social sphere — where groups can be gathered (the Internet and its

social networking forums are obviously a more recent, more personalised and

proactive extension of this phenomenon). Viewers are addressed as individuals but are

also invited to join in a group.

15 The ‘talking head’ format perfectly illustrates this apparent paradox.35 Though meant

to simulate a face-to-face exchange, this form of communication remains

unidirectional and soliloquial, and is seen as very formal. In more recent productions,

hand-held cameras are more readily used to follow the party leaders in their daily

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activities, be they professional or personal. Inspired by new television filming

techniques (much used in reality TV shows), the camera endows the viewers with the

illusory feeling that they can engage in a personal relationship with the leader, that

they can follow him/her almost everywhere, and that nothing can be hidden from

them. This is mostly accompanied by the use of a first-person narrative. By way of

example, one may cite the third Labour broadcast of the 2001 campaign (27/05/01). It

focused on Tony Blair and was shot in a school in his constituency of Sedgefield (Co.

Durham) by commercials director Jack Price. The Prime Minister speaks to someone

off-camera who is neither seen nor heard. This places the viewer in the position of a

privileged witness without being directly addressed, as though he/she were left to

make up his/her own mind. Tony Blair uses the “we” form to refer to the government

but this only seems to be an extension of the first-person pronoun. Above all, his

speech illustrates what is at stake in political communication, i.e. to create a causal link

between programmatic words and concrete achievements. Television’s “dual impact”

totally serves this effect as the “camera [is] used to carry a visual representation of the

message in support of the audio portion”.36 The images show what the words announce.

“I wouldn’t stay in politics a day longer than I thought I had some useful purpose in it”,

Tony Blair reveals before being filmed in the schoolyard talking with a teacher,

surrounded by pupils. He insists on the government’s achievements — “You can come

to a school like this and it’s changed. And it’s changed because of the political

decisions” — and concludes that “there are real changes that we can see that have

made a real difference to people’s lives”.

16 In this example, the leader is portrayed as someone endowed with specific powers. This

often goes together with a more ‘human’ side. In order to gain popularity, he must

appear close to ‘ordinary people’. In 2005, Michael Howard spoke about the state school

he went to in Wales, about his mother who was a victim of the Holocaust, and about the

death of his mother-in-law who contracted MRSA in hospital (20/04/05). In 2001 and

2005, the Lib Dem series featured a portrait of Charles Kennedy, relating his “political

journey” from his early years in rural Scotland to his position of party leader (16/05/01

and 25/04/05). Popular or newly elected leaders looking for further credibility are

usually much present in their party’s broadcasts. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are

cases in point (in 2010 they appeared in all the PEBs, save one, of their respective

parties).37 This exposure can also boost voters’ support. 38 It is equally true that an

unpopular leader may withdraw from the PEBs. Save for a 2-second succession of shots

(21/04/10), Gordon Brown does not appear in any of the 2010 Labour productions. He

was replaced by television celebrities including Sean Pertwee, David Tennant, Eddie

Izzard, Peter Davison and Ross Kemp.39

17 While leaders try to be seen as ‘ordinary persons’, anonymous citizens are praised as

‘everyday heroes’. In 2001, a Labour PEB praised the personal commitment of a nurse, a

retired police officer, a teacher and a war veteran, whose names were given. Tony Blair

introduced them in a voice-over as “the real heroes, the quiet heroes, who are building

the future of Britain” and described them as the “strength and soul of this country”

(01/06/01). The Lib Dems used a similar approach in three of their PEBs with

testimonies by nurses, pensioners, policemen, teachers, commuters and students

(25/05, 29/05 and 03/06/01). More recently, David Cameron’s vision of the ‘Big Society’

was actualised in a broadcast featuring the portraits of a charity shop assistant and of a

volunteer, both identified by their first names and places of residence (13/04/10). Such

‘actants’ contribute to the creation of a ‘reality effect’ and to an impression of

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genuineness reminiscent of documentary filmmaking and of the cinéma vérité style.

They also provide characters and narratives that structure the broadcasts.

18 In ideological terms, this is also coherent with a tendency to ‘individualize’

responsibilities and to attribute social disorder not to socioeconomic conditions but

primarily to individual anti-social behaviour. This is arguably one of the legacies of the

Thatcher years and a reflection that “there is no such thing as society”. But New Labour

(1997-2010) also played a major role in inducing “a change in the location of

responsibility from society to individual” that contributed to alter “the social

democratic concept of citizenship”.40 Emphasis was laid on personal responsibility with

rights presented “not as entitlements but as things we earn by fulfilling our duties”

with the implication “that when the duties are not fulfilled, the failing lies with the

individual”.41 This approach relies on counter-models and justifies hard-nosed

postures, as exemplified in David Cameron’s diatribe against “welfare spongers”

(23/04/10).42

A Lasting Impression on the Collective Memory

19 Television is “a highly ‘generic’ medium with comparatively few one-off programmes

falling outside established categories” and Party Election Broadcasts are no exception

to the rule.43 They largely borrow from other genres too (soap opera, apocalyptic

fiction, comedy, reality TV, documentaries, etc.) so as to constantly be revived and still

be able to seize the viewers’ attention. At the same time, they must be analysed as

vehicles for party propaganda. Communication strategists play on this ambiguity to try

and produce entertaining programmes that carry a political message. Following the

1959 Labour series of PEBs, The Daily Mirror already commented that “[it] moved so fast,

so topically and so entertainingly that many viewers probably forgot they were being

appealed to as voters”.44 Should such circumstances be created, political slogans and

soundbites are all the more likely to be memorised by the viewers.

20 In 2003, the Electoral Commission indicated that “[a]lthough evidence regarding the

influence of PPBs is inconclusive, they remain one of the most effective and therefore

most important direct campaigning tools available to qualifying political parties”.45 The

voters’ attitude towards PEBs is rather ambiguous. Most of them endorse the right of

parties to make them and agree they may raise public awareness regarding what

parties stand for. On the other hand, they deny PEBs any effect on people’s political

allegiance and find them little informative.46 These statements are contradicted by

other surveys and the influence of party broadcasts remains open to dispute.47 While

some are doubtful about their very purpose, others argue about their “valuable role […]

in the democratic process”.48 Even though one may doubt about the PEBs’ direct

influence on voting behaviour, one may assume that they can reinforce or modify

people’s attitudes towards a party, or alter their perception of events. With their own

broadcasts, political parties participate in the production of the media discourse and, as

such, in the creation of a collective imaginary. In this respect they also participate in

the writing of British audio-visual history and contribute to enriching the national

television archives.49

Dermody, Janine, and Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd. “An Introspective, Retrospective, Futurespective

Analysis of the Attack Advertising in the 2010 British General Election.” Journal of Marketing

Management 27, n°7-8 (2011): 736-52.

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APPENDIXES

Appendix 1:

PEB allocation for the general elections of 2001, 2005 and 2010

PEB allocation in 2001 (polling day: 7/06/01)

Parties Dates Title or main theme(s) Duration

Labour

14/05

23/05

27/05

01/06

05/06

The work goes on (feat. Geri Halliwell)

Tory Policies Will Hurt (mock trailer)

Leadership

The Real Heroes (Let’s finish what we all started)

Be part of it (making a big difference to people in your

community)

2’40

2’40

4’40

2’40

2’40

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Conservatives

15/05

24/05

30/05

02/06

04/06

Labour’s special early release scheme / Petrol tax

Education in disarray / Keep the Pound (in Europe, not run by

Europe)

Petrol tax / Keep the Pound (in Europe, not run by Europe)

Repeat 15/05

Labour’s broken promises / William Hague campaigning

2’40

2’40

2’40

2’40

2’40

Lib Dems

16/05

25/05

29/05

03/06

Charles Kennedy: a leader who jumps on injustice, not

bandwagons

A real chance for real change: NHS, pensions, police

A real chance for real change: education, transport, tuition fees

A real chance for real change: NHS, tuition fees, police, pensions

2’40

2’40

2’40

2’40

PEB allocation in 2005 (polling day: 5/05/05)

Parties Dates Title or main theme(s) Duration

Labour

11/04

15/04

19/04

27/04

03/05

Blair and Brown

Remember?

The NHS expresses fundamental Labour values

If you value it, vote for it

One in ten (feat. Alan Sugar)

4’40

2’40

3’40

3’40

3’40

Conservatives

12/04

16/04

20/04

26/04

02/05

Choices (speaking up for Britain’s forgotten majority)

Repeat 12/04

Values (M. Howard and his team)

Send Mr Blair a message

Repeat 26/04

3’40

3’40

3’40

2’40

2’40

Lib Dems

13/04

17/04

25/04

01/05

Our achievements in Scotland and in numerous by-elections

Would you buy a used car off this government?

Charles Kennedy: a political journey

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

2’40

2’40

2’40

2’40

PEB allocation in 2010 (polling day: 6/05/10)

Parties Dates Title or main theme(s) Duration

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Labour

14/05

16/04

21/04

28/04

04/05

The Road Ahead (feat. Sean Pertwee and David Tennant)

Brilliant Britain (feat. Eddie Izzard)

Our Journey (feat. Peter Davison and David Tennant)

A Nightmare on your Street

Sixty Seconds (feat. Ross Kemp)

2’40

2’40

2’40

2’40

2’40

Conservatives

13/04

19/04

23/04

27/04

03/05

An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain

What it takes to change a country

The Big Society

An Election Broadcast from the Hung Parliament Party

A contract between the Conservative Party and you

4’40

4’40

4’40

2’40

3’40

Lib Dems

14/04

20/04

26/04

30/04

Say goodbye to broken promises

Vote for what you believe in

Say goodbye to broken promises (repeat)

Don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be different

3’40

2’40

3’40

2’40

Appendix 2:

Total campaign expenditure and amount spent on Party Political Broadcasts*

Labour Conservatives Liberal Democrats

Campaign PPBs Campaign PPBs Campaign PPBs

2001 £10,945,119 £272,849 £12,751,813 £567,286 £1,361,377 £55,353

2005 £17,946,000 £470,218 £17,852,000 £293,446 £4,325,000 £124,871

2010 £8,016,000 £430,028 £16,683,000 £699,124 £4,788,000 £152,747

Sources: The Electoral Commission, Election 2001: Campaign Spending (London: HMSO,

2002); Electoral Commission, Election 2005: Campaign Spending — The UK Parliamentary

General Election (London: HMSO, 2006); The Electoral Commission, UK General Election

2010: Campaign Spending Report (London: HMSO, 2011). See also The Electoral

Commission, The Funding of Political Parties (London: HMSO, 2003).

* This includes broadcasts aired before the beginning of the official campaign in the

year of the election.

Appendix 3:

Dominant tone in the PEBs (2001, 2005 and 2010)

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Labour

(out of 5 PEBs)

Conservatives

(out of 5 PEBs)

Liberal Democrats

(out of 4 PEBs)

2001 2005 2010 2001 2005 2010 2001 2005 2010

Self-praise 4 4 4 0 3 4 5 2 2

Including a focus on the leader 1 1 0 0 1 4 1 1 2

Negative 1 1 1 5 2 1 0 2 2

Including attacks on other parties’ leaders 0 1 0 1 2 0 0 1 0

Appendix 4:

Dominant speakers in the PEBs (2001, 2005 and 2010)

Labour

(out of 5 PEBs)*

Conservatives

(out of 5 PEBs)*

Liberal

Democrats

(out of 4 PEBs)*

2001 2005 2010 2001 2005 2010 2001 2005 2010

Party leader 2 1 0 1 3 4 4 2 4

Average citizen(s) 0 2 1 0 2 0 3 0 0

Celebrity/celebrities 0 1 4 0 0 0 0 0 0

None (fiction, voice-over, music, etc.) or

very brief final address3 1 1 4 2 1 0 2 0

* The total for each column may exceed the number of PEBs allocated when the leader

and other speakers are equally present in the broadcast.

NOTES

1. A poll by Opinion Matters for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts

(Nesta) showed that 63% of voters used television to get information about the campaign,

compared to 47% who read the newspapers, 27% who listened to the radio, and 9% who visited

political websites. Cited in The British General Election of 2010, ed. Dennis Kavanagh and Philip

Cowley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 184.

2. Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) are scheduled during general, local and European election

campaigns. Party Political Broadcasts (PPBs) are transmitted outside electoral campaigns, though

the expression is also used to refer to all the categories of party broadcasts (election, ministerial,

budget, referendum and political broadcasts). They are allocated to qualifying parties and aired

free of charge on BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, Five and Sky. For further details, see Oonagh Gay,

Party Election Broadcasts (London: House of Commons Library, SN/PC/03354, 13/01/10) and The

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Electoral Commission, Party Political Broadcasting: Report and Recommendations (London: HMSO,

2003).

3. See appendix for details.

4. The first quotation is by Creative Director Jeremy Sinclair, cited in Martin Rosenbaum, From

Soapbox to Soundbite: Party Political Campaigning in Britain since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 20.

The second one is by Saatchi’s Managing Director, Tim Bell, speaking in a documentary on Party

Political Broadcasts first aired on 8 October 1993 on BBC2 (There now follows… directed by Bob

Clifford and Celia Ellacott).

5. For further details on the ‘Americanization’ of British politics and political communication, see

Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson, “The Americanization of British Politics? Trends in Negative

Advertising, 1951-2005.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science

Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at the annual meeting of Elections, Public Opinion

and Parties Conference, Nottingham, United Kingdom (2006); Karen S. Johnson and Camille

Elebash, “The Contagion from the Right: The Americanization of British Political Advertising,” in

New Perspectives on Political Advertising, eds Lynda Lee Kaid, Dan Nimmo and Keith Sanders

(Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986): 293-13; Dennis Kavanagh,

Election Campaigning: The New Marketing of Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 218-27; Brian McNair,

An Introduction to Political Communication (1995; London: Routledge, 2003), 97.

6. Janine Dermody and Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd, “An Exploratory Analysis of the Message Discourses

Employed in the 2010 British Party Election Broadcasts,” (2010); Barrie Gunter, Kostas Saltzis and

Vincent Campbell, “The Changing Nature of Party Election Broadcasts: The Growing Influence of

Political Marketing” (Discussion papers in mass communication, Department of Media and

Communication, University of Leicester, 2006); Jennifer van Heerde, “Rethinking Issues, Image

and Negative Advertising: British Party Election Broadcasts, 2001-2005,” (Annual meeting of the

American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 2005); Robin Hodess; Julio Juarez

Gamiz, Political marketing and the production of political communications: A content analysis of British

Party Election Broadcasts from 1979 to 2001 (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Journalism Studies,

University of Sheffield, October 2004).

7. Lord Annan et al., Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting (London: HMSO, 1977),

298. Since 2000, parties have been able to choose from broadcasts of 2’40, 3’40, or 4’40: Gay, Party

Election Broadcasts. In 2005, Labour’s request for 30-second spots was rejected by the Electoral

Commission: The British General Election of 2005, eds Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler (London:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 111.

8. The Electoral Commission, Party Political Broadcasting: Report and Recommendations, 4.

9. McNair, An Introduction to Political Communication, 31.

10. See appendix for details.

11. Every element of the broadcast (captions, speeches, images, music, sounds, etc.) constitutes a

‘sign’ (or ‘signifier’) to which a meaning (‘signified’) is to be ascribed in a given cultural context

(the linguistic, political, socioeconomic, ideological, etc. environment). The message is ‘co-

constructed’ insofar as the receivers (viewers/voters) must decode the signs produced by the

sender (the party) to make sense of the said message. Television and Political Advertising, vol. 2:

Signs, Codes and Images, ed. Frank Biocca (Hillsdale, New Jersey: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991). See

further references below.

12. Ralph Negrine, Politics and the Mass Media in Britain (London: Routledge, 1989), 181.

13. Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, The Crisis of Public Communication (London: Routledge,

1995), 134, authors’ emphasis.

14. Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Message,” in Culture, Media, Language:

Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, eds Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 138.

15. David Bordwell, Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1989), 129, author’s emphasis. The expressions “texts” and “textual

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99

items” are to be understood in their broader meaning, i.e. as “a signifying structure composed of

signs and codes which are essential to communicate”. James Watson and Anne Hill, Dictionary of

Media and Communication Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2003), 317.

16. Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (1991;

London: Sage, 1994), 23.

17. Scenes showing anonymous voters addressing the camera to praise the party or incriminate

its opponents are a common feature in PEBs (these shots are known as ‘vox pops’). This type of

sequences was used in 10 broadcasts (almost 24%) of our corpus.

18. One of their 2005 PEBs featured a teacher, a black man in a suit and a young woman of Indian

origin (12/04/05). A few months later, Adam Afriyie, their first black MP (Windsor), took the lead

in the party’s first post-election PPB (4/10/05).

19. John Fiske, Television Culture (1987; London: Routledge, 1991), 145.

20. Fiske, Television Culture, 145.

21. In 2001, Jack Price (who had filmed commercials for Nike) made the Labour PEB focusing on

Tony Blair’s leadership, Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) worked on Charles Kennedy’s

portrait for the Lib Dems, and Ken Loach directed the Socialist Alliance’s PEB. In 2005, Labour’s

opening broadcast with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was filmed by Anthony Minghella (The

English Patient). The same year, Channel 4 News aired three spoof PEBs produced by advertising

agency Quiet Storm and directed by two of its creative, Lee Ford and Dan Brooks. In 2010, Labour

hired Stephen Hopkins (24, Nightmare on Elm Street 5) for one of their PEBs.

22. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). See also

Algirdas-Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at Method (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1983) and Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkley: University of

California Press, 1977).

23. Television and Political Advertising, ed. Biocca, 79.

24. Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates, The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television (1984;

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 277-81.

25. J. van Heerde, “Rethinking Issues, Image and Negative Advertising: British Party Election

Broadcasts, 2001-2005,” 10.

26. Michael Ray and William Wilkie, “Fear: The Potential of an Appeal Neglected by Marketing,”

Journal of Marketing, 34 1 (1970): 55-56.

27. The idea was reiterated in 2010 with a PEB entitled A Nightmare on your Street (aired on

28/04/10), a clear reference to the Nightmare on Elm Street series of horror films, one of which was

directed by Stephen Hopkins, who was recruited to shoot the aforementioned Labour PEB (see

footnote 21).

28. Janine Dermody and Richard Scullion, “Exploring the Consequences of Negative Political

Advertising for Liberal Democracy,” Journal of Political Marketing, 2 1 (2003): 77-100. For a review

of research studies on this topic, see J. Dermody and S. Hanmer-Lloyd, “An Exploratory Analysis

of the Message Discourses Employed in the 2010 British Party Election Broadcasts,” 1-2. See

appendix for details.

29. B. Gunter et al., “The Changing Nature of Party Election Broadcasts: The Growing Influence of

Political Marketing,” 12-14; Aron O’Cass, “Political Advertising Believability and Information

Source Value during Elections,” Journal of Advertising, 31 1(2002): 63-74.

30. Anthony Mughan, Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections (Houndmills,

Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 12.

31. Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency (Manchester: MUP, 1993); Mughan, Media and

the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections; Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb, The

Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies (Oxford: OUP, 2005); Pippa

Norris, A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-Industrial Societies (Cambridge: CUP, 2000);

David Farrell, Robin Kolodny and Stephen Medvic, “Parties and Campaign Professionals in a

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100

Digital Age,” The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 6 4 (2001): 11-30; David Farrell,

“Campaign Modernization and the West European Party,” in Political Parties in the New Europe:

Political and Analytical Challenges, eds Kurt Richard Luther and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel (Oxford:

OUP, 2002), 63-83.

32. Kevin Maher, “Campaign Trail Star: Politicians are Roping in A-list Directors to Boost their

Campaigns,” The Times (28/04 2005); Margaret Scammell and Ana Langer, “Political Advertising:

Why Is It So Boring?” Media, Culture & Society, 28 5 (2006): 763-84.

33. Fiske, Television Culture, 21.

34. Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on

Gratifications Research (London: Sage, 1974). One of the earliest studies carried out on PEBs was

based on this theory: Jay G. Blumler and Denis McQuail, Television in Politics (London: Faber &

Faber, 1968).

35. The speaker is filmed in close shot so that he/she has approximately the same size as a

person sitting in front of the viewer would have. He/she looks straight into the eye of the

camera, reads from an autocue and addresses the audience as “you”.

36. Stephen C. Shadegg, How to Win an Election: The Art of Political Victory (New York: Taplinger

Publishing Co., 1964), 168. See also Annie Lang, “Defining Audio/Video Redundancy from a

Limited Capacity Information Processing Perspective,” Communication Research, 22 1 (1995):

86-115.

37. See appendix for details.

38. Daniel Stevens, Jeffrey A. Karp and Robert Hodgson, “Party Leaders as Movers and Shakers in

British Campaign? Results from the 2010 Election,” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, 21 2

(2011): 137.

39. Labour has produced other PEBs with endorsements from celebrities: though furtive, ex-

Spice Girl Geri Halliwell’s appearance in one of their 2001 broadcasts attracted much media

attention, and so did their first 2010 PEB featuring Sean Pertwee (on-screen) and former Dr Who

David Tennant (voice-over). Anne Perkins, “It’s raining celebs as Geri backs Blair,” The Guardian

(14/05/10); “General Election 2010: David Tennant and Sean Pertwee star in Labour advert”, The

Daily Telegraph (12/04/10).

40. Mark Bevir, New Labour: A Critique (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 69. See also Individualization:

Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, eds Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth

Beck-Gernsheim (London: Sage, 2002); The Conservative Party and Social Policy, ed. Hugh Bochel

(Bristol: Policy Press, 2011); Florence Faucher-King and Patrick Le Galès, The New Labour

Experiment: Change and Reform under Blair and Brown (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford UP, 2010); Bill Jordan,

Why the Third Way Failed: Economics, Morality and the Origins of the “Big Society” (Bristol: Policy Press,

2010).

41. Bevir, New Labour: A Critique, 69.

42. The PEB uses footage of a speech by David Cameron in which he states: “[…] people who can

work, people who are able to work and people who choose not to work: you cannot go on

claiming welfare like you are now.”

43. Fiske, Television Culture, 109.

44. Quoted in Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 5: Competition,

1955-1974 (Oxford: OUP, 1995), 251.

45. The Electoral Commission, Party Political Broadcasting: Report and Recommendations, 4.

46. Jane Sancho, Election 2001 Viewers’ Response to the Television Coverage (London: ITC Research

Publication, 2001), 19-20.

47. Paul Baines et al., “Measuring Communication Channel Experiences and their Influence on

Voting in the 2010 British General Election,” Journal of Marketing Management, 27 7-8 (2011):

691-717; Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston, “Assessing the Television Campaign: The Impact of

Party Election Broadcasting on Voters Opinions in the 1997 British General Election,” Political

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Communications, 19 (2002): 333-58; David Sanders and Pippa Norris, “ The Impact of Political

Advertising in the 2001 UK General Election,” Political Research Quarterly, 58 4 (2005): 525-36;

Richard Scullion and Janine Dermody, “The Value of Party Election Broadcasts for Electoral

Engagement: A Content Analysis of the 2001 British General Election Campaign,” International

Journal of Advertising, 24 3 (2005): 345-72.

48. J. Dermody and S. Hanmer-Lloyd, “An Exploratory Analysis of the Message Discourses

Employed in the 2010 British Party Election Broadcasts,” 1.

49. PEBs and PEBs are kept at the British Film Institute. A selection of them can be viewed on the

BFI website (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1389732/index.html). The Edward Boyle

Library of the University of Leeds also has a collection of party broadcasts, and the website of the

University of Sheffield provides access to a corpus of PEBs (http://pebs.group.shef.ac.uk/).

ABSTRACTS

As the majority of programmes aired on British terrestrial channels, Party Election Broadcasts

(PEBs) address a large and anonymous audience. In order to reach specific viewers however, they

rest on stereotyped representational codes meant to enable target voters to identify with the

characters and the situations portrayed. The mirror presented to them is necessarily distorted to

fit within the party’s ideological framework and to serve its electoral ambition. This article

examines the representational codes at work in the PEBs produced by the three main British

political parties at the general elections of 2001, 2005 and 2010. How are those codes manipulated

to produce a dynamic (audio-visual) discourse? How is dramatisation used to engage the

audience and enhance message recall? How do PEBs reflect the personification of issues and the

individualisation of the social body?

INDEX

Keywords: Party Election Broadcast (PEB), political communication, television genre, narrative,

identification

AUTHOR

DAVID HAIGRON

David Haigron is a senior lecturer in British civilisation at the University of Rennes 2 and is a

member of the research team ACE (EA 1796). His research focuses on political communication,

the media and social representations. He completed a PhD in 2006 on the British Conservative

Party’s Televised Political Broadcasts (1974-1997) and co-edited Stratégies et campagnes électorales en

Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis (L’Harmattan, 2009) with Renée Dickason and Karine Rivière-De

Franco. His published articles include “Campagne télévisée, spectacle télévisuel : les débats entre

chefs de parti et les spots électoraux”, Revue française de civilisation britannique, vol. 16(1), 2011,

pp. 73-87, and “Targeting ‘Essex Man’ and ‘C2 wives’: The Representation of the Working Class

Electorate in the Conservative Party Political Broadcasts (1970s-1980s)”, in The Representation of

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Working People in Britain and France: New Perspectives, ed. Antoine Capet. Newcastle-upon-Tyne:

Cambridge Scholars, 2009, pp. 109-28. He is currently editing The UK’s Political Landscape in the 21st

Century: Players, Strategies, Stakes, due to be published in LISA e-journal (http://lisa.revues.org/).

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Bibliographical Essay

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‘Locus of Control’: A SelectiveReview of Disney Theme ParksThibaut Clément

1 In the fifty-five years since Disneyland’s opening in Anaheim, California, the

characteristic insularity and thematic coherence of the Disney theme parks have made

them prominent examples of the “landscapes of power” so often discussed both inside

and outside academic circles.1

2 While Disneyland’s opening was met mostly with silence by academics, later responses

have been mixed at best, revealing the suspicious attitudes of intellectuals with regard

to popular culture: as early as 1958, the comments of screenwriter Julian Halevy on

Disneyland would set the tone for later discussions of the parks, as he remarked in

Nation that the park’s “sickening blend of cheap formulas packaged to sell” only

“exist[s] for the relief of tension and boredom, as tranquilizers for social anxiety, and …

provide[s] fantasy experiences in which not-so-secret longings are pseudo-satisfied.”2

3 However, other voices soon emerged that found the environment of the park

“immensely exciting” rather than oppressive and debilitating.3 In 1965, Charles Moore’s

serious treatment of Disneyland’s playful theming helped the low-brow theme park

enter high-brow discussion, thus paving the way for postmodernism in architecture:

then the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Moore praised the park as “the most

important single piece of construction in the West in the past several decades” — a new

public arena that responded to the erosion of public space in Los Angeles and allowed

visitors to engage in “play-acting, both to be watched or participated in, in a public

sphere.”4

4 At the heart of these interpretations of the Disney theme parks lies the issue of who

controls the visitor’s experience or, more precisely, where the locus of control for this

experience really sits. While it originally referred to a person’s perceived control over

his and her actions and their attribution to personal (or ‘internal’) or environmental

(‘external’) factors, the term ‘locus of control’ here applies broadly to the agency and

motivations demonstrated by the park’s various participants (visitors, employees, and

company executives) in shaping and assigning meaning to the park’s environment.5

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5 As some critics have shown, the Disney corporation’s efforts to shape its environment

are not just confined to the park’s physical landscape but include an entire array of

legislations and infrastructures, allowing the company to contain outside forces and

exert greater control over its parks.6 Beyond such hegemonic interpretations, other

critics have placed the locus of control not within the Disney-controlled environment

of the parks but within individual visitors as well as the wider socio-economic context

of which the parks form only a part. These diverse perspectives show evolving

conceptions of the reception processes of mass media, that is how people respond to

and consume mass media as well as how the social, economic and material conditions

surrounding its reception affect personal interpretations.

6 This essay is intended to evaluate how the notions of reception, agency and control

apply to both the user and the Disney corporation. We first identify one research trend

that draws from semiotics and post-modernism to cast the park as a ‘text’ whose

meaning largely escapes the visitor. In such approaches, the visitor is a passive

receptor of the park’s hidden ideological message, and the locus of control for the

user’s experience sits within the park’s environment itself. A second approach places

the locus of control within individual users, presenting visitors and employees as

actively involved in appropriating the park’s design, themes and contents. A third, final

trend evaluates whether the seemingly autonomous environment of the parks is itself a

locus of control — that is, an environment whose design and operations are the

exclusive products of the Disney corporation.

7 Since we focus on issues of reception and agency, we do not include an exhaustive

review of all scholarly approaches to the Disney parks. In particular, approaches whose

topics and methods fall outside our scope include discussions of the parks’ overall

design and contents — most notably their presentation of history and technology.7

8 Under the European influences of semiotics and post-modernism, American cultural

critics have approached the parks as sets of signs and representations arranged into a

discourse and intended to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy. These

approaches combine the Socratic view of representations as fallacies with a Marxian

approach to mass culture, generally depicting the parks as a privileged seat of ‘false

consciousness’ — the embodiment of capitalist domination and consumerism.

9 Originating in the works of semiologists Louis Marin, Umberto Eco and sociologist Jean

Baudrillard, this trend found new resonance in the United States with Stephen

Fjellman’s magnum opus, the 500-page Vinyl Leaves.8 In keeping with a semiotic

approach, Fjellman and his European counterparts tend to present the park as a

discourse or a text whose message is ideological in nature.9 While Marin found that

Disneyland exemplifies the American ideology, “the imaginary relationship that the

ruling class in American society maintains with its real conditions of existence,” Eco

saw in Disneyland an “allegory of the consumer society”; Fjellman in turn defines

Disney World as “the most ideologically important piece of land in the United States” in

that it exposes “[t]he hegemonic meta-message of our time,” namely that “the

commodity form is natural and inescapable.”10

10 However, it is only under careful analysis that the parks surrender their ‘true’

meanings, since within their boundaries the signs no longer stand for what they seem

to represent: by presenting itself as ‘real,’ the park’s environment blurs the line

between ‘fake’ and ‘authentic,’ allowing the ‘artificial’ copy — the signifier — to replace

the ‘original’ model — the signified — entirely. Noting that in the parks “[t]he

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referential functions of normal, everyday language have been shattered and the

signifier disconnected from the signified,” Fjellman remarks that Disney World

“juxtapose[s] the real and the fantastic, surrounding us with this mix until it becomes

difficult to tell which is which. A kind of euphoric disorientation is supposed to set in as

we progressively accept the Disney definition of things.”11 In so defining the park,

Fjellman closely follows the conclusions of Eco and Baudrillard, which have made the

park a prominent example of man’s so-called ‘postmodern condition’: while Eco

identified Disneyland as the epitome of “hyperreality,” where “[t]he ‘completely real’

becomes identified with the ‘completely fake,’” Baudrillard saw the park as an example

of “simulation,” where “the radical negation of the sign as value” leads to a “reversion

and death sentence of every reference.”12

11 In a post-Socratic critique of mimesis as illusion, the vivid representations of the theme

parks are said to cause “the blunting of visitors' powers of discrimination” between

fantasy and reality: while visitors are encouraged to take part in the park’s fictional

environment, they also engage in real acts of consumption.13 As Fjellman underlines,

the park’s stores are “part of show. And we participate only through purchase. Candy is

there, in part, to lend verisimilitude to the false-front real stores. It is both commodity

and prop.”14 Fjellman’s observations closely follow Eco’s previous conclusions that

“[w]hat is falsified is our will to buy, which we take as real,” making Disneyland “the

quintessence of consumer ideology.”15 In other words, what the park works at

manufacturing and commodifying is the entire mental life of the visitors, as Fjellman

remarks: “Fantasy goes on the market, as the last remaining vestige of uncommodified

life — the unconscious — is brought into the market system.”16 As they work at

naturalizing the dominant ideology of mindless consumption, the parks serve as

capitalism’s province of ‘false consciousness’: in so doing, they serve to displace the

‘locus of control’ for the guest’s experience away from individual visitors to the Disney-

controlled environment.

12 While Fjellman makes a solid point when he suggests that the fantasy landscapes of the

parks present themselves as the objective product of collective labor and of specific

structures of production (or what Marx called praxis), his analysis also shares some of

the limitations of the works he draws from. Much of Fjellman’s work revolves around

the meaning or ‘meta-message’ that visitors ultimately extract from the park’s

environment, yet the author provides no convincing model for reception, thereby

suggesting that reception is largely an unproblematic activity, neatly separated from

production and free of interference of any kind. Indeed, as is common with hegemonic

interpretations, very little room is left for individual variation from the normative

interpretations identified by the critic: given Eco’s proclivity to depict the park as “a

place of total passivity” where visitors are required to “behave like [Disneyland’s]

robots,” one is hardly surprised that even an anthropologist such as Fjellman did not

feel it necessary to interview visitors, as he himself admits to “never initiat[ing] a

research inquiry with a customer while at the parks.”17

13 The semiotic and post-modern approaches that Fjellman draws from also fail to explain

how the parks may legitimately be treated as linguistic products or ‘texts’ to be

deciphered or ‘read’: while Marin explains that ‘utopias’ work at converting space into

a text, geographers such as Gottdiener have legitimately insisted that “urban space can

only be considered as a pseudo-text, because it is produced by non-semiotic processes,

such as economics and politics, as well as semiotic ones.”18

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14 Finally, the authors’ extreme suspicion with regard to mass culture brings them to

reassert a strong divide between low-brow entertainment and high-brow analysis, as

their critical interpretations of the parks ultimately serve to disqualify popular

practices and receptions as invalid, naïve or even ‘distasteful’: by depicting the park as

‘fake,’ scholarly interpretations suggest the existence of an objective reality against

which the park may be judged and interpreted. Also, Fjellman takes great pains to

distance himself from the decidedly low-brow audience of theme parks as he

repeatedly describes some of the park’s attractions as “unbearably corny”: “However

corny the show is — and it verges on the unbearable — the audience appears to enjoy

itself.”19 Ultimately, Fjellman seems to have adopted the exoticism and perhaps even

the slight contempt that European critics seem to feel for this (then) typically American

phenomenon, thereby leaving the vague impression that American visitors are but

gullible grown-up children. Baudrillard for instance noted that “the debility, the

infantile degeneration of [Disneyland’s] imaginary” was meant “to make us believe that

the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world” while “real childishness is everywhere,

particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster

illusions of their real childishness.”20

15 Other critics, relying on micro-sociological approaches, have placed stronger emphasis

on users’ practices and insiders’ tales, depicting the parks as a playground for social

interactions and allowing visitors and employees to engage in individual or collective

“poaching” strategies (following Michel de Certeau’s expression) in the name of

personal or group interests.21 As noted above, as early as 1965, architect Charles Moore

saw in Disneyland a public space where people, through playacting, were able to engage

in social interactions and “respond to a public environment, which Los Angeles

particularly no longer has.”22 Ethnologist Alexander Moore further elaborated on this

view in 1980 as he described Disney World as a “playful pilgrimage center” — a place

where visitors compensate for the gradual disappearance of the communal experience

of “organized religion and obligatory rituals” through collective and ritualized forms of

“play,” with the park’s attractions reenacting “true rites of passage, offered as edifying

play in a modern art form.”23

16 In accordance with such interpretations, John Van Maanen, an organization theorist,

wrote a series of articles in the early 1990s dealing with the corporate culture and

public meanings of Disney theme parks. Rather than a collection of shared

representations, Van Maanen seems to view culture as a “toolkit,” in Ann Swidler’s

seminal expression, a “repertoire of strategies” that enables improvised action under

variable circumstances.24 As an audience especially subjected to the messages of the

Disney corporation, the Disneyland work-force has allowed Van Maanen to

demonstrate how such messages are actively appropriated, as employees typically

negotiate their way between recommended instructions, ‘on the fly’ responses as well

as codified acts of collective or individual resistance.

17 In his broad overview of the social life of theme park workers, “The Smile Factory:

Working at Disneyland,” Van Maanen shows how Disneyland’s overall organization of

labor and training procedures are appropriated and even allow subgroups to emerge

with perceived common interests.25 Despite their apparent social homogeneity, the

predominantly middle-class workforce has developed an informal status system based

on the perceived autonomy, skill sets, and exposure to guests required for any of the

park’s given functions, from the “upper class” Disneyland Ambassadors and Tour

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Guides down to the “peasants” from Food and Concessions, otherwise derisively known

as “peanut pushers,” “coke blokes,” or “soda jerks.”26 With nearly equal pays across all

‘classes,’ power struggles among the park’s various classes have crystallized based on

status symbols, starting with uniforms. For instance, the upper-class Tour Guides, then

commonly held as the park’s fashion vanguard with their uniforms of kilts, knee socks

and English hats, successfully lobbied against the redesigned outfits of the lower-

ranked female ride operators from It’s a Small World, whose more revealing and ‘sexy’

design was perceived as a threat to their status.27 Patterns of solidarity and resistance

also emerge among employees, as older operators undermine their supervisors’ habits

of spying on employees by revealing their favorite hiding places to newcomers.

Similarly, ride operators share methods for punishing unruly visitors while giving the

impression of following standard procedures; such strategies notably include the self-

explanatory “seatbelt squeezes,” “seatbelt slaps,” the “‘break-up-the-party’ gambit” as

well as the somewhat cruel “‘Sorry-I-didn’t-see-your-hand’ tactic.”28

18 In a groundbreaking article “‘Real Feelings’: emotional expression and organizational

culture,” co-authors Van Maanen and Gideon Kunda focus more specifically on the

performative and participatory nature of work at Disneyland.29 Since social interactions

are scripted in advance, they require a performance on the part of the worker — an

active process of internalization of scripted lines and even emotions that occasionally

generates resistance. Drawing from Hoschild’s theory of “emotional labor,” whereby

employees are increasingly required to ‘feel’ certain emotions while engaging in

specific tasks, Van Mannen and Kunda show how Disneyland’s corporate and

organizational culture requires for the effective delivery of services that certain

feelings and emotions be conjured up by employees. For instance, Disney employees are

typically required not just to smile, but to smile sincerely. As Van Maanen and Kunda

note, “[e]mployees are told repeatedly that if they are happy and cheerful at work, so

too will be the guests at play.”30 While the active and willing participation of the

employee is necessary, such emotional labor is extremely prescriptive and alienating,

to the point that when the emotional toll seems too high, employees simply “go robot”

or “fake” desired emotions, thereby opposing “passive resistance” to their supervisors’

control.31 Above all, the frivolous, Mickey Mouse connotations of the Disney

corporation allow such instructions to not be taken too seriously, offering some leeway

in how to interpret and apply them. As the “satirical banter, mischievous winkings, and

playful exaggeration in the classroom” suggest, “[a]ll [participants] are aware that the

label ‘Disneyland’ has both an unserious and artificial connotation and that a full

embrace of the Disneyland role would be as deviant as its full rejection.”32

19 Finally, in “Displacing Disney: Some Notes of the Flow of Culture,” Van Maanen uses the

case of Tokyo Disneyland to evaluate local strategies of appropriation of Disney’s so-

called global appeal, as Japanese visitors and entrepreneurs actively recontextualize

the park and its apparent meaning.33 In Maanen’s expression, the Japanese park is made

to serve as a “differentiating device” meant to instill national pride in the Japanese’s

perceived “selective hybridity.”34 Though it is a near-exact copy of the existing Magic

Kingdom at Walt Disney World, the ‘displaced’ park, by virtue of its new cultural

context, is invested with new meanings and allows for new uses. For instance, the well-

publicized self-discipline of Japanese audiences allows visitors to explore at liberty the

park’s environment and come within touching distance of elaborate and fragile pieces

of equipment that are kept securely remote from guests at the American parks. In the

same way, the audience has long enjoyed the Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour, a ‘walk-

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through’ attraction unique to the Japanese park, since it requires the audience to

closely follow the instructions of the Guide — a requirement that would be

inconceivable in the American parks.

20 More generally, the park is widely presented as a cultural import rather than a cultural

export, suggesting that the Japanese were actively involved in its recreation. This has

effectively allowed the park to serve as a differentiating device, whereby the Japanese

can marvel at the spectacle of their cultural adaptability and superior sense of craft and

service. As Maanen says: “The message coming from Japan (for the Japanese) is simply

‘anything you can do, we can do as well (or better).’… Were the park built more

specifically to Japanese tastes and cultural aesthetics, it would undercut any contrast to

the original in this regard.”35 This point was elaborated on by Mitsuko Yoshimoto, who

remarked that “[t]o the extent that it perfectly fits in with the nativist discourse

valorizing the selective hybridity of Japanese culture, Tokyo Disneyland is in fact one of

the most powerful manifestations of contemporary Japanese nationalism. … Far from

being a manifestation of American cultural imperialism, Tokyo Disneyland epitomizes

the ingenious mechanism of neo-cultural imperialism of Japan.”36

21 Ultimately, by defining “[t]he happiness trade [as] an interactional one,” Maanen

suggests that the success of Disney theme parks cannot be properly accounted for

without an interactional approach.37 In other words, visitors and employees are actors

in that they actively extract meaning from and adjust to the environment of the park,

which is interpersonal and cultural by nature.

22 Finally, macro-socioeconomic analyses have shown that the Walt Disney Company,

while actively involved in crafting its own legal and commercial environment,

conversely finds itself shaped by the interactions of various political, economic and

social groups with differing interests. The experience of coherent narrative universes

has also been shown to extend beyond the pristine confines of the parks to other

businesses, suggesting that ‘theming’ and ‘Disneyization’ respond to wider socio-

economic trends that now largely escape Disney’s control.

23 In keeping with such an approach, it appears that, despite its many efforts to the

contrary, the Walt Disney Company does not operate entirely under conditions of its

own making but rather adjusts to evolutions in its environment. Richard Foglesong has

studied the conflicted relationship between the Disney Company and Florida’s various

levels of Government — a relationship that he likens to a failing marriage, with passion

and commitment eventually giving way to estrangement. A politics professor,

Foglesong has defined Disney’s Florida operations at Disney World as a “Vatican with

mouse ears”: indeed, under Disney’s persuasive efforts to promote private initiative

and innovation in Florida, the state’s house passed a bill in 1967 that granted the

company a private charter, allowing the parks to operate an autonomous government

with quasi-regalian powers outside the “state and county regulation of buildings, land

use, airport and nuclear power plant construction, and even the distribution and sale of

alcoholic beverages.”38 The so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District Act met

virtually no resistance in the Florida House as the Disney Company promoted the bill as

instrumental to the completion of its ambitious (and eventually shelved) EPCOT project

— a real community of 20,000 residents that would serve as a showcase for innovative

urban thinking and American technology.

24 However, contrary to common perceptions, the Disney Company does not operate in a

complete legal, political and competitive vacuum. Disney’s efforts to shape its legal

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environment eventually backfired under the lobbying efforts of competitors, as

illustrated by the example of the Mag-lev train bill. Approached in 1985 by a

consortium of Japanese banks representing the Japanese train industry, Disney was

convinced to build a high-speed railway that would connect the Orlando airport

directly to its property, allowing visitors to bypass what was then the second most used

corridor in the nation. By channeling visitors directly from the airport, the so-called

Mag-lev train was expected to make visitors even more reliant on Disney for their

transportation, thereby shielding the company from the new competition of

neighboring hotels and theme parks such as SeaWorld and Universal Studios. In an

effort to repeat its 1967 private charter, the Disney Company introduced a bill in the

Florida house meant to protect the project from excessive regulation and speed up the

whole process — all with the blessing of local legislators who viewed the proposed train

line as a private solution to a public problem. However, worried that the projected line

would compromise their business, Universal’s team took advantage of the legal process

and successfully lobbied senators to surreptitiously introduce provisions in the bill

requiring “unfettered public access” at all transit stops, effectively defeating the train’s

initial purpose to hold visitors captive on Disney property. While politicians thought

that the provision made the train line an even superior solution to the problem of local

transit, Universal’s ‘poison pill’ effectively killed the deal, with Disney eventually

withdrawing its support and money from the project in 1989. As Foglesong emphasizes,

“[i]n failing to support Mag-lev, Disney’s actions suggested they were public only when

they wanted to be: they wear their public hat or their private hat, depending on what

best serves their corporate interest.”39

25 In the Disneyization of Society, Alan Bryman, a professor of organization studies,

examines how processes commonly identified with the Disney parks have extended to

businesses outside the corporation, suggesting that the appeal of narrative universes

once characteristic of Disney theme parks may respond to wider social and economic

trends.

26 Bryman defines Disneyization as “a mode of delivery in the sense of the staging of

goods and services. It provides a framework for increasing the allure of goods and

services.”40 As such, Disneyization is distinct from what has commonly been referred to

as Disneyification, that is the ‘sanitization’ and ‘trivialization’ of cultural items

commonly associated with the Disney universe.41 As a staging device meant to

encourage consumption, Disneyization relies on four key processes, starting with

theming, that is the application of an ‘exotic’ theme to enhance the delivery of a

service, as exemplified by the likes of Planet Hollywood Restaurants or Rainforest

Cafés. A second area of Disneyization is what Bryman calls “hybrid consumption” or

“[the] transformation of shopping into play,” when “consumption becomes part of the

immersion in fantasy.”42 For instance, when checking into an Egypt-themed hotel,

clients may to the degree of their choice fantasize themselves as pharaohs. A third

distinctive character of Disneyization is the use of ‘merchandising,’ that is the sale of

licensed products and memorabilia whose primary aim is to “leverag[e] additional uses

and value out of existing well-known images.”43 Finally, Bryman identifies a fourth area

of Disneyization, “performative labor,” entailing that employees play a part, thus

suggesting that work is merely ‘play.’ While Bryman differentiates between

“structural” and “transferred” Disneyization (that is between principles “merely

exemplified” by the Disney corporation and others consciously borrowed from the

theme parks), the very notion that processes commonly associated with the Disney

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theme parks have found wider resonance suggests that such practices respond to a

socio-economic context largely outside Disney’s control.44

27 As Eric Smoodin once suggested, the Walt Disney Company may be best described as a

“vast technological system.” While their careful arrangement into nested structures

suggests totalizing tendencies, the company’s diversified products and theme parks

should not be treated as singular occurrences but rather as the result of wider social,

economic and political conditions necessary for their effective delivery: “Disney has

been responsible for a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority of leisure and entertainment.

That is, like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, while celebrated for individual artifacts,

Disney was actually the master of vast ‘technological systems,’ to use Thomas Hughes’s

term. Those systems involved ‘far more than the so-called hardware, devices, machines

and processes,’ but also the ‘transportation, communication, and information networks

that interconnect them,’ and the array of employees and regulations that make them

run.”45 In other words, even though the Disney parks might be read as an attempt to

maximize control over the environment in which it conducts its business, the Walt

Disney Company remains dependent on outside social, political and commercial actors

on which it has but limited influence. As the example of the Mag-lev train suggests, not

everyone (and certainly not competitors) has an interest in keeping visitors under

Disney’s control.

28 Spanning from 1958 to 2007, these three theoretical approaches toward the Disney

theme parks may be interpreted as successive models for the study of mass culture and

the reception processes of mass media. In assigning various degrees of agency to the

parks’ participants, critics have gradually displaced the locus of control for the parks’

meaning, design, and operations from the Disney corporation to the individual user

and the company’s socio-economic context, paying increasing attention to the

audience’s interpretive activity and the parks’ competitive environment.

29 From the 1970s to the early 1990s, semiotic and post-modernist approaches largely

assimilated the parks to a “readerly text” (to reprise a term first introduced by Roland

Barthes in S/Z) — that is, a text whose meaning is fixed and largely predetermined,

leaving the visitors mere “receptors” of the park’s hidden ideological message.46

Indeed, by describing visitors as passive or even malleable, such approaches do not

conceive of reception as an activity, leaving the meanings ultimately extracted from

the park largely unaffected by the personal motives and interests of visitors. ‘Culture’

(and especially mass culture) is therefore presented as a set of conventional

representations quintessentially captured in myths and symbols whose constant

repetition serves to keep the dominant ideological order in place. Finally, these studies

not only maintain a hierarchy between ‘critical’ high-brow culture and ‘naïve’ popular

practices, they also serve to legitimize the intellectuals’ social utility, since visitors are

considered unable to access to the real meanings of the park on their own.

30 In the early 1990s, managerial and organizational research, relying on interactional

approaches, described meaning-making in the park as a context-dependent activity

whose actualization depends on the personal interests of individual actors as well as

routinized social behaviors. Here, reception of mass media is at once creative and

strategic: it is a cultural activity in the sense that Ann Swidler has defined. Visitors are

not ‘cultural dopes’ but rather actively reconstruct available meanings to elaborate

strategies and pursue motives of their own.

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31 Finally, large-scale approaches such as socio-economics or politics in the 2000s have

focused on the integration of the Disney corporation and theme parks within their

larger social, political and economic environment. While its exposure to a varied

audience allows myriad subjective interpretations, mass media is also typically shaped

by the objective conditions in which it operates: legal and commercial constraints will,

to some degree, influence the actual experience that visitors have of parks.

32 While it originally referred to the degree of agency that individuals assume to exert in

their daily actions, the term ‘locus of control’ has here been used to assess how much

credit the parks’ various participants must be given in shaping and assigning meaning

to the parks’ environment. As critics shift from micro to macro scales, from personal

interactions to the park’s dominant ideological order and competitive environment, so

is the individual user given more or less important a role in the reception and

production of the park’s meaning, design and operations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981.

———. Simulations. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983.

Bryman, Alan. Disney and his Worlds. London: Taylor & Francis, 2007.

———. The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage Publications, 2004.

Bukatman, Scott. “There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience.”

October 57 (July 1991): 55-78.

Certeau, Michel de. L’Invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire, edited by Luce Giard. Paris: Gallimard,

1990.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Fjellman, Stephen M. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World And America. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.

Foglesong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2003.

Francaviglia, Richard V. “History after Disney: The Significance of 'Imagineered' Historical

Places.” The Public Historian 17, no 4 (October 1995): 69-74.

———. “Main Street U.S.A.: A Comparison/Contrast of Streetscapes in Disneyland and Walt Disney

World.” The Journal of Popular Culture 15, no 1 (June 1981): 141-56.

Gottdiener, Mark. “Disneyland, A Utopian Urban Space.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 11,

no 2 (July 1982): 139 -62.

Greenberg, Douglas. “'History Is a Luxury': Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Disney, and (Public) History.”

Reviews in American History 26, no 1 (March 1998): 294-311.

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113

Halevy, Julian. “Disneyland and Las Vegas.” The Nation, June 7, 1958.

King, Margaret J. “Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form.” The

Journal of Popular Culture 15, no 1 (June 1981): 116-40.

Kuenz, Jane, Susan Willis, Shelton Waldrep, and Stanley Fish. Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at

Disney World, The Project on Disney. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1995.

Van Maanen, John. “Displacing Disney: Some Notes on the Flow of Culture.” Qualitative Sociology

15, no 1 (1992): 5-35.

Van Maanen, John, and Gideon Kunda. “Real Feelings: Emotional Expressions and Organization

Culture.” Research in Organizational Behavior 11 (1989): 43-102.

Van Maanen, John. “The Smile Factory: Working at Disneyland.” In Reframing Organizational

Culture, edited by Peter J. Frost, Larry F. Moore, Meryl Reis Louis, Craig C. Lundberg, and Joanne

Martin, 58-77. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991.

Mannheim, Steve. Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2003.

Marin, Louis. “Dégénérescence utopique  : Disneyland.” In Utopiques  : jeux d’espace, 297-324. Paris:

Editions de Minuit, 1973.

Marling, Karal Ann. “Disneyland, 1955: Just Take the Santa Ana Freeway to the American Dream.”

American Art 5, no 1/2 (January 1991): 169-207.

Marling, Karal Ann, ed. Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance. New York:

Rizzoli / Flammarion, 1998.

Moore, Alexander. “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Center.”

Anthropological Quarterly 53, no 4 (October 1980): 207-18.

Moore, Charles W. “You Have to Pay for The Public Life.” In You Have to Pay for the Public Life:

Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore, edited by Kevin Keim, 111-141. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT

Press, 2004.

Raz, Aviad E. “The Hybridization of Organizational Culture in Tokyo Disneyland” 5, no 2 (1999):

235.

Rotter, Julian B. Social Learning and Clinical Psychology. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954.

Smoodin, Eric. “How to Read Walt Disney.” In Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited

by Eric Smoodin, 1-20. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Sorkin, Michael. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New

York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Swidler, Ann. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51, no 2

(April 1986): 273-86.

Telotte, J. P. The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press,

2008.

Wallace, Mike. “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World.” Radical History

Review 1985, no 32 (January 1985): 33 -57.

Yoshimoto, Mitsuko. “Images of Empire: Tokyo Disneyland and Japanese Cultural Imperialism.”

In Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin, 181-202. New York:

Routledge, 1994.

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Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1993.

NOTES

1. The expression “landscape of power” is borrowed from sociology professor Sharon Zukin. See:

Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1993).

2. Julian Halevy, "Disneyland and Las Vegas,” The Nation, June 7, 1958, 511-13.

3. Charles W. Moore, "You Have to Pay for The Public Life,” in You Have to Pay for the Public Life:

Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore, ed. Kevin Keim (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004), 128.

4. Moore, "You Have to Pay for The Public Life,” 124-26.

5. The term locus of control was first introduced by psychologist Julian B. Rotter as part of his

social-learning theory of personality. Julian B. Rotter, Social Learning and Clinical Psychology, (New

York: Prentice-Hall, 1954).

6. Zukin, Landscapes of Power, 217; Alan Bryman, Disney and his Worlds (London: Taylor & Francis,

2007), 88-92.

7. For a presentation of the parks’ overall design, see: Richard V. Francaviglia, "Main Street

U.S.A.: A Comparison/Contrast of Streetscapes in Disneyland and Walt Disney World,” The Journal

of Popular Culture 15, no 1 (June 1981): 141-56; Karal Ann Marling, "Disneyland, 1955: Just Take the

Santa Ana Freeway to the American Dream,” American Art 5, no 1/2 (January, 1991): 169-207;

Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, ed. Karal Ann Marling (New York:

Rizzoli / Flammarion, 1998); Steve Mannheim, Walt Disney and the Quest for Community (Farnham:

Ashgate Publishing, 2003).

For a discussion of the parks’ presentation of history and technology, see for instance: Scott

Bukatman, "There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience,” October

57 (July, 1991): 55-78; .

8. See: Louis Marin, "Dégénérescence utopique  : Disneyland,” in Utopiques  : jeux d’espace (Paris:

Editions de Minuit, 1973), 297-324; Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essay s (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), Inc.,

1983); Stephen M. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World And America (Boulder: Westview Press,

1992).

9. Though it was the first book of this length and scope, the ideas Vinyl Leaves presented were not

entirely unfamiliar to American scholars, since earlier articles and essays had dealt with the

same objects and approaches. Mark Gottdiener, for instance, had already published a semiotic

reading of the park, while in 1992 Michael Sorkin edited and published Variations on a Theme Park,

a book on the “city of simulations, television city, the city as theme park” whose architecture, he

remarked, “is almost purely semiotics, playing the game of grafted signification, theme-park

building” (p. xiv). Inside the Mouse, another book published in 1995, also drew from Marxism and

post-modernism to reach conclusions mostly similar to Fjellman’s. See: Mark Gottdiener,

"Disneyland, A Utopian Urban Space,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 11, no 2 (July, 1982):

139-62; Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Jane Kuenz et al., Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World,

The Project on Disney (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1995).

10. Marin’s original reads: “[le] rapport imaginaire que la classe dominante de la société

américaine entretient avec ses conditions réelles d’existence.” Marin, "Dégénérescence utopique

 : Disneyland,” 298; Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 48; Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 9-10.

11. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 255.

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12. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 7; Baudrillard, Simulations, 6. Baudrillard’s original reads: “[la

simulation] part de la négation radicale du signe comme valeur, part du signe comme réversion

et mise à mort de toute référence.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Editions

Galilée, 1981), 16.

13. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 256.

14. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 165.

15. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 43.

16. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 300.

17. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 48; Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 18.

18. Marin explains: “le ‘contenu’ de l’utopie, c’est l’organisation de l’espace comme texte ; le

texte utopique, sa structuration formelle et ses procès opérationnels, c’est la constitution du

discours comme un espace.” Marin, "Dégénérescence utopique  : Disneyland,” 24; Gottdiener,

"Disneyland, A Utopian Urban Space,” 144.

19. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, 72.

20. Baudrillard, Simulations, 25. The original reads: “L’imaginaire de Disneyland n’est ni vrai ni

faux, c’est une machine de dissuasion mise en scène pour régénérer en contre-champ la fiction

du réel. D’où la débilité de cet imaginaire, sa dégénérescence infantile. Ce monde se veut enfantin

pour faire croire que les adultes sont ailleurs, dans le monde ‘réel’, et pour cacher que la véritable

infantilité est partout, et c’est celle des adultes eux-mêmes qui viennent jouer ici à l’enfant pour

faire illusions sur leur infantilité réelle.” Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, 24.

21. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Gallimard,

1990), xxxvi, 240.

22. Moore, "You Have to Pay for The Public Life,” 126.

23. Alexander Moore, "Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage

Center,” Anthropological Quarterly 53, no 4 (October, 1980): 207, 213.

24. Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no 2

(avril 1, 1986): 273.

25. John Van Maanen, "The Smile Factory: Working at Disneyland,” in Reframing Organizational

Culture, eds Peter J. Frost et al. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991), 58-77.

26. Van Maanen, "The Smile Factory," 61-2.

27. Van Maanen, "The Smile Factory," 62-3.

28. Van Maanen, "The Smile Factory," 71.

29. John Van Maanen et al., "Real Feelings: Emotional Expressions and Organization Culture,”

Research in Organizational Behavior 11 (1989): 43-102.

30. Van Maanen et al., "Real Feelings," 64.

31. Van Maanen et al., "Real Feelings," 68-70.

32. Van Maanen et al., "Real Feelings," 65.

33. John Van Maanen, "Displacing Disney: Some Notes on the Flow of Culture,” Qualitative

Sociology 15, no 1 (1992): 5-35.

34. Van Maanen, "Displacing Disney," 22; Mitsuko Yoshimoto, "Images of Empire: Tokyo

Disneyland and Japanese Cultural Imperialism,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom,

ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 197.

35. Van Maanen, "Displacing Disney,” 22.

36. Yoshimoto, "Images of Empire: Tokyo Disneyland and Japanese Cultural Imperialism,” 197.

E.A. Raz gives a similar account of ‘selective hybridity’ in the area of organizational culture at

Tokyo Disneyland. As Raz notes: “The process of hydridization consisted of selective insertion —

namely, incorporation as well as rejection — yet no practice or ideology were actually invented

for that purpose. Moreover, the ‘American’ and the ‘Japanese’ were combined in TDL [Tokyo

Disneyland] in a manner that maintained their boundaries. The Disney Way [an in-house training

program directly imported from the American parks] became the hallmark of part-timers and

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front-line employees, while the socialization of regular workers destined for promotion

remained typically Japanese.” Aviad E. Raz, "The Hybridization of Organizational Culture in

Tokyo Disneyland" 5, no 2 (1999): 258-59.

37. Van Maanen, "The Smile Factory,” 59.

38. Richard E. Foglesong, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2003), 71.

39. Foglesong, Married to the Mouse, 124.

40. Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 159.

41. Bryman, The Disneyization of Society, 5.

42. Bryman, Disney and his Worlds, 159.

43. Bryman, The Disneyization of Society, 79.

44. Bryman, The Disneyization of Society, 12.

45. Eric Smoodin, "How to Read Walt Disney,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed.

Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3.

46. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976).

ABSTRACTS

Long held as the province of capitalist domination, the Disney parks have recently seen other

trends of analysis emerge, providing renewed emphasis on user activity and the parks’

competitive environment. In this article, we identify three trends of research toward the Disney

theme parks, with the ‘locus of control’ for the parks’ meaning, design, and operations placed

successively within the Disney-controlled environment of the park, within the user, and, lastly,

within the park’s wider socio-economic context.

INDEX

Keywords: Disneyland, Walt Disney Company, theme parks, popular culture, reception

AUTHOR

THIBAUT CLÉMENT

Thibaut Clément is Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. In

2011, he defended a thesis on storytelling and narrative placemaking in the Disney theme parks.

His research interests include the American landscape, socio-cognition and the modes of

consumption of mass culture.

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Interview

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At the Crossroads of Media, MediaCritique, and the Critique of Mediacritics – An Interview with SergeHalimi, Editor-in-Chief of Le MondeDiplomatiqueSerge Halimi and Christine Larrazet

Translation : Christine Larrazet and Ray Cooke

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Interview conducted in Paris, on July 25, 2012.

In “Media Studies: A French Blind Spot,”1 François Cusset observed that, contrary to

American tradition, no comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to media studies has

so far penetrated French universities, thus leaving an ‘empty territory’ between the

professional training of journalists and an activist critique arising from non-academic

circles. Since the 1990s, French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique has thus consistently

stood out for its “non-academic activism against media power and bias,” to quote an

expression of François Cusset. Under the activism of its previous and present editors-

in-chief, Ignacio Ramonet and Serge Halimi, the monthly continues to play a vital role

in the French media environment.

Ignacio Ramonet, who was editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique from 1990 to 2008,

published three books critically analyzing the content and evolution of the mass media:

La Tyrannie de la communication (Galilée, 1999), Propagandes silencieuses (Galilée, 2000)

and L’Explosion du journalisme (Galilée, 2011). A former student of Roland Barthes and

Christian Metz at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), and

with a Ph.D. in Semiology, Ramonet provided in these three books an analysis of the

media strongly influenced and inspired by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School

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but nonetheless directed at the general public. His successor at the helm of Le Monde

Diplomatique shares a common desire to reach out to a readership beyond the realm of

the academic and media environments. Serge Halimi, also a Ph.D., graduated in Political

Science from the University of Berkeley and has regularly contributed critical articles

to Le Monde Diplomatique since the beginning of the 1990s, on both the French and

American media. Of all his published works, one critical essay on the media in

particular has encountered considerable success with the public. Les Nouveaux Chiens de

garde ( The New Watchdogs, Raisons d’Agir) published first in 1997, and in a second

revised edition in 2005, has sold up to 300,000 copies; in 2011, the book was adapted

under the same title into a documentary, attracting some 250,000 viewers.2 The two

journalist-analysts have succeeded in fueling the critical field on the media and at the

same time providing works of interest to the general public.

Halimi developed an interest in the media while studying in the United States at the

time of the Gulf War – as he relates in the following interview – and since then he has

relentlessly highlighted the strong convergence of media discourse with media interest

or economic dependency, both in the United States and in France. In one of his very

first papers published in Le Monde Diplomatique in March 1991, he pointed to NBC

anchorman Tom Brokaw’s nationalistic and pro-war coverage of the Gulf War, while

remarking that, coincidentally, Brokaw’s television network was owned by none other

than General Electric, one of the Pentagon’s arm suppliers. Startled by the failings of

American media, Halimi then turned his media criticism to the French scene, where he

found the same demise of the mission of journalists, summarized by the American

formula: ‘Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.’ He considered that the French

media had been undermined by the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideas and the collusion

of a small group of ‘professional elites,’ with the leaders of this industrial sector sharing

the same ideas and interests. In 1995, during the French presidential election, Halimi

denounced the “occupation of the mainstream media by a small caste of journalists and

intellectuals who share the same patterns of thinking and who live together bound by

networks of complicity and a common submission to the major industrial and financial

groups that have penetrated mass communication.”3 In his book Les Nouveaux Chiens de

garde, Serge Halimi provides compelling data supporting this hypothesis and reveals

the identity of these journalists who form a caste that, owing to the confluence of their

opinions and interests, turn supposedly free speech into parodies of debate that distort

democracy.

The naming and unmasking of these elite journalists has sparked retaliation in the

mainstream media; in response, Halimi has forcefully argued that, while it is common

practice for economic critics or journalists to name the actors of their fields of analysis

(such as Bill Gates or the Walton brothers, to name but a few examples), so should the

radical critique of the media be able to name the people involved in the field.4 He has

adopted this same straightforward position in his criticism of French researchers who,

he argues, refrain from difficult analysis or in-depth radical critique in hope that they,

too, benefit from media coverage.5 His uncompromising posture can be affiliated with

Pierre Bourdieu, who founded the publishing house Raisons d'Agir (Reasons to Act)

where Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde was published a few years after Bourdieu’s book Sur

la télévision. In this context, Halimi has been associated with 'Radical Academicism.'6

Radicalism has been the rallying cry systematically used by detractors to discredit his

media critique. It is also a label that Halimi will willingly embrace to define his actions

and positions. In his latest book, Le Grand Bond en arrière, (published in a second edition

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in 2012), the journalist-analyst proceeds with his investigation of the forces

contributing to the spread of the neo-liberal discourse and logic, with special emphasis

on the fields of media and politics. With his unflinching position at the crossroads of

media, media criticism, and the criticism of academics conducting a soft media critique,

Halimi has emerged as a major player in the field of French media analysis. In the

following interview, he looks back on his particular itinerary and justifies his ongoing

action at Le Monde Diplomatique.

Christine Larrazet: Have English-American Media Studies influenced your critique of themedia?

Serge Halimi: Actually, in the very beginning, I was not really interested in the media.

My interest was aroused at the time of the Gulf War, triggered by the invasion of

Kuwait, while I was a student at Berkeley. In January-March 1991, just before the

American military intervention, there was a rich debate in the United States about

the best way to react. A majority of the Democratic Party was hostile to an

intervention in Kuwait, whereas the Republican Party was in favor of it. In the fall of

1990, I sent a paper to Le Monde Diplomatique covering the richness of the American

debate compared to that in France.7 But in January 1991, the debate closed, especially

in the media, that swung the other way when the first bombs were dropped on

Baghdad. The media no longer covered the opposing opinions and protests. In March

1991, I published an article in Le Monde Diplomatique on this reversal in the media and

on journalists in uniform.8 At that time I was reading Extra, which was at the Berkeley

library. This journal conducts a really critical analysis of the media that is not based

solely, as in France at that time, on the confrontation of critical texts.9 So my first

contact with what you call Media Studies was the work done by Extra. At that same

period, I read new books published by Noam Chomsky, an active scholar who

unfortunately still remains the subject of a misperception in France where he is

mainly considered as a media critic while the bulk of his work is rather a cutting

analysis of American foreign policy.10 And, being at Berkeley, I also became

acquainted with Todd Gitlin’s work.11

When I returned to France, there was an ongoing debate on the Treaty of Maastricht.

I came again upon the same systematic media battering that I had observed during

the Gulf War in the United States. As far as I was concerned, it was confirmation for

me that the pluralism of newspapers did not result in a pluralism of comment, even

during peacetime.12 Afterwards, I published numerous articles on this subject in Le

Monde Diplomatique, then the book Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde (The New Watchdogs).

Then, with a small group of people (Pierre Rimbert, Pierre Carles, Gilles Balbastre,

Marc Pantanella, Thierry Discepolo), we launched the PLPL newspaper, and, a few

years later, with new people who joined us, Le Plan B. Throughout this period, the

association Acrimed played an important role in my continuing involvement in

media criticism.13 This criticism is still necessary today because over time,

newspapers have increasingly lost their autonomy. While Hersant sometimes had to

put up with journalists’ freedom of opinion in the 1970s, Dassault, for his part, does

not even waste time consulting with editors he has hired when deciding to make

changes – editors he can fire in an instant.14

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C.L.: Is it different in the United States?

S.H.: There is not one United States. There are United States, from the New York Times

to Fox News. Things are not done in the same way everywhere. Nor is it different in

France, even though the professional community is more homogeneous.

C.L.: How do you see Media Studies in France?

S.H.: In France, we also have a Media Studies field. I read what is published but the

studies seem to be conducted more to feed academic thinking within the university

(and inspire Ph.D. dissertations…) than to transform the media. Or even to change the

perception that millions of citizens have of the media. Media Studies get little outside

coverage, and most people could not care less about that fact. Yet it seems to me that

when someone conducts a study with money from the public coffers, one should take

that fact into consideration and communicate the results of the study to the public.

This is a feature of universities that can be found elsewhere. There is an 'entrance

fee' in the university world, meant to filter out charlatans, but I think there is also

what Bourdieu called an “exit duty” to be paid.

In a sense, I feel that this “exit duty” was paid by Le Monde Diplomatique. We seized on

this issue, which was not covered by the other media, with the disputed exception of

Daniel Schneidermann’s program on the television channel Arte.15 We played an

important role in bringing to public attention issues that the public was interested in.

And we called on academics. Now the space is no longer empty.

The documentary “Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde” (The New Watchdogs) was viewed

by 250,000 people without any media coverage. This just goes to show that the public

is interested in media criticism. And we did it despite the ritual objections like: “It

has always existed,” “nobody cares,” “we already know,” “it's not useful.”16 Yet, when

we developed this line of criticism of the media, with all the people I referred to, and

also Ignacio Ramonet who ran Le Monde Diplomatique and has written a lot on this

topic, we discovered that many people were interested in this topic. In fact, the

public was not aware of a few things and they wanted to learn what they did not

know. Our initiative has opened up a niche that has now been taken up by others, but

differently, by toning down what is said. Ok for a critique of the media but not like

this, we are often told. Thanks for the advice…

C.L.: What kind of relationships do you have with the journalists of the dominant Frenchmedia?

S.H.: I do not know them. And, generally, I refuse to know them. If I met them, talked

to them, spent time with them, it would be much more difficult to maintain my

critical freedom. Today, I’m meeting you, I'm talking with you. If I later see your

name associated with an action that I deem objectionable or reprehensible, I might be

tempted not to make your name public when I criticize this initiative. Having already

identified three or four other people, “why should I name you?”, I might think. I do

not want to be in this situation.

C.L.: How did Le Monde Diplomatique come to adopt this very peculiar stance in the Frenchmedia landscape?

S.H.: When Le Monde Diplomatique really took off with Claude Julien, it served as a kind

of fortress. Claude Julien withdrew to Le Monde Diplomatique, and established a more

leftist line than that followed by Le Monde which, in the early 1980s, switched towards

liberal ideology and favored the more rigorous approach adopted by the socialists. In

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contrast, Le Monde Diplomatique pursued a radical critique of the Reagan policy, which

we feel to be a form of anti-model. As Julien developed the newspaper, the criticism

of an imperialistic liberal policy took increasing place in it.

C.L.: In your opinion, what impact does Le Monde Diplomatique have on French research?

S.H.: I do not know. Even so, many students of journalism are interested in our

critical work on the media. Young journalists ask to meet us and tell us that our work

is important, wondering whether they can continue the work we have undertaken,

and especially where it could be done. Renaud Lambert has just been awarded a prize

by students of journalism for his article on the 'contract economists' and their

support in the media.

C.L.: What relationships do you have with French academia?

S.H.: Le Monde Diplomatique maintains personal links with numerous academics. Many

of them contribute to the paper and I use whatever seems useful: critical reading,

doctoral theses, etc.

C.L.: Is your particular position in the media landscape tenable?

S.H.: When you undertake political work, when you want to change things,

sometimes you feel a sense of weariness. And when you are a journalist, the

temptation is to say new things, not writing an umpteenth article on the promotion

of Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL). However, at the same time, it is our duty to write the

article as long as the BHL effect continues.17 My motto goes something like this: “he

proceeds, so we also proceed.” In addition, I also now learn a lot less in media

criticism, although new things are still published, as I have been covering this area

for nearly 20 years. However, the question is: what matters to you? To make an

intellectual performance or to solve a problem that our society confronts us with?

When you are a journalist, you are summoned by news as it breaks. If there is a

conflict, you cannot release yourself, thinking you have struggled enough on this

theme, on this front, and just leave and do something completely different,

something 'newer.' Although, over time, by plowing the same furrow, the intellectual

curiosity tends to drop away somewhat.

Today, I am comforted in the idea that what matters are the structures. The media

criticism we have conducted has all in all changed little in the daily functioning of

the media. You think that once you have brought a problem to the light of day, once

people are informed, those responsible for it won’t start their same old tricks while

everyone knows what they are doing. But they do start again. Once you have

described a phenomenon, you hope it will disappear. But it does not disappear. Why?

Because man is also the product of a structure consisting of lasting social interests.

Regarding the connivance networks operating in the media, the fact that X or Y is

unmasked will not change anything about their behavior. But it changes something

about how X or Y is looked upon. Once people are informed about what is happening

in the media, they might think: since I understand better how this all works, I become

freer not to take into account what I see or what I read. I keep my free will. This very

change, this lucidity, has weakened the media system. And I think that we have

played our role in that change.

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ENDNOTES

1. http://inmedia.revues.org/135

2. http://www.lesnouveauxchiensdegarde.com/

3. Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1995.

4. Serge Halimi, "L'art et la manière d'ignorer la question des médias," in Pour une analyse critique

des médias. Le débat public en danger, edited by Evelyne Pinto, 195-210. Paris: Editions du Croquant,

2007. Available at

http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/media/halimi/pouracrimed/extraits1.html

5. Halimi, "L'art et la manière d'ignorer la question des médias."

6. On this 'radical academicism,' the French sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie writes: “The entire

problem with such a position is that it is first and foremost a position: that of the radical

academic or revolutionary bourgeois. How to explain the fact that these sociologists belong to

the world of the university and yet claim that their rightful position is alongside the oppressed

and dominated? All 'position-taking' is justified by referring to oneself as 'radical.' The debate

never pertains to science, to the content of observation and how to interpret it. The only

acceptable question and the only concern is to determine who is truly radical and to demonstrate

one's own radicalness. Is there any more effective way of doing this than saying that the others

are not radical, or not truly radical? The academic radical's own position, and therefore his self

justification, requires practicing a kind of 'puritan' logic wherein one must continually accuse

'the others;' it requires kindling and fueling suspicion, denouncing 'false' radicals, false 'friends

of the people,' anyone who, under cover of being 'on the left' or 'scientific researchers,' are

'really' the most effective agents of neo-liberalism, or even American imperialism.” Didier

Lapeyronnie, “Radical Academicism, or the Sociologist's Monologue: Who Are Radical

Sociologists Talking with?”, Revue française de sociologie, 47, Supplement: An Annual English

Selection (2006): 3-33.

7. “L’opinion américaine, si loin du Proche Orient,” Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1990.

8. “Des médias en tenue camouflée,” Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1991. In the heading, Serge

Halimi writes: "While open to courageous debate before the outbreak of the war in mid-January,

the American media have since vied for 'patriotism,' reflecting without turning a hair the views

of the White House and the Pentagon. The 'fourth power' surrendered unconditionally."

(Translated by C. Larrazet and R. Cooke)

9. Extra is the monthly magazine of FAIR, an American media watch group that has been

conducting in-depth media analysis since 1986. (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4)

10. Le Monde Diplomatique has played an important role in publicizing Noam Chomsky’s research

in France. In 1998, Chomsky redefined the nature of his research in the newspaper, Le Monde

Diplomatique, August 1998. Recently, the newspaper published an interview with Noam Chomsky

conducted by the French journalist Daniel Mermet, “Le lavage de cerveau en liberté,” Le Monde

Diplomatique, August 2007, and organized a conference in May 2010, in which Noam Chomsky,

after 25 years of voluntary absence from France, came to present his thoughts on "Contours of

global order. Continuities, Changes and Challenges."

11. Todd Gitlin had already published three books on the media: The Whole World is Watching: Mass

Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Left (University of California Press, 1980), Inside Prime Time

(University of California Press, 1983), Watching Television (Pantheon, 1986).

12. The Treaty of the European Union, which was ratified in Maastricht in February 1992 by 12

heads of state and government, was subject to a referendum in France in September 1992. After

the referendum, Serge Halimi published "Décideurs et délinquants” (Policymakers and

Offenders) on "the Media and the War over the referendum" in which he denounced a

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"deferential media" system serving as an "echo chamber" for a doctrinaire approach, Le Monde

Diplomatique, October 1992.

13. Acrimed stands for “Action Critique Medias.” It is a French association founded in 1995 that

brings together journalists, academics and "users of media” with a view to conducting an

"independent, radical and uncompromising" analysis of the media (http://www.acrimed.org/).

14. Robert Hersant is a press baron who owned several news media, including Le Figaro. The

majority of the shares in his media group, Socpresse, were sold by his heirs to Serge Dassault in

2004.

15. “Arrêt sur Images” is a program analyzing television footage that was launched by the public

television channel France5 in 1995. After its over-the-air interruption in 2007, a site "@rrêt sur

images" was created to prolong the program online.

16. Halimi, "L’art et la manière d’ignorer la question des médias."

17. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French author of philosophical works and surveys of past and present

wars, receives extensive media coverage for each of his films or books. For nearly twenty years,

Serge Halimi has denounced this treatment he receives. See for example one of the first articles

published on this topic which is entitled “Tapis rouge” (Rolling out the red carpet), Le Monde

Diplomatique, December 1997, or more recently “Tous nazis !“ (All Nazis), Le Monde Diplomatique,

November 2007, and the online file on the newspaper’s website entitled "L'imposture Bernard-

Henri Lévy” (The Imposture of Bernard-Henri Lévy). In 2011, Serge Halimi wrote on this subject:

"Indeed, the French press has been governed by an irremovable rule for thirty-five years: any

country in which Bernard-Henri Lévy has just travelled and on which he has written a book

becomes ipso facto a giant news item”, in “La singularité a un prix” (Singularity has a cost), Le

Monde Diplomatique, December 2011.

AUTHORS

SERGE HALIMI

Serge Halimi, journalist, writer and activist, has been editor-in-chief of the monthly newspaper

Le Monde Diplomatique since 2008. He was hired by the critical monthly in 1992 after having

completed a Ph.D. in political sciences from Berkeley University. He is the author of A

l’américaine : faire un président (Aubier, 1986), Les Nouveaux chiens de garde (Liber-Raisons d’Agir,

1997, 2005), Quand la gauche essayait (Arlea, 2000), L'Opinion, ça se travaille (with Dominique Vidal,

Agone, 2002), and Le Grand bond en arrière (Fayard, 2004; Agone, 2012).

CHRISTINE LARRAZET

Christine Larrazet is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Segalen and a

researcher at the Emile Durkheim research center on comparative sociology and political

sciences. She completed a Ph.D. in American studies investigating the evolution of black citizens’

place and representation in the content of Time Magazine paralleled with the integration of black

journalists in Time’s newsrooms from 1965 to 1995. She is currently conducting a comparative

research on the semantic and political shift of the term “Politically Correct” as used by the

American and French media.

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Critical Perspective

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Social CognitionDivina Frau-Meigs

1 As France seems to discover 'cultural studies'—via the analysis of American television

series in some university departments that study literature or media—cultural studies

in the English-speaking world are being displaced by new interdisciplinary approaches

with a different arsenal of tools. In their initial phase, cultural studies expanded the

scope of analysis of different arts and media into complex social phenomena, with such

analytical notions as class, gender and ethnicity.1 Their legacy cannot be scorned,

especially in the British works of the Birmingham School with their emphasis on the

folk culture of the lower classes. Cultural studies now, at least in some circles, remain

mired in the shallow swamp of reiterated analysis of the superficial aspects of the

appearances of popular culture. They seem to have lost what made them successful and

allowed them to reach their initial goal: the place of reception and the interpretation of

cultural representations.

2 One problem with cultural studies is methodological. Self-report and self-perceptions

are not easily shareable and duplicable methods. They elude newcomers. Simple

reproduction of methods from other areas isn’t always possible. Persistently addressing

complex media processes as 'text'—an all too frequent practice by newcomers to the

field—has created epistemological limitations, as mass media, mix media and

transmedia do not produce texts alone, despite the enduring supremacy of story-

telling. The loss of perspective on reception as well as the disconnects between

reception and message production can be perceived as accepting commercial media

fare without questioning it in categories other than the familiar ones of gender and

race. As cultural studies remain unconnected to issues that remain salient in the new

media age, such as the political economy of production, the risks of harmful content

and harmful behavior, the effects of propaganda, not to mention emerging issues such

as traceability on the so-called 'social media,' privacy on ubiquitous mobile devices or

friendship on anonymous transnational networks, they run the risk of falling behind

their times and missing the cognitive turn.

3 Such is not the case with social cognition, as an emerging field of inquiry. If, in the

evolution of media theory, cultural studies are associated with the research tradition of

'uses and gratifications,' social cognition tilts partly in favor of 'effects' theory as it

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considers how individuals form attitudes, values and beliefs using media

representations. It highlights the mechanisms behind media use and the cognitive

consequences of such use for individuals and groups. The outcome of messages is

considered significant for stereotyping, voting and risk management, for instance. The

cultivation processes implied by the use of the media— priming, framing or selective

attention and recall—can explain how media tend to perpetuate stereotypes and yet

can change existing beliefs and modify perceptions over time.

4 Social cognition emerged in the early 1980s, with the book by Michael Roloff and

Charles R. Berger, Communication and Social Cognition.2 Originating in psychology

research, the work focused on the interactions of people around social information. It

looked at the cognitive processes that are involved when people think about their

interactions in the world, without separating message design from message storage and

perception. By now, social cognition has received new inputs from neurosciences and

mind theory, enabling the shift from behaviorism and its rather exclusive focus on

measurable responses and decomposable, discrete and stable elements. Another shift

has led to the inclusion of situation as a cognitive tool to incorporate social learning in

a process that accounts for local and socially constructed worlds, with distributed

information sharing that goes beyond the individual. Situated cognition thus sheds a

new light on the notion of culture as distributed cognitive network.

5 The key notions and concepts of social cognition have spread into the larger fields of

sociology, anthropology, philosophy, semiotics and linguistics. It has come to take on

communication as a major area of research, with particular interest for media as

providers of social information (in addition to family and peers). It has applied the

insights of the cognitive turn to the challenges to identity-formation, stereotyping,

opinion-making and problem-solving, posed by a rapidly changing media environment.

6 The main areas of scholarship have to do with message production, interpersonal

communication, social influence and old/new media processes. The research questions

are related to how social information is encoded and retrieved from memory in the

shape of specific representations; how individuals build social knowledge from them

and finally how they pass social judgments that eventually lead to decision-making and

action-taking.

7 Among the most exciting developments, the areas of message production and the

combination of interpersonal and mass communication interactions have detonated an

explosion of theories and case-studies. Message production processes combine with

political economy of media to take into account design and multiple goal-planning to

manage representations and organize their storage and retrieval. People interested in

social influence have benefited also from such research. Looking at the role of affect

and emotion can help identify beliefs and attitudes derived from memory and past

experiences. Notions such as social scripts and schemata, norm accessibility and

heuristic modeling can lead to an understanding of how persuasion works via media.

Interpersonal interactions around relationships and groups is also crucial to

understanding this age of broadband networked media, where sense-making with

others is connected to group negotiation and attribution processes that produce a

shared understanding of reality. Social cognition thus provides compelling arguments

and methods for recombining issues of gender and race with notions of attention,

memory and attribution.

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8 Importantly, social cognition has recognized the limitations of analyzing an audience

from the perspective of text comprehension. Researchers can now insist on the

differences between text comprehension and media comprehension, because of added

visual and audio dimensions. The complexity of this area implies a whole array of new

methodologies. Situation models and mental models related to prior experience and

shared common interpretations can have meaning independent of an idiosyncratic

analysis of a media story. Mental maps and constructs in memory help decode the

implicit message of a media rather than its literal representation. Drawing from

dynamic and cinematic features (editing and music mostly) can provide cues for

making inferences about the story unconnected to text and dialogue. Elements of

activation, attribution and recall can be solicited without being actually verbalized but

rather visualized as suggested by the “dual code theory” proposed by Allan Paivio.3 He

posits that visual and verbal information are not in the same place in memory and are

processed differently in the brain is an example of the independence of a cognitive

effect from a narrative effect, with references to the reality and the felt experience of

the viewer.

9 Finally, the consolidated digital media environment as well as globalized phenomena of

message production and reception call for new perspectives that afford more synthetic

views, while maintaining a sustained attention on trends toward diversification. The

new media age challenges researchers to expand their inquiry beyond single units such

as the narrative space of a sit-com, into the continuous experience of media including

ads, station breaks, pop ups but also the recycling of media fare from the linear

audiovisual system to the non-linear internet system. Special attention should be

directed to how the two subsystems of the digital era will evolve as TV-based

developments increase together with computer-based developments. Far from being

displaced, online television remains a major source of story-telling, as narrative

remains a central piece of social learning and interaction. The audiovisual networks are

still the providers of dominant narratives that are then recycled on the social

networks. There is a 'shuttle screen' situation in which activity on the surface screen of

audiovisual media is discussed within the deep bottom screen of social media with

feedback and feedforward loops that are reflected in all sorts of formats including film,

series or games. Audiences engage in a variety of interactions such as ranking, mixing

and aggregating content and as a result engage in activities where their performance

online and offline are part of their daily world and larger culture. The many modes of

interaction with media (one to one, one to many, many to many, a few to many) as well

as the awareness that these modes have built-in power structures, create a powerful

urge to reshape the research agenda of media studies.

10 How theory is translated into methods becomes crucial in such a context and social

cognition requires interdisciplinarity just as cultural studies did, as it gets beyond

flawed dichotomies and superficial contradictions to provide more comprehensive

insights on social interactions. Within major established disciplines it chooses

subdisciplines whose boundaries can be sutured together. Thus social cognition can

recombine social influence with information systems, political communication, visual

communication, and even artificial intelligence. It implies the creation of a concerted

and explicit methodological scaffolding. The innovations, intuitions and stop gaps need

formalization and testing by researchers furthering the field of inquiry.

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11 Researchers should explain their concepts as well as their methods and practices. Thus

reflecting on and offering a frank evaluation of the implementation and results of

interdisciplinarity is an important cognitive posture that actually affects

interdisciplinarity itself. In the new media age, characterized by the prevalence of

online representations and activities over offline media use, such a new approach to

reality can be seen either as transgressive or transformative. It may lead to

controversial stances, as the boundaries between 19th century disciplines are

punctured. Cognitive interdisciplinarity is also geared at problem-solving and supposes

a catalytic process around a specific problem or project. This calls for research

practices where the investigator needs to rely on distributed intelligence and

collaborative work to tackle the question at hand. The practice of such research

requires a multidisciplinary approach grounded in complementary competences as

single researchers do not have the time and resources to manage alone the numerous

variables that media representations entail.

12 Even though self-reporting remains a method that can yield reflexive benefits, it is

critical to go beyond such a method to make claims about media outcomes. The

methods yielding promising results imply a combination of virtual ethnography,

rhetorical criticism, focus groups, behavioral observations, field work, questionnaires,

video-assisted recording, computer-aided mapping and even generating responses to

hypothetical situations. Computer-enhanced techniques such as reaction time

measures, recognition measures, multidimensional scaling and even eye-tracking

techniques, not unconnected to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), also need to be

integrated in this scaffolding as well as collaborative tools. Computer-aided social

cognition research could then track relationships between representation and beliefs,

in a real-time environment. It could follow the negotiations around narratives

produced in the shuttle-screen situation, as audiences migrate from television series to

fanfiction sites in their transmedia experiences. It might be able to monitor socially

revealing behavior as self-disclosure practices and conversations create an impression

over large cohorts. The current experiments in neuro-marketing and in online fund-

raising strategies during elections already point at the social uses that such methods

can produce.

13 The direction of social cognition thus remains very open. In the new media era

however, the theories with most promise are related to “actor-networks,”4

“lifelongings,”5 “transmedia storytelling”6 and socialization via “transliteracies.”7 They

are promising as they make it possible to bridge a number of disciplinary boundaries

underlying research programs in media and representations, past and present, Western

and non-Western. Social cognition can benefit from approaches and methods that

foster non-linear, non-causal logics of investigation, and be free from laboratory

conditions of observation (often criticized for their lack of relation to reality). By

integrating notions such as situation, they can give full extent to relations that are not

necessarily causal but cultural. They can thus amplify the research agenda,

recombining virtual and real relations, digital and mental maps, etc. They can open the

fan of methods that recombine quantitative and qualitative explorations and explore

new territories as they invest new ways of collecting data, especially those that concern

the interactions between individuals and their communities. It can thus provide deep

knowledge, that is to say a critical understanding of reticular, multi-causal, multi-polar

and process dynamics at work in media interactions and modes of socialization.

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14 Such interactions and processes are oriented by institutions and technological changes,

which in turn affect reception and media use. So issues of power, property, regulation

are just as important to take into account, to highlight mechanisms of alienation as

well as integration by media and their representations. The negotiated relations

between the public and private spheres, the local and global levels, the on-line and off-

line shuttle screens and story-telling are critical directions for research, and part of the

process of socialization that is still vastly under-researched and under-theorized.

NOTES

1. R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Pelican, 1957).

2. M. Roloff and C.R. Berger, Communication and Social Cognition (New York: Routledge, 1982).

3. A. Paivio, Imagery and Verbal Processes (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971).

4. B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Milton Keynes:

Open University Press, 1987).

5. S. Scheibe, A.M. Freund and P.B. Baltes, (2007) “Toward a developmental psychology of

Sehnsucht (life longings): The optimal (utopian) life” in Developmental Psychology, 43 3: 778-95.

6. H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide (NY: New York U Press, 2006).

7. D.Frau-Meigs et al, “L’éducation aux cultures de l’information”, E-dossier de l’audiovisuel, 2011,

http://www.ina-sup.com/ressources/dossiers-de-laudiovisuel/les-e-dossiers-de-laudiovisuel/e-

dossier-leducation-aux-cultures

AUTHOR

DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

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Conference and Seminar Reviews

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Offshore Processes: InternationalPerspectives on Australian Film andTelevision8-11 July 2012, Monash Prato Centre, Italy

Oliver Haag

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Conference organized by Therese Davis, Liz Conor, Mark Gibson and Tony Moore

1 Australian cinema has never been solely national, neither in the contexts of its

production nor in its themes and influences. It reflects the cultural and historical

diversity of a continent that has been shaped by the sovereign presence of Indigenous

people and more than two centuries of migration. Australian film and television is

diverse and inherently international. The symposium “Offshore Processes:

International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television” explored the

transnational contexts of Australian film and television past and present.

2 The symposium was organised by scholars from Melbourne’s Monash University and

held at its Italian campus in Prato. Scholars from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as

cinema and media studies, history and Australian cultural studies were engaged in

placing a national cinema into its decidedly global dimensions. The symposium was not

merely multi-disciplinary but indeed inter-disciplinary as it provided a fruitful dialogue

on the different approaches to a transnational understanding of national cinemas.

3 Despite the international composition of Australia, Australian studies is still practiced

within a largely national framework. In this, quite aside from the focus on film and

television, the symposium was highly innovative in placing the study on Australia in a

broader context. The symposium’s theorisation of Australia’s place in the world is a

timely approach and will hopefully serve as an incentive for future conferences and

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symposia, not merely in the area of film and television studies but Australian studies

more generally.

4 The symposium started with the public screening of Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia

(2008). Shown in Prato’s unroofed Emperor’s castle, the open-air screening of the

almost three-hour long film was a spectacular event in itself. Beneath the clear Tuscan

evening sky, the colours of the Australian landscape appeared much brighter and alive

than in any indoor cinema. Australia is a much-debated film set in the Northern

Territory during the Second World War. It tells the story of an English lady planning to

sell her husband’s cattle station. Driving the cattle to Darwin, she not only experiences

many adventures but eventually falls in love with the ‘Drover’, an embodiment of white

Australian masculinity. They become a couple and informally adopt an Indigenous

orphan boy who is exposed to racial persecution. The film is a mixture of romance and

adventure story set in the Australian outback, which is a frequently occurring theme in

Australian films. The novelty of the film lies with its focus on racism and the forcible

abduction of Indigenous children from their families. This systematic policy aimed at

alienating Indigenous children from their cultural heritage, thus to destroy Indigenous

cultures, and is sometimes referred to as genocide. Marcia Langton, an Indigenous

academic and intellectual, appraised Australia as having given Australia a “new past”,

one that reflects the processes of reconciliation. Australia has evoked manifold

reactions among Australian and non-Australian audiences alike — from extreme dislike

to embracement. One thing is for sure: Australia is also a political movie as its reception

transcends mere liking and disliking but relates to issues of inter-racial history and the

legitimacy of using national(istic) stereotypes.

5 The first keynote address, by Meaghan Morris, followed the screening and focussed on

the film Australia. It explored the ways a national story (or perhaps rather history) is

being narrated from a transnational perspective. This perspective presupposes the use

of signifiers or clichés — whether national or gendered — with which the audiences are

familiar and can thus relate to past experiences and meaning. Blockbusters such as

Australia, Morris argues, transgress national boundaries, requiring audiences to be able

to easily grasp its underlying rhetoric and images. Clichés are powerful for a film’s

subtle images being either successfully conveyed or lost. The focus of textual analysis

should thus not rely on the deconstruction of a cliché as morally or artistically right or

wrong but rather analyse its mechanisms of conveying meaning. The question of

whether Australia is a good or a bad film is not the actual academic task, but it is to

understand whether or not audiences, Australian and international, recognise

particular clichés and so derive meaning from them.

6 Australia was not the only film discussed in the symposium. Remarkably, there were

eight short films being screened, one in presence of its filmmaker: Anna Cole co-

produced Dancing with the Prime Minister (2010), a documentary on the history of female

Indigenous debutantes in the 1960s, a time when Indigenous affairs became

increasingly visible on a national scene. The film draws on interviews conducted with

former debutantes and their families and is a very sensitive and powerful document of

Indigenous history in Australia. Dancing with the Prime Minister has been regarded as

primarily tailored to Indigenous audiences (I would add: to all audiences related to

Indigenous cultures and people). This leads to the question of how regional films can

best be ‘translated’ into international contexts, given that a screening of the film is

being planned on the BBC. The Indigenous protagonists of the film, let alone Indigenous

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history and politics, are hardly known outside Australia. This issue has practical

consequences for Indigenous films entering the European market: Indigenous films

need to be contextualised historically and culturally — as, for example, in the form of a

title sequence — when being shown in Europe.

7 The symposium also focussed on the international contexts of Australian film

production; the highly successful role of Australian women filmmakers was analysed in

its international dimensions. Australian women film producers have been highly

successful not only nationally but also internationally. Government funding played a

crucial role for this gendered specificity in Australian film history. Many papers were

theoretically challenging not only for the study of Australian films but film and cinema

studies as such. The theorisation of the meanings of transnationalism in national

cinemas has contributed to a differentiated view of Australian films as have the many

empirical approaches to Australian cinema, especially the presentation of a database on

Asian-Australian films (http://asianaustraliancinema.org). This database comprises 539

film entries as well as entries on directors and production companies relating to Asian-

Australian films. It provides an immensely useful platform for systematic scholarly

research on the history of Asian-Australian cinema.

8 The transnational approach to Australian film and television has covered the processes

in the production of Australian screen content as well as its international reception. A

collaborative paper explored the reception of the Indigenous-produced film Samson and

Delilah (2009) by French and German audiences. The film has been regarded as highly

‘disturbing’ and considered a form of ‘documentary’ of Indigenous ‘problems’. It tells

the story of a young Indigenous couple that, almost without speaking a word,

overcomes the inter-generational conflicts in their community by escaping to Alice

Springs. Among Indigenous critics the film has been largely conceived of as a positive

document of Indigenous sovereignty and survival. In Germany and France it has been

perceived rather negatively as a document of Indigenous ‘misery’. Audience-reception

in both countries has evinced different patterns, especially the lack of physiological

classification in Germany, reflecting post-National Socialist discourses of racial

representation. In France, Indigenous protagonists were often regarded as “in-

authentic” and not “Indigenous enough”, reflecting discourses on Indigenous (physical)

authenticity both in France and Australia. In Germany, Indigenous claims to

sovereignty were largely misconceived as essentialism. The comparative analysis

highlighted, in conjunction with Anna Cole’s film, the importance of contextualising

(Indigenous) Australian films for Europe-based audiences. There is considerable

interest in (Indigenous) Australian films in Europe yet this interest is also distinguished

by a lack of recognising cultural clichés on the side of European audiences.

9 The symposium also included a workshop on international collaboration and funding

possibilities. The options of large-scale international partnerships have been discussed

as much as shorter collaborative projects between individual scholars in different

countries. The symposium was a great intellectual and academic incentive for the

future practice of Australian film and television studies as well as Australian studies

generally. The conveners — Therese Davis, Tony Moore, Liz Conor and Mark Gibson —

have excelled in making “Offshore Processes” an intellectually and humanly engaging

event.

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AUTEUR

OLIVER HAAG

University of Edinburgh & Austrian Centre for Transcultural Studies

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The Translation and Reception ofMultilingual Films 15-16 June 2012, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

Samuel Bréan et Jean-François Cornu

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Conference organised by Jean-Marc Lavaur and Adriana Şerban

1 Audiovisual translation studies is an active, albeit fairly recent, field. The translation of

films is almost as old as cinema itself, since intertitles appeared in the early 1900s, but

the advent of sound film turned out to be a mixed blessing for the film industry:

solutions had to be found so that movies could keep travelling ‘abroad’, i.e. out of their

linguistic spheres. Subtitling, dubbing and voice-over are the three main methods used

nowadays (though the latter is generally not associated with fiction films ). Little

attention was given to audiovisual translation before the 1990s, but since then,

publications and conferences have blossomed. Given its hybrid nature, the topic

attracts attention from scholars in translation studies, film studies, and the sociology of

cinema.

2 Research is especially active in Europe, with two regular international conferences

(Languages and the Media, Media for All) and a research group, ESIST (European

Association for Studies in Screen Translation, set up in 1995). So far, however,

conferences in France on the topic have been few and far between. The June 2012

conference in Montpellier followed a previous one entitled “Audiovisual Translation:

Multidisciplinary Approaches”, held in 2008.1 This time the topic was more focused.

This seems a reasonable approach, given the vast variety of subjects generally tackled

in conferences on audiovisual translation, sometimes with mixed results. In this case,

the topic of multilingual films allowed for a wider and more diverse range of papers

than we expected.

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3 Contributions dealing with multilingual films focused mainly on themes

(multiculturalism, immigration, war films), case studies of specific scenes or films (Close

Encounters of the Third Kind, Inglorious Basterds) and the presentation of work in progress.

Some researchers took into consideration the constraints imposed on the translator,

others measured the ‘degree’ of multilingualism in polyglot films.

4 Multilingualism was examined from three major perspectives: as a narrative and

aesthetic element of a film, including cultural identity issues; from a reception point of

view, especially with monolingual audiences; and as a specific problem for translators

who devise various strategies to solve it.

5 Each day began with a keynote speech. Reine Meylaerts, a professor of comparative

literature at the Katholieke Universiteit, in Leuven, Belgium, opened the conference

with a communication entitled “Multilingualism and the limits of translation”. After

reviewing the background to the topic, she focused on specific aspects of

multilingualism in film and their impact on audiovisual translation. Meylaerts

mentioned that most studies on the subject are about literary works, emphasizing the

scarcity of such studies related to cinema. The 19th-century romantic ideal in terms of

language (one nation = one language) has been dropped, she said, in favour of a more

prominent space given to multilingualism in literature since the postcolonial period. As

regards cinema, Meylaerts asked whether film was less dependent on language(s) and

examined the situation from a translation perspective. In the case of multilingual films,

film-making and translation overlap, which places the translation process not so much

in-between as within the text or film. Yet, Meylaerts claims that the multilingual film

translator’s task is neither mere craftsmanship nor brilliant creativity, but lies

somewhere in-between.

6 In the second keynote address, freelance translator and researcher Jean-François Cornu

specifically focused on what becomes of multilingual films when put to the test of

dubbing and subtitling. He gave a broad definition of what a multilingual film is,

highlighting the fact that a film is by definition a multilingual object made up of image

and sound – languages in their own right. Narrowing the definition, he dealt with

multilingual films as, of course, films involving more than one ‘natural’ language in

their dialogue and narration. Cornu outlined a rough typology of multilingual films

based on the presence of various languages or forms of languages within one film,

including regional or other accents and the more controversial issue of puns and

wordplay. Such a variety of ‘multilingual’ films calls for equally diverse translation

strategies ranging from total respect of multilingualism to imposed monolingualism,

such as in the French- and Italian-dubbed versions of Liliana Cavani’s La Pelle (1981),

whose original version involved English, Italian, German and French. This gave Cornu

the opportunity to reflect on an increasingly sensitive and researched issue in film

studies, the concept of the version originale or ‘original version’. He concluded by

emphasizing the fact that audiovisual translation was by no means an end in itself, but

one of the tools of film language in its own right.

7 Lisbon-based scholar Francine Arroyo’s paper similarly contended that wordplay is a

kind of “foreign language within a language”. Arroyo focused on a character in a little-

known film by a popular director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009),

whose lines are almost entirely comprised of idiomatic expressions. Her thorough

examination included a phraseological breakdown of the expressions and a close look

at the Portuguese subtitler’s translation strategies. Arroyo’s paper was also valuable

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because of the account she gave of working conditions in Portugal: the translator only

had 48 hours to subtitle this film, which makes it nearly impossible to achieve a

satisfying translation.

8 A number of contributions came under the general heading of multilingualism as a

narrative device. The film-maker’s perspective was examined from various angles. With

“The Tower of Babel in cinema: the role of language and translation strategies in

original polyglot films”, Elena Sanz Ortega, a PhD student in Edinburgh, probed the

reasons behind a film-maker’s choice of a multilingual narrative and how the use of

several languages contribute to the storyline. She emphasized the reasons for and

challenges of shooting a polyglot film and the subsequent strategies involved in

translating such films. Another PhD student from Bologna, Giuseppe de Bonis,

introduced the audience to a specific case study with “Alfred Hitchcock presents:

multilingualism as a vehicle for… suspense”. To highlight the crucial role of

multilingualism in Hitchcock’s films, de Bonis devised an impressive typology of the 14

films by the master of suspense which include more than one language. He also

examined the translation solutions chosen for the Italian-dubbed versions of those

films.

9 These contributions showed that studying the issue from the film-maker’s perspective

is indeed interesting from an artistic point of view. Yet one may feel that the

implications for translation strategies may not differ that much from those involved in

the translation of monolingual films, in the sense that knowing the director’s initial

reasons may not be fundamental to making a good job of translating his or her film. As

for Hitchcock’s films, apart from Torn Curtain and Topaz which both include a number of

European languages for narrative purposes, it can hardly be said that multilingualism is

a crucial factor of suspense in the great master’s filmography.

10 The narrative issue was also looked at from the viewer’s perspective by University of

Bologna professor Delia Chiaro in her talk called “Mixed languages, mixed sensations:

the emotional rollercoaster of multilingual films.” Her main point was that multilingual

films are not a specific genre, but cut across film genres.2 They involve polyglot

performance on the part of the actors, as well as translation within the film, not just

towards an audience. She added that the use of different languages also has to do with

triggering specific emotions in the audience, especially in American post-war comedies

(such as identifying German as the language of oppression, or ‘comically’

mispronouncing foreign names).

11 In an impressive paper, Ilaria Parini (University of Milan) looked at the puzzling

differences between the Italian dubbing of Cédric Klapisch’s L’Auberge espagnole (2001)

and that of its sequel, Les Poupées russes (2005). Both films feature characters from

various countries who speak in their own language or in a language understood by all

(generally English). While the dubbing of L’Auberge keeps a certain number of foreign

elements (subtitled dialogue, accented deliveries), that of Les Poupées all but erases

them. This is due, Parini explained, to the role of the distributors: they shied away from

carrying over the same translation strategy from one film to the next – rather

incomprehensibly, since L’Auberge was a success in the first place. Parini concluded by

regretting the lack of consistency implied by the distributors’ decision and their lack of

respect for spectators likely to be disappointed by the sequel of a film they liked.

12 Other case studies focused on the role of interpreters in multilingual films: Lucía Ruiz

Rosendo addressed the issue through a selection of films in which different kinds of

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interpreters appear (professionals, non-professionals, interpreters in conflict zones).

Others dealt with the problem of dubbing into French a French character speaking

French in an American film (Simon Labate on Truffaut’s performance in Steven

Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The theme of immigration was brought up

in two papers: Irene de Hinges Andino’s “Ideological implications in the translation of

multilingual films” (on migration and diasporic cinema) and Marie Biscio’s “French

polyglot cinema in translation”. Both scholars have defined a corpus of films for their

research and aim to study the importance of language in the depiction of immigrant

characters, and especially its impact in terms of identity and integration. Both studies

are still at a fairly early stage but promise well for the future.

13 Of course, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds was the multilingual film of recent

years which was most quoted and studied in depth. Two contributors presented specific

studies on the film: Cristina Huertas Abril reviewed the difficulties of dubbing and

subtitling it and the strategies used to convey its crucial polyglot narrative, while

Anne-Lise Weidmann undertook a comparative study of four dubbed versions of the

film, showing that the coherence of the original film was somewhat lost in the process.3

The film may not be to everybody’s taste. However, Inglorious Basterds is indeed

fascinating for its use of multilingualism as a major narrative device. The opening

sequence, where a Nazi officer has a tense discussion with a French farmer, involves

French and English in the original version, with a switch from French into English at a

defining moment. This was obviously one of the major problems for the makers of the

French dubbed version who had to come up with other ideas to maintain the dramatic

tension. Other scenes offer similar problems, with other languages at stake. The

presence of German makes it difficult for the German dubbers to remain somewhat

faithful to the director’s vision. Yet, here again, comparative studies reach their limits.

Dubbed versions are easy prey for criticism, while subtitled versions are considered

loyal to the original film. Indeed, each dubbed version of Inglorious Basterds has its own

defects, but each was made with care. On the whole, the general atmosphere and plot

were successfully maintained. Academic studies could gain a lot from considering a

given film’s dubbed version for its own qualities and drawbacks, as long as it does not

overtly betray the original.

14 This report is obviously a partial one, since it was impossible to attend all

presentations. Other aspects included reception studies, audiodescription, accessibility,

‘surtitling’ (subtitling for the stage) – the three latter falling into a wider and looser

category: ‘adaptation’ rather than translation.

15 To conclude, the third Montpellier conference on audiovisual translation was a major

event in advancing academic and independent research in the field. It included a

growing number of professional translators, as well as researchers who seem to be

increasingly aware of the working conditions and constraints audiovisual translators

are confronted with. Academics, especially from the younger generation, now

acknowledge this. The conference also contributed to filling the gap between

audiovisual translation studies and film studies. The good news is that some

researchers are gradually leaving behind old literary translation concepts ill-applied to

audiovisual translation. In the process, they are acknowledging the fact that to study a

piece of audiovisual translation, one should be aware that this form of translation

involves a good understanding and awareness of how a film or audiovisual production

works. However, university researchers often feel the need to provide frameworks for

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translation strategies and translators. This may be considered as a recurrent flaw in

some of their studies. Whether multilingual or monolingual, each film is different in its

own right and provides a specific translation challenge. Attempts to ‘over-theorize’ or

to impose frameworks on day-to-day translation practices do not always lead to fruitful

results.

16 The conference ended with three university researchers presenting a stimulating

initiative, the creation of a network of studies on multilingual films. The idea is to set

up a worldwide database of multilingual films and to foster exchanges between

researchers interested in the subject. Conference participants will all be kept informed

of the development of this network.

17 The publication of the proceedings is currently scheduled for the end of 2014, in a

special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (LANS –

TTS, http://www.lans-tts.be/).

NOTES

1. See Adriana Şerban and Jean-Marc Lavaur eds, Traduction et médias audiovisuels (Villeneuve

d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011) and Adriana Şerban, Anna Matamala and

Jean-Marc Lavaur eds, Audiovisual Translation in Close-Up (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011).

2. The case for multilingual films as a genre was notably made by Chris Wahl. See Chris Wahl,

“Discovering a genre: the polyglot film,” Cinemascope 1 (2005), accessed July 31, 2012, http://

www.cinemascope.it.

3. Weidmann’s paper will be included in the “Retour sur Inglorious Basterds” dossier, on the

Association des Traducteurs/Adaptateurs de l’Audiovisuel (ATAA) blog, accessed July 31, 2012,

http://www.ataa.fr/blog/category/retour-sur-inglourious-basterds/.

AUTEURS

SAMUEL BRÉAN

Translator and independent researcher, member of ATAA (Association des Traducteurs

Adaptateurs de l’Audiovisuel)

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CORNU

Translator and independent researcher, member of ATAA (Association des Traducteurs

Adaptateurs de l’Audiovisuel)

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Contemporary Screen Narratives17 May 2012, Department of Culture, Film and Media, University ofNottingham

Fabrice Lyczba

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Conference organized by Anthony Smith

1 The one-day conference entitled “Contemporary Screen Narratives”, with its enticing

plural, took place on May 17 at the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the

University of Nottingham (UK) – a Department chaired by Professor Roberta Pearson.

The conference, organized by Anthony Smith, featured an exciting mix of presentations

from current PhD candidates, emerging scholars and well-established authorities,

mostly from UK institutions – with the addition of representatives from Turkey, Spain,

Italy and Ireland – and a no-less impressive display of presentation tools (for example

Prezi, with its dynamic thought-mapping potential) and social media technologies, with

scholars in the audience engaging in online debates during live presentations (a virtual

conference, as it were, running in parallel to real-life discussions on Twitter and

Facebook). As a side note, an intriguing article could, one imagines, be written on how

the latest media tools are currently transforming the conference space and

accelerating the spread of ideas, a particularly pregnant question at a conference

aiming to understand the circulation of narrative content across cutting-edge media

platforms.

2 Foregrounding present contemporary screen storytelling practices in all their

production, distribution and consumption complexity, the day offered a unique

opportunity to come to terms with the burgeoning field of transmedia studies, with

case studies ranging geographically from US to Turkish media, but also diachronically

from the most recent (2011) iterations of transmedia audience engagement through

social web media tools to the interactions of fandom, comics and marketing in 1940s

Classical Hollywood. A recent field of research in media studies launched by Henry

Jenkins’s widely influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006),

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and inspired (at least initially) by the development of modern communication

technologies and their use in film distribution and film reception (from webpages to

social Internet tools, to comic books, video-games, and Alternate Reality Games),

transmedia studies have since been raising central issues in film theory, revolving

around questions of audience engagement through intertextuality, multimodality (how

narratives adapt to different media) and additive comprehension (when transmediality

participates in narrative world-building, as opposed to merely franchising). When do

texts in fact circulate, and when is it simply branding? What is it that does circulate

when a text changes media platform? What forms does audience engagement take, in

transmedia distribution and reception? In the model of transmedia additive

comprehension, how is narrative coherence maintained? This conference was to

suggest several possible answers through precise case studies and expose the lines of

debate in current research being carried out across Europe. Contemporary screen

narratives, it suggested, are indeed plural in at least two ways: in the way transmedia

distribution and reception opens up each screen narrative to multiple variations; and

in the way this renewed focus on the plurality of texts, to paraphrase Barthes, opens up

film history to a plurality of narratives, in line with the search for cinema’s futures and

pasts (cinema’s alternative histories) that Thomas Elsaesser has proposed in the last ten

years.

3 Organized in the traditional ‘simultaneous panel’ format allowing for an impressive

thirty-eight papers in one day, the conference also featured two longer keynote

presentations, one by American TV scholar Jason Mittell, the other – clearly the

highlight of this stimulating day – by transmedia studies guru Henry Jenkins, appearing

here in one of his many stops on his current European tour. One of the many possible

subtitles to this conference could thus have been “Henry Jenkins meets Europe”, as the

focus of the day seemed to have been to showcase recent European work by a wide

variety of international media scholars in the presence of the founder of transmedia

studies, and allowing, as it were, for an up-to-date appreciation of the current situation

of the field – and the pervasive influence that Professor Jenkins’s insights on

‘convergence culture’ have had outside of the United States. Judging by the wealth of

studies represented at this conference, transmedia studies are alive and well in the

academic world, as convergence culture is happening around the globe in both industry

and audience practices.

4 The first panel of the day looked at the question of ‘interactivity’ and raised the issue of

whether audience engagement with film texts could be analyzed, beyond the familiar

model of immersion, as a more active, but also more video-gaming, interactive

relationship. Two examples in particular were presented. Dr Sarah Atkinson, of the

University of Brighton, who has explored issues of contemporary media engagement

both in her research and in her practical work (see her interactive cinema installation

“Crossed Lines”), presented the transmedia experience built around the self-advertised

“first ever social film”, The Inside Experience (D.J. Curaso, 2011). A film, a video game, a

puzzle, The Inside Experience also offered interactive role-playing possibilities to its fan

community through the Facebook pages of its main characters, which allowed users/

viewers to comment on fictional character Christina Perasso’s actions in the film and

offer her guidance. In such transmedia experience, metalepsis (the crossing of narrative

boundaries as expounded by Gérard Genette) is at the very heart of the film’s reception,

since the film text co-exists across several media platforms simultaneously and creates

audience engagement on three levels: on a textual level (following plot), on a

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paratextuel level (with issues, among fans, of how their Facebook activity could help

the film character or not: fans, in other words, establishing the rules of engagement

with the fictive universe), and on a meta-textual level when the fictive experience

seems to move beyond fiction to become, through the use of interactive social media

and the increasing sophistication of young audiences’ media literacy, ‘real’. In their co-

presentation, Amy Chambers and Lyle Skains, of Bangor University, looked at another

way of engaging audiences through what they termed “a multimodal text”: the film

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright, 2010). With its many references to Gen X

video-game graphics, comics, and musical culture (the way the film, for instance, stages

fight scenes as in Arcade-style video-games, or incorporates thought bubbles as in

comic books), Scott Pilgrim, they argued, offers a case study of “tele-presence”1 for the

fan, a model of virtual interaction with the film text – beyond the model of film-based

passive viewing. Film narrative in this case becomes “participatory narrative” through

an “aesthetics of artifice” that offers viewers the possibility of engagement with the

film text by importing modes of engagement from his or her experience of other media

(from watching someone else play a video-game to reading a comic book) – and where

film narrative, in other words, becomes (at least potentially) hypertext. The theoretical

framework is not new – as Umberto Eco suggested as early as the 1960s, mass media, by

its multimodal, derivative nature, is inherently participatory in this sense – but one

must admit that Scott Pilgrim offers a particularly clear example of a form of audience

engagement through cinema’s hypertextual referentiality – a modern example of the

participatory nature of film reception that has been well explored for early, 1900-1910

cinema (Miriam Hansen), but under-researched for later periods of cinema history.

5 The two afternoon panels shifted the focus of the transmedia transformation away

from audiences’ activities and more to issues of content, questioning that grey zone

where transmedia happens, with one foot in narrative content, and the other in

marketing and promotion. The ‘transmedia’ panel was organized around presentations

exploring the impact of transmedia marketing on narrative contents. Tom Phillips, of

the University of East Anglia, concluded from his study of the transmedia distribution

of TV series Psychoville (Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, 2009-2011, BBC2) that

in transmedia marketing, content would seem to matter less than media: the Psychoville

transmedia experience, expanding to web pages ‘maintained’ by fictive characters or to

‘their’ YouTube channel, is thus able to extend the horror/comedy tension inherent in

the TV series to all parts of its universe by relying less on narrative consistency

(narrative contents varying as they spread across platforms) and more on audiences’

media literacy to maintain the film’s tone of distancing irony. Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen

(Istanbul University) presented a coauthored study of a particularly dynamic case of

transmedia marketing in the distribution of Turkish TV series Valley of the Wolves /

Kurtlar Vadisi (Serdar Akar, Mustafa Sevki Dogan, Osman Sinav, 2003-2005, Show TV).

Not only is there an Alternate Reality Game available for Turkish fans of the series,

integrating the fictional film universe with reality, but the reverse integration of

reality within the fictional spy world is also made to appear seamless, with fictive

characters discussing real-life news events a mere few days after the news has broken

or offering in-show predictions about future real-life events. Such strategies, the

authors propose, generate a “reverse Alternate Reality Game” where reality becomes

part of the world being built by fiction, whether because, when real-life events conform

to in-show forecasts, fans turn to conspiracy theories to describe the show creators as

controlling real-life events, or whether fans take inspiration from the show to engage in

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community-based action in the real world (such as community engagement against Big

Oil). Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham) proposed, from the study of the

transmedia universe of the Superman comics and cartoons in the late 1930s, that

transmedia be seen less as a product of convergence and more as a process – a process,

importantly, that did not wait for new contemporary media to develop but has existed

in Hollywood for a long time. His research shows how this process may come to cross-

influence content across the several platforms where it is explored: Superman, after all,

only learnt to fly in the D.C. comics after the change was introduced in the film cartoon

series. In those three case studies, thus, the ‘bleeding over’ of content across media is

situated differently: in Psychoville’s multimodality, in aggressive metalepsis through

active referencing of reality for Valley of the Wolves, or in a creative process that did not

wait for media convergence to exist in cinema for the Superman cartoons.

6 Veering more resolutely to questions of the impact of transmedia marketing on

production, the “industry/production” panel consisted of several recent case studies of

how media producers are integrating audience engagement within their product(ion)s.

Sophie Halliday (University of East Anglia) looked at the impact of fan communities on

the development (and sheer survival) of US series Fringe (J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman,

Roberto Orci, 2008-2012, Fox Network), “probably the first ever series to be saved by a

hashtag.” Gloria Dagnino (University of Italian Switzerland) presented findings from

her on-going PhD research about changing tax rules in Italian law that make it

financially more interesting for companies to fund filmmakers in exchange for product

placement – a practice that is starting to have an impact even on Italian ‘auteur’

cinema as it forces filmmakers to adapt diegetic worlds to financing pressures. By

looking at commercial modes of engagement of films, the panel suggested that film

texts do not, in fact, exist in splendid isolation and that the profit incentive, in itself, is

already fertile ground for content cross-proliferation.

7 The day’s panels, thus, established as a key focus of the symposium the question of the

nature of transmedia: should it be theorized as mostly promotion (as in the linkage

between film fictions and commercial products advertised through the film), or, more

intriguingly, as mostly content – that is, storytelling through other means? Following

Henry Jenkins’s oft-quoted definition of transmedia narrative as “unified and

coordinated” across media platforms,2 should transmedia narrative practices be

restricted to cases of narrative expansion, or could it come to include cases of narrative

reduction, as media scholar Carlos Scolari (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

proposed with his analysis of Spanish TV series The Triplets / Les Tres Bessones (Robert

Balser, Baltasar Pedrosa, 1995-2003, Televisió de Catalunya TV3) as a case study of what

he proposes to call “the narrative accordion”? The two keynotes, in different ways,

returned to these issues of defining transmedia and its reach – content vs promotion,

expansion vs reduction – and offered contrasting answers. Jason Mittell’s presentation

on TV series’ ‘infamous’ heroes (the antiheroes of Breaking Bad, Dexter, The Sopranos or

Mad Men), while not directly concerned with transmedia storytelling, was nonetheless

an offshoot from his soon-to-be-published book on ComplexTV: The Poetics of

Contemporary Television Storytelling, where such issues are explored as part of new

narrative complexities he has identified in contemporary American TV series.3 For

Mittell, transmedia must be distinguished from more general paratexts of media

production – commercial clutter that does not offer narrative expansion but serves

merely as an introduction to the film or TV text. In the concluding lecture of the day,

Henry Jenkins on the other hand aimed to move beyond such dichotomy by including

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paratexts (such as bench advertising in the streets of Los Angeles for the release of

District 9) as part of the immersive experience that transmedia, whether as promotion or

content, proposes audiences. Reworking some of the issues broached in the different

panels of the day, but with the goal of offering an expanded theoretical framework,

Jenkins’s lecture reframed transmedia studies within the larger scope of “participatory

culture”, and suggested the development of a “media archaeology” perspective in

transmedia studies. Starting with examples of how contemporary communication

technologies have helped today’s fans to become active participants and transmedia

creators of screen narratives, Jenkins then invited scholars to look beyond

contemporary technologies to the larger history of “the 200 years of grass-root

movements trying to gain access to the tools of cultural production.” Beyond web 2.0

social media tools, a whole new field, Jenkins suggested, awaits scholars wishing to look

at technologies that have allowed media contents to circulate throughout history by

offering “systems of spreadability.” In this framework of a history of technologies that

have allowed texts and contents to spread, under the control or not of production

authorities, Gutenberg’s printing press, Jenkins suggested, would thus become “web

minus 10.0”.

8 Thus transmedia, in situating film narratives within a larger technological history of

media, could rejoin not just fan studies but also, more generally, other fields of media

studies currently undergoing exciting development, from game studies (A. Blanchet) to

software studies (L. Manovich) and media archaeology (E. Huhtamo). Importantly,

media (including film) is here proposed as inherently participatory – as fiction

universes to be played with, re-organized, expanded, reduced, transformed by

audiences throughout the technological history of images and screens. This, to me,

represents a salutary and generous call on Professor Jenkins’s part to consider media

fictions in all their circulation – a call which opens up intriguing possibilities to study

all media texts, contemporary and past, New Hollywood or Classical, once more in their

reception dynamic.

NOTES

1. Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton, “At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence,”

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication vol. 3 no. 2 (1997).

2. Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” August 1, 2011, Confessions of an Aca/Fan,

accessed June 27, 2012, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html.

3. The book is offered as open source in pre-publication mode through the CommonsMedia

website

(http://tinyurl.com/complextv) – which is another sign of the conference organizers’ and

panelists’ unequivocal embrace of new technologies as enhancers of scholarly interaction.

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AUTEUR

FABRICE LYCZBA

Université Paris Est Créteil

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Internet Studies in EuropeSymposium on Internet and Society, 25-28 October 2011, HumboldtUniversity, BerlinICTs and Society Conference, 2-4 May 2012, Uppsala University, Uppsala

Mathieu O'Neil

EDITOR'S NOTE

The First Berlin Symposium on Internet and Society – Exploring the Digital Future was

organised by Ingolf Pernice, Jeanette Hofmann, Thomas Schildhauer and Wolfgang

Schulz. See http://berlinsymposium.org/.

The Fourth ICTs and Society Conference, Critique, Democracy and Philosophy in 21st

Century Information Society – Towards Critical Theories of Social Media was organised

by Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval. See http://www.icts-and-society.net/events/

uppsala2012/.

1 Internet studies have historically developed in the United States. The Oxford Internet

Institute (OII), launched in 2001, was the first European Internet research department -

rather than a research centre or programme in a disciplinary department, the OII was

able to offer degrees. To some extent, OII has managed to create an analytical

perspective distinct from the cyber-law focus of major US research centres such as

Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society and the Annenberg School for

Communication, though it does share the US focus on public policy and e-social science.

It was therefore of great interest to Internet scholars that two landmark conferences

were to be held on the European continent: the First Berlin Symposium on Internet and

Society was convened to launch the Berlin Institute for Internet and Society; whilst the

Fourth ICTs & Society conference was to be held at Uppsala University in Sweden. Since

I had the opportunity to attend both events, I will discuss them in comparative fashion

in terms of background, organisation, and ideology.

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Background

2 The Berlin Institute was launched with significant financial support from Google,

because, as Google's Europe Blog put it:

[T]he Internet is changing society. And it’s also true that society is changing theInternet, through the choices we all make on the web every day. For Google, thepoint at which the Internet and society intersect is fascinating. Seeing differentperspectives and understanding cultural nuances is critical to how we develop ourservices.1

3 Skeptics have conjectured that launching the Institute is in fact a ploy to ‘win over’

Europeans worried about the firm's power and the threat it poses to data protection.

Whatever the case may be, it does not detract from the assembled research capacity.

Four German institutions have each delegated a Director to the Institute, reflecting a

wide diversity of outlooks: Professor Ingolf Pernice (Humboldt University) will

specialise in Internet and constitutional law; Dr Jeanette Hofmann (Social Science

Research Center Berlin) brings her Internet governance and regulation expertise;

Professor Thomas Schildhauer (University of the Arts) his interest in Internet-based

innovation and the economy; and Dr Wolfgang Schulz (Hamburg Hans Bredow

Institute) his focus on media law.

4 The ICTs & Society network is an open and informal project, which anyone can join. It

was initially the brainchild of Professors Wolfgang Hofkirchner and Christian Fuchs in

Salzburg. After working in his native Austria, Fuchs was appointed in 2011 Chair in

Media and Communication Studies of the Department of Informatics and Media Studies

at Uppsala. One of Fuchs' central concerns is to counter what he views as the a-critical

and non-normative perspective of Manuel Castells (arguably the best-known

theoretician of the information society) by developing “Critical Internet Studies”,

chiefly through the application of Critical Theory concepts to Internet studies. Typical

questions might include: “Is digital labour productive or unproductive labour? Does it

involve exploitation and/or alienation and/or objectification and/or reification? What

is the relationship between production and consumption and between commodification

and ideology in the realm of digital media today? Is play labour exploited even if it is

fun?”2 Professor Fuchs is also the editor of TripleC (C ognition, Communication, Co-

operation), an “Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society”.

Earlier ICTs & Society meetings were on a smaller scale and took place in Salzburg,

Trento and Barcelona.

Organisation

5 In Berlin, after the opening ceremony and reception at Humboldt University on Unter

den Linden, the sessions and keynotes took place at the Nhow hotel – an über-trendy

spot where every surface was either mauve or pink, the lifts exploded in bright

psychedelic yellow, and the lobby and bar made one feel as if one was inside a lava-

lamp. The terrace overlooked the Spree and what appeared to be artistically decorated

blocks of the Berlin Wall. The traditional part of the Symposium took place on the

ground floor, in a modular space that could be divided into three large rooms. The

lunches, Open Science Forum and evening revelries occurred in an upstairs area, above

the art gallery, which had a bar and an unfinished, rough, loft-type atmosphere.

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6 Google's presence meant the Symposium was well endowed, and the organisers could

experiment with all kinds of ideas to make it more interactive. The website enabled all

participants and attendees to list their identities and interests. Upon registration,

everyone received a bag comprising the usual conference kit (the program, a nice

booklet to write in, and since we were at the Nhow the gift pen was pink) as well as a

mysterious flat metal object and a series of cards with attendees' names and those

geometric black and white squares that appear on every ad and artwork these days.

The mysterious object turned out to be an ultra-flat USB stick with all the conference

papers and research questions in PDF format (all the papers were of impressive

quality). As for the flashcodes: when you wanted to say something in a session, you

were supposed to alert helpers, who would scan your card with their phone so that

when it was your turn to speak, your name, affiliation and interests were projected

onto a screen. A different screen featured a blow-by-blow collaboratively produced

summary of interventions. In addition, every session comprised an artist who drew in

real time a large illustration of what people were talking about. People were also

encouraged to write ideas on cards and panels outside the sessions but I did not notice

that these were used much.

7 In the lead-up to the Berlin symposium research questions were collectively developed,

whilst keynote abstracts were posted to the ICTs & Society email list and generated

quite lively exchanges. This was intended to determine some of the dominant themes

to be discussed. Uppsala is a small university town, sometimes described as the

‘Swedish Oxbridge’. The conference was held in the Ekonomikum, a maze-like structure

with nicely high wooden desks in the amphitheatre, definitely a plus for tall folks. In

general the ICTs & Society conference felt more traditional, with efficient time keeping

(15 minutes for presenting, five minutes for discussion) which was scrupulously

enforced by all the session managers. Whereas Berlin ended with a sparsely attended DJ

party, Uppsala wrapped proceedings up with a banquet where guests were issued a

booklet featuring lyrics to drinking songs. They also brought in a choir to sing a few

songs, which was nice.

Ideology

8 The Berlin Symposium gathered worldwide experts on Internet issues, so there was a

great diversity of outlooks in attendance, from business types, to researchers

(including representatives from the Berkman Center and the OII), to free software and

‘smart cities’ activists.3 In her opening remarks, Director Jeanette Hofmann framed her

research objectives around the notion of the public domain, emphasising concerns such

as determining which public domain areas transcend specific fields of operation, the

impact of technological and regulatory changes to the public domain on democratic

dialogue, and the consequences of interactions between different types of public

domain regulation over time. The first two days followed the traditional conference

formats – smaller workshop sessions alternating with keynote plenaries. Plenaries

included homilies to the Internet's potential to develop technological innovation (for

example “Internet as a Motor for Societal Innovation”, by Oliver Gassmann of the

University of St. Gallen) whilst others dealt with its potential to liberate the oppressed

of the earth from the shackles of tyranny (though acknowledging the challenges posed

by corporations to individual liberty) as for example “Consent of the Networked: The

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Future of Freedom in the Internet Age” by Rebecca MacKinnon of the New America

Foundation. In terms of the workshop sessions, I appreciated the presentation by Malte

Ziewitz (OII) entitled “Can Crowd Wisdom Solve Regulatory Problems?”. Ziewitz

presented an overview of the notion of crowdsourcing by tracing its historical

antecedents, providing examples of contemporary applications (such as the US Patent

Office's Peer-to-Patent, the New Zealand Policing Act wiki, and web-based patient

feedback for the NHS in the UK) and the challenges posed by the rise of lay expertise

and feedback to traditional regulatory agencies.

9 All the workshop papers are available as individual files on the conference website.

There was a definite buzz in Berlin as Google's backing imbued the proceedings with a

certain weight – the underlying message was this was not just another conference, but

the start of something significant. The significance of the event was undeniable, as so

many people were gathered in one place, but its meaning was harder to fathom. The

numerous quality contributions in the realm of political science, communications and

law, with their concern for developing the public sphere, mapping online governance,

increasing citizen participation, and the like, seemed to sit a little uneasily with the

management focus on capturing crowd-sourced innovation for profit. It sometimes felt

as if two different conferences were happening in the same space.

10 The last day was an Open Science Forum which would, to quote the program, provide

an “innovative platform” for academics and “stakeholders from industry, politics and

various civil society interest groups to discuss and work on the real world problems of

the information society”. Participants were arranged in small teams and encouraged to

take part in “trans-disciplinary working sessions”. Google's Damon Horowitz, who,

aside from his Doctorate in philosophy from Stanford, holds a degree in artificial

intelligence from MIT, delivered that day's morning keynote on “Humanism and

Technology”. He urged researchers to engage with Google to make it a better company,

but failed to address the concerns raised by the firm's ever-growing accumulation of

online and offline individual and corporate data. Other Google employees were in

attendance at the Symposium. When I wondered aloud in a session whether Google

might be the first transnational corporation whose business model was based on the

disregard for copyright (as a recent example, Google only modified in 2012 their search

algorithm to index non-copyrighted content lower than copyrighted content in their

search results), a Google employee not only expressed vehement disagreement with my

statement, but asked that it be “struck from the record”. I do not know whether this

happened or not, but it struck me as a rather heavy-handed way of dealing with ideas

one disagrees with. Since this happened at the end of a session, I did not notice any

other reactions.

11 In contrast to the vision of the Internet as an essentially positive or even liberating

phenomenon, at the ICTs & Society conference in Uppsala the notion of the

participatory web was described as an illusory ‘ideology’ and the global network, more

often than not, portrayed in terms of exploitation of free labour and crowdsourcing of

surveillance. Interestingly, there was a significant Canadian contingent in Uppsala. This

brings to mind the fact that many Canadian communications scholars have adopted a

far more critical attitude than their US counterparts – see for example Vincent Mosco

(Queen's University), Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University) and Nick Dyer-

Witherford (University of Western Ontario), who were all plenary speakers. Mosco

opened the conference with a speech entitled “Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge

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Workers of the World Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and

Communication Today”, where he advocated focusing on strategies and tactics for

activism. Feenberg was the final speaker, and his talk, “Great Refusal and Long March:

How to Use Critical Theory to Think About the Internet”, conceptualised the Internet as

a site of struggle between the consumption model and the community model. Following

Marcuse, Feenberg argued for the need to enter dominant institutions and contest

them from within. Dyer-Witherford's talk, “Cybermarxism Today: Cycles and Circuits of

Struggle in 21st Century Capitalism”, tracked a new class composition, the

Weltgesamtarbeiter or ‘global worker’, a collective labour organised not along the

assembly line of the factory, but along planet-spanning supply chains. This talk was

very well received by the audience, though a case could be made that Occupy Wall

Street (and other Western anti-austerity struggles), the Arab Spring, Chinese migrant

worker protests and peasant struggles in Latin America are parallel, rather than inter-

connected events.

12 Sessions were entitled “Towards a Critical Theory of Social Media: The Dialectics of

Empowerment and Disempowerment” and “Surveillance 2.0? Commodification,

Policification, and Discrimination in the ‘Surveillance Society’”. A conference focus was

indeed surveillance, and a notable plenary presentation was by a specialist in the field,

Mark Andrejevic (University of Queensland), whose talk, “Social Media: Surveillance

and Exploitation 2.0”, described “the most comprehensive system for mass monitoring

in human history”, based on “digital enclosure”, whereby users are separated from the

ownership of their data in order for a process of privatization to occur. In my view, the

focus on Facebook as a form of surveillance and exploitation of free digital labour

possibly overly dominated the conference (to be fair, a session was devoted to social

movements and the Arab Spring). The final wrap-up plenary session was led by

Professor Fuchs, the microphone wielder, who seemed to pick with a little too much

care who would be allowed to speak. I will therefore take advantage of this opportunity

to suggest that more attention could have been given to positive developments in the

information society, such as the growth of the physical and digital commons, of open

data and open access, and of ‘collaborative’ or ‘peer’ production such as free software

and Wikipedia, all of which represent – granted, fragile and contradictory –

alternatives to the dominant system.

The Future

13 These events face opposed challenges: whilst the Berlin Institute for Internet and

Society has a strong potential for development, because of Germany's position at the

heart of Europe and because of Google's support, it also needs to create an identity

from quite distinct research traditions, as well as secure funding beyond Google's

three-year grant. In contrast, the ICTs & Society research network has a clear identity;

its challenge lies in forging alliances with other research streams, so as to avoid

‘preaching to the choir’, and finding itself overly isolated.

14 The risks of partitioning can be observed at the national level as well. Since they were

held in Germany and Sweden both events obviously had a strong local flavour, with

many researchers from both countries presenting papers. However, all the talks were

given in English. As far as I am aware, apart from myself and a PhD student in Uppsala,

there were no French researchers presenting papers at either event (there was at least

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another French academic present in Berlin). This confirms the observation that

linguistic isolation is having a deleterious effect on French-language research, which is

effectively cut off from global knowledge networks.

NOTES

1. Max Senges, “Research Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin”, Google Europe Blog, July

11, 2012. http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.fr/2011/07/research-institute-for-internet-

and.html

<accessed on September 4, 2012>

2. Christian Fuchs, “New Marxian Times! Reflections on the Fourth ICTs and Society-Conference:

Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society. Towards Critical

Theories of Social Media”, TripleC 10 1 (2012): 114-21.

3. ‘Smart cities’ refers to the use of ICTs to make urban environments more socially and

environmentally sustainable (in the activist variant) or more competitive and attractive to

investors (in the business-oriented understanding).

AUTHOR

MATHIEU O'NEIL

Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris 4

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Cinema and the Crossing ofFrontiers, 16th SERCIA Conference8-10 September 2011, University of Bath

Julie Assouly et Marianne Kac-Vergne

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Conference organized by Wendy Everett, Nina Parish, Peter Wagstaff and Melvyn

Stokes

1 The SERCIA (Société d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Cinéma Anglophone), founded in

1993 to gather researchers of English-speaking film and to promote their work, held its

16th conference in September 2011 at the University of Bath. The conference was

organized by Wendy Everett, Reader in French and Film at the University of Bath, Nina

Parish, Lecturer in Contemporary French Studies at the University of Bath, Peter

Wagstaff, Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bath, and Melvyn Stokes,

Senior Lecturer in American Film History at University College London.

2 The theme of the conference was “Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers”, an open

invitation to probe the adventurous spirit of cinema, its desire to create and explore

new territories and technologies in its quest for modernity. Indeed, the theme invited

very diverse points of view as well as different research methodologies – from

historical approaches to geographical standpoints, including sociological and aesthetic

perspectives.

3 There were 24 panels of three or four speakers, organized in 8 sessions.1 The plenary

was given by film director Ken Loach, who spoke about the three frontiers he had to

cross to make his films: moving from the small screen to the big screen, breaking

taboos “to say the unsayable”, on Ireland or 9/11 for example, and lastly getting his

films distributed, especially in the US market. Indeed, whereas films in the US market

are often considered as commodities, Ken Loach holds true to his vision of film as a

means of communication and to his desire to widen the range of movies offered to the

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audience. His speech provided a practical application of the conference’s theme while

engaging with the political considerations which characterise his work.

4 Politics were also discussed in the two panels on the US-Mexico border which included

a paper by Stephanie Fuller (University of East Anglia) on ‘Borderline identity’, an

examination by Anne Crémieux (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) of the

cinematic crossings of frontiers in Babel, an analysis by Rosa Urtiaga (Université de

Zaragoza) of the Chicana in John Sayles’s Lone Star and a presentation by Jeffrey

Swartwood (Université Bordeaux 3) on The Gatekeeper by the relatively unknown

Mexican-American filmmaker/activist John Carlos Frey, whose films have never been

distributed in France. All stressed the link made by the films between crossing the

border and changing identities, yet one could detect through the different

presentations a general evolution from the time of Borderline (1950), when Chicano and

Chicana actors played a variety of ethnic characters, to the late 1990s and early 2000s,

when Mexican-American identity became the central subject of films such as Lone Star

(1996) or The Gatekeeper (2002).

5 Another geographical border was the theme of the panel “Crossing the Atlantic” where

two presentations caught our attention, both adopting a historical perspective on film

and reception. Melvin Stokes (University College London) spoke about Charlie Chaplin’s

links with the French surrealists, who drew inspiration from his films and came

together in his defense in the 1927 manifesto Hands Off Love, using him as “a symbol

with which to further their own outlook and ideas.” Nimrod Tal (Oxford) analyzed how

the different cultural contexts influenced the reception of Birth of a Nation and Gone with

the Wind in the United States and Great Britain. While Birth of a Nation was seen in

Britain as an exotic American product about the Civil War, without full recognition of

its controversial racial dimension, Gone with the Wind was received with more ambiguity

because of its antiwar message (the movie was released during the Second World War)

and its gender and racial representations.

6 The issue of identity as a fluid and permeable construction was at the heart of a panel

on Multiple Identities, where two of Woody Allen’s films were analyzed – Isabelle

Schmitt (Université de Bourgogne) examined the crossing into another woman’s psyche

in Another Woman, while Ana Moya (Universitat de Barcelona) revealed the

transnational dimension of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, emphasizing the difficulty for the

characters to preserve their cultural identities. Her analysis brought her to reconsider

the notion of transnationalism as the reflection of the characters’ state of mind. The

central threesome is constantly on the verge of breaking down, symbolically crossing

the boundary from one self to another out of dissatisfaction (the way one would cross

the border between two continents in search of a new life). To a certain extent, the

recurring use of unsubtle clichés (the Spanish virile male, the spicy Spanish woman, the

naïve American girl, the romanticized artistic life…) can be seen as another implicit

commentary on the futility of holding onto them.

7 Gender and racial identities were also the subject of Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris’s

(Université Paris Ouest Nanterre) presentation on Imitation of Life, which focused on the

notions of passing and trespassing in melodrama and the subversion of stereotypes to

foreground the issue of racial legitimacy. Examining the crossing of racial and social

borders in the two versions of the film was a way for Pr Paquet-Deyris to reevaluate the

melodramatic genre, as Sirk’s film broke some of the genre’s conventions by addressing

the burning question of black self-loathing. Yet she concluded her presentation by

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pointing out the difficulty for both black and white spectators to identify with the

characters and situations, as they often remain, even in Sirk’s version, quite

stereotypical.

8 From an aesthetic perspective, an interesting debate was engaged in a panel about

“Crossing the Boundary between Fiction and Documentary”. Jean-Francois Baillon

(Université Bordeaux 3) chose to discuss Powell and Pressburger’s wartime feature

films, while Christophe Gelly (Université Clermont-Ferrand 2) commented on the

hybrid nature of Lost in La Mancha by Terry Gilliam, a production which never became

an actual movie, maintaining “an ambiguous status mixing reality and fiction and

adopting a self-conscious mode of representation”. Furthering this discussion on

aesthetic hybridity, Barbara Le Maitre (Paris 3) analyzed the work of photographer Jeff

Wall, who used the conventions of zombie movies to stage fake historical photographs.

Developing her previous essay on aesthetics, Entre film et photographie. Essai sur

l’empreinte (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2004), the French researcher chose to

put forward Ephraim Getthold Lessing’s theory of the ‘pregnant moment’, the possible

link between still and moving images. Practicing what Le Maitre called a “remelting of

the media” thanks to a digital photomontage, Wall built an artificial battlefield on

which each soldier seems to come back to life in spite of a deadly wound, recalling

Romero’s horror films. Zombie movies were also the focus of a Foucauldian analysis of

subjection and subjectivity in David Roche’s (Université de Bourgogne) presentation on

George Romero’s Living Dead trilogy, while Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poitiers)

considered the generic hybridity of contemporary gothic/horror cinema, in a panel on

“Reinventing the Horror Genre”.

9 Many other aspects of the question were also addressed, such as the position of the

spectator, in a paper given by Céline Murillo (Paris 13) on the redefinition of screen

borders in Jim Jarmusch’s cinema and in a presentation by Fabrice Lyczba (Université

Paris Est Créteil) on publicity and exhibition practices of American silent cinema.

Technological crossovers, the western frontier, generic hybridity, globalization and

national borders were also developed, making this conference a rich and stimulating

event.

10 The following, 17th SERCIA conference, entitled “Cinema of intimacy and/or the

intimacy of cinema in English-speaking film”, took place in Dijon from September 5 to

September 7, 2012. More information can be found on the SERCIA website

(www.sercia.net).

NOTES

1. Due to the very large number of panels, not all of them could be covered in this report.

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AUTEURS

JULIE ASSOULY

Université d’Artois

MARIANNE KAC-VERGNE

Université de Picardie Jules Verne

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Book Reviews

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Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : lesArtistes américains contre la guerre enIrakParis : Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.

Delphine Letort

REFERENCES

Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : les Artistes américains contre la guerre en Irak, Paris : Presses

de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.

1 Rather than focusing on the aesthetics of committed art, Art vs War, les Artistes

américains contre la guerre en Irak examines the reasons behind an array of actions

undertaken by artists involved in the anti-war movement. Violaine Roussel presents

the results of a sociological study, which draws on a wide range of interviews published

in a previous work (Violaine Roussel and Bleuwenn Lechaux, Voicing Dissent, American

Artists and the War on Iraq, New York and London, Routledge, 2009). She first traces a

chronology of the Iraq war, from George W. Bush’s characterization of North Korea,

Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil” in his 2002 State of the Union Address to Barack

Obama’s 2009 promise of troop withdrawal. The author provides a record of all the

military operations and the diplomatic advances negotiated on an international level,

thus providing a historical background to the anti-war movement.

2 The introduction emphasizes the difference between engaged artists and committed

art, considering that the anti-war movement’s attraction was based on its

independence from politics. Apart from a few radical groups (Artists to Stop the War,

Refuse and Resist) that created specific artistic events in opposition to the war

(demonstrations, concerts…), the movement revolved around petitions that were

circulated by Not In Our Names (NION - founded in March 2002) and Artists United to Win

Without War (AUWWW – created in December 2002), using the Internet as a powerful

linking medium. The author distinguishes two types of commitments among artists,

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opposing the staunch and long-term involvement of the pioneers emerging in 2002 to

the short-term commitment of celebrities, who gained media attention, but whose

participation in the movement flagged after George W. Bush announced the end of

major combat operations in Iraq on 1 May 2003.

3 The first part of the book explores the relationship between engaged artists and the

war, arguing that fame ensured the legitimacy of the citizen artists’ public stance.

While documentary filmmaker Barbara Trent blended her film practice with her

engagement, using her art to organize resistance, first-time activists Robert Greenwald

and Mike Farrel (founders of AUWWW) used their professional connections to collect

more petition signatures among fellow artists working in Hollywood. Violaine Roussel

analyses the reasons of their success, suggesting that their exclusive focus on the Iraq

war allowed them to draw widespread support; they presented the movement as a

coalition deprived of a broader political agenda. Then the author assesses the

professional consequences of this type of commitment: be they actors, directors,

painters or writers, many young artists relinquished endorsing an anti-war message

that might endanger their professional career. The author gives a series of examples

drawing on the interviews she conducted among actors and painters who would rather

not be perceived as politically committed for fear that they might be categorized as

‘Hollywood liberals’ or ‘activist artists.’ The label would either undermine the value of

their art or cause them to be blacklisted (66-70, 158-161, 173-181). Paradoxically, the

anti-war movement also opened up new venues for others, boosting the careers of

street artist Shepard Fairey, or of such documentary filmmakers as Barbara Kopple and

Michael Moore amongst others. George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election represented a

turning point as many artists abandoned the movement after campaigning for a

Democrat agenda.

4 The second part of the book highlights the historical relation between committed

artists and the war, going back to the McCarthy era and to the Viet-Nam war. The

comparison allows the author to pinpoint the specificities of each anti-war movement,

which reached out beyond the artists’ circle to include Blacks’, women’s and students’

voices of dissent in the 1960s. Artistic practices at the time blended creativity and

political commitment whereas most artists refused to compromise their art with their

engagement in the 2000s.

5 The third part examines the identity of activist artists, whose artistic career and

activist engagement are constrained by career patterns. Fearing that their art be

judged and devalued on account of their political commitment, artists devised new

types of engagement. Being labelled a militant is not seen positively in the profession

and artists who display their convictions run the risk of being outcast. Violaine Roussel

strikingly remarks that some filmmakers furthered the anti-war debate without openly

criticizing America’s foreign policy, focusing instead on the impact of the conflict on

the individual. Some artists experienced a political awakening as the war broke out,

including film director Robert Greenwald who created his own company to produce

activist videos and films, without endangering a career that had been constructed in

the 1970s and 1980s. Artists thus contributed to the public discussion about the war,

using their social prestige to act as spokespeople – including such figures as George

Clooney and Sean Penn.

6 The book draws a lively portrait of activism in Hollywood, using a series of examples

that consistently illustrate Violaine Roussel’s sociological analysis. She depicts the

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ongoing debate from the inside, thus sharing part of her experience and research in Los

Angeles, yet maintaining the critical distance that informs a sociological study. Her

research provides illuminating insight into the dynamics of art and commitment,

politics and business, seen through the prism of the Iraq War. She depicts the

constraints weighing on different types of artists, underscoring that individual

commitment may differ according to the artist’s status in the industry. While there

have been many studies focusing on war films as objects to be analysed, Violaine

Roussel challengingly discusses the reasons behind professional commitment or artistic

restraint, thus drawing a ground-breaking portrait of artists in Hollywood.

AUTHORS

DELPHINE LETORT

Université du Maine – Le Mans

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Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan(eds), Major Problems in AmericanPopular CultureBoston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.

Elsa Grassy

REFERENCES

Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (eds), Major Problems in American Popular Culture,

Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.

1 So far, most popular culture readers published have been collections of essays (like The

Soul of Popular Culture, edited by Mari Lynn Kittelson as early as 1987), or collections of

theoretical texts presenting a more or less felicitous or enlightening medley of French

theory and postmodernism. In the second category, John Storey’s Cultural Theory and

Popular Culture: A Reader (Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006) – part of a diptych with Cultural

Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Pearson Education, 2006) – runs the gamut of

conceptual tools available to the popular culture scholar through founding texts and

other secondary sources, from Marxism to Postmodernism via Feminism and

Structuralism. Then there are more thematic, but just as theoretical books, like Cultural

Studies and the Study of Popular Cultures: Theories and Methods (Edinburgh University

Press, 1996), another Storey opus whose chapters focus on TV, fiction, film, the press,

music, consumption, and globalization. Those books are obviously destined to graduate

students and researchers.

2 By contrast, Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan’s Major Problems in American Popular

Culture is both a historians’ book, and one that – in spite of its limitations – will prove

fitting for use in the classroom, especially when teaching undergraduates. The authors

focus on fourteen topics in American popular culture, presented in chronological order.

Following the usual format for the collection, each chapter starts with a general

introduction, followed by primary sources covering several 'popular culture'

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specificities of the period, and then by essays about the same topics. A useful

bibliography closes each chapter. The book is complemented by a website giving access

to various resources, including audio and video recordings, sheet music collections, as

well as links to museums and exhibits websites.

3 Despite the promise of the book’s title, it must be stressed that the reader will not find

here a list of issues pertaining to the study of American popular culture. In the preface

to the book, the authors make it clear that “the documents and essays in this volume

address four major problems that historians encounter in studying an interpreting

popular culture: defining our object of study, the role of audiences, the relationship

between popular culture and society, and how to think about the globalization of

cultures” (xv). Identity (gender, class, and race), technologies, commercialization and

the role of the nation state are identified as secondary 'problems.' Hence, although the

opening chapter strives to define popular culture as a research object and makes the

case for studying it (with essays by George Lipsitz, Stuart Hall, and John Clarke), the

collection does not read as an investigation of various issues relating to American

popular culture per se. Rather, it is a history of American popular culture taken piece by

piece, with each chapter listing issues for the period under consideration.

4 The 'major problem' of this book for American Studies scholars might be that the

“major problems” tackled here are not made understandable by the historical periods

studied; rather, they themselves provide illustrations (taken from popular culture) for

the periods studied. It is quite revealing that the first chapter, “Why Study Popular

Culture”, should focus on the birth of popular culture studies “as a subfield of history.”

Major Problems in American Popular 'History' would be a more accurate title. While the

authors quote George Lipsitz, saying, “popular culture is not the side show of history,

but rather the main event” (2) – popular culture is precisely treated here as an 'event,'

not as a stream that connects several generations and periods in American history.

Fragmenting the popular narrative into historical tableaux obscures its nature as a

contested terrain where visions collide, merge, disappear, then resurface, ad lib.

5 Given the width of the material the authors tried to cover, this is not a perfect book –

even for historians. Some widely studied issues are all but absent from the work (LGBT,

subcultures, space and place, and tourism, to name but a few), while others are

leitmotivs. Race, for example, is the central theme chosen for the chapter on the

second half of the 19th century and minstrel shows, then makes cameo appearances in

chapter 8 (“Cars as Popular Culture: Democracy, Racial Difference, and New

Technology, 1920-1939”), chapter 10 (“Defining Popular Music: The Concept of

Authenticity and the Role of Culture Brokers, 1935-1950”), and chapter 13 (“Popular

Culture and Globalization: Beyond Imperialism”). And while there are two chapters

devoted to the 1950s (11: “Television Becomes Part of the Family, 1955-1965” and 12:

“Youth and Popular Culture during the Cold War, 1952-1960”), the Counterculture is

conspicuously absent from the volume, except for a quick mention page 381.

6 Given the scope of the project, one understands that the authors have proposed an

itinerary (the panoramic kind) of American popular culture, which, all things said, does

not really fulfill the promises of the title. Each chapter does not truly address a

'problem' of popular culture, but rather a period in the history of popular culture, with

its core and secondary issues. This is clearly the authors’ aim, as stated in the first line

of the preface: “Popular culture presents a critical group of players, texts, and activities

for examining the history of everyday life in the United States” (emphasis mine).

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7 The interest of the book rests mostly on its wealth of primary sources, a valuable asset

for teachers of American popular culture. In each chapter, essays are paired with

relevant primary sources, including advertising, photographs, speeches, and excerpts

from plays or novels. As such, this volume can be compared to Jim Cullen’s Popular

Culture in American History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), whose ten essays similarly combine

primary and secondary sources; although in reverse order, which guarantees a better

understanding of primary documents. While some may prefer a less directed gaze, one

regrets the lack of suggested questions on the texts. The separation of primary and

secondary sources (the required format for the collection), and the lack of a general

introduction establishing links between both kinds make it harder to understand at

first sight why a picture of a Native American family in a car was chosen for the chapter

on the automobile. It is only later, in the introduction to the secondary sources for the

chapter, that the global pattern is revealed, the second part of the chapter including an

essay on Native Americans and cars. The same goes for the 'Fireside Chat' chosen to

illustrate the advent of the radio in America: the text seems out of place, and even

when put in perspective with the corresponding essay, it tells us more about FDR than

on the significance of the radio. While the chapters in the Cullen book are also

presented in chronological order, and may appear as case studies of a particular

moment of popular culture, connections are made across periods. This is something

that Smulyan and Franz’s book is missing, especially in the absence of a thematic index.

8 Franz and Smulyan’s ability to gather fascinating sources on aspects of American

popular culture commands respect, and the introduction, which lists websites and

academic associations devoted to the study of popular culture, will be useful to aspiring

popular culture scholars. But this book will disappoint popular culture specialists by its

lack of focus on 'problems' for the sake of historical perusal. While Major Problems in

American Popular Culture won’t help graduate students of American popular culture

delve into matters of race, class, gender, age, mediation, and other 'major problems'

thoroughly, it will provide professors teaching panoramic undergraduate classes on

American popular culture a suitable itinerary.

AUTHORS

ELSA GRASSY

Université de Strasbourg

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Carol MacKeogh, Díóg O’Connell, Documentary in a Changing State:Ireland since the 1990sCork: Cork University Press, 2012, 176 p.

Estelle Epinoux

1 Documentary in a Changing State, Ireland since the 1990s, written by two Irish lecturers in

media studies, not only falls into the field of media studies but more globally into those

of sociology, history, politics and cultural studies with which several links are drawn. It

emerged after a documentary conference held in 2007 at the Institute of Art, Design

and Technology, at Dún Laoghaire in Ireland. The book is a collection of essays and

interviews from different contributors – coming from Northern Ireland, the Republic of

Ireland and France – and from different backgrounds: academics (Harvey O’Brien,

Desmond Bell), filmmakers (Alan Gilsenan, Donald Taylor Black), producers (Maíre

Kearney, Rachel Lysaght), journalists (Mary Raftery) and writers (Kevin Rafter, Alan

Gilsenan). It is divided into four sections within which documentaries are looked at

from different angles. Both the producing context the documentaries were made in and

the impact of those films are analysed.

2 The first section deals with theory and practice, starting a reflection on the role of

documentary, then exploring ethnographic and socially engaged documentaries and

ending with a study on the relationship of history to documentary film, referring to

documentaries such as Hard Road to Klondike (1999) or Rebel Frontier (2004), both directed

by Desmond Bell.

3 The second section of the book entitled “Documentary: Critical Practice” includes

personal reflections from practitioners who, in the past twenty years, have addressed

social issues in documentaries which have had an impact on Irish society and which

also highlight “the ethical dilemmas that the documentary maker must face” (p. 10)

when directing a documentary.

4 The third section of the book tackles the questions of policy and politics regarding

documentaries, presenting different aspects of production. It starts with the main

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changes which have taken place in documentary production. It then pinpoints the roles

of independent producers and directors as well as the role of RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís

Éireann) in financing documentaries. The third section also deals with the question of

programming documentaries, referring to the role of TG4 (Teilifís na Gaeilge) - a

branch of public service broadcasting - and finishes with the digital impact on

documentary in Ireland.

5 The final section of the book relates to the future developments of documentaries in

Ireland relying on several interviews with ‘key players’, according to the authors: the

director Ken Wardrop (Love is like a Butterfly, 2004), the producer Alan Maher and the

director Mary Raftery (Suffer the Little Children, 1999). The different sections of the book

also provide the reader with five tables, which give figures concerning the different

financing programmes which have helped to produce documentaries be it by RTÉ or

the IPU (Independent Production Unit) as well as figures on the number of hours

devoted to documentary programming.

6 Documentary in a Changing State, Ireland since the 1990s offers an interesting insight in the

recent developments of documentary films in Ireland and more precisely on their

questioning of the Irish State, of Irish history and of current problems, while following

its main thread of thought, which is to “explore the ongoing discourse and relationship

between theory and practice” (p. 9). The documentary film Unheard Voices (2009)

directed by Jolene Mairs and Cahal McLaughlin is an example of that process. Unheard

Voices tells the story of six individuals who either lost someone or were injured during

the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1968-early 1990s) and in the chapter entitled Unheard

Voices: Recording Stories from the Troubles, the directors of the film explain how they

conceived their documentary so as “to establish a model of documentary film-making

that would allow them to tell their story” (p. 29).

7 The book also provides a historical approach of the evolution of documentaries in

Ireland which, fifty years ago, were considered as the “handmaiden of the state” (p. 1)

and regarded with suspicion and distrust by the Irish state which resorted to the use of

much censorship whereas today the media have become the “watchdog of society” (p.

1). The reasons for the late flourishing of investigative documentaries in Ireland is

thoroughly discussed in the book, which explains that such an evolution has to be

found in the “new culture and civil society” (p. 3) which developed in the 1990s and

which led to more questioning of Irish society and to less trust in the institutions on

the part of the population. It also finds its roots in several changes such as the

economic growth undergone by the country, the cultural impact of the Internet on

society and Ireland’s membership of Europe. The book stresses that the media not only

focused on these changes but that they also furthered them. The investigative

documentaries made in the 1990s question the evolution of Irish society at large and at

the same time they also highlight “the changing state of documentary as a form of

communication” (p. 8), describing Irish broadcasting structures and the characteristics

of documentary form, documentary appearing as “a prism through which key moments

in recent Irish history are negotiated, revealed (…) informing us on the nature of these

changes” (p. 11).

8 An example of such an evolution is the documentary Dear Daughter (1996), directed by

Louis Lentin, which deals with the story of a woman who spent thirteen years in an

industrial school in Dublin, run by the Sisters of Mercy. The impact of the documentary

was so important that it “obliged the government to respond to abuses of power in

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religious and state-run institutions” (p. 1). As pointed out in the book, Irish

documentaries “have shaken the country’s central institutions” (p. xvii). Regarding his

documentary, Louis Lentin states that he detests the term ‘documentarist’, explaining

that his role is the following one: “when permitted I tell stories, stories that I hope will

reveal, reflect and resonate” (p. 76).

9 Documentary in a Changing State, Ireland since the 1990s, while providing an in-depth and

relevant “insider perspective” (p. 9) of the recent documentaries produced in Ireland

also offers an insight into the Irish state and above all it examines the evolution of Irish

documentary films in the past twenty years thus filling the gap of an “insufficient

recognition of the Irish documentary story” (p. xviii).

AUTHORS

ESTELLE EPINOUX

Université de Limoges

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Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of theNews: Media Coverage and the Makingof 9/11New York & London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.

Delphine Letort

REFERENCES

Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11, New York

& London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.

1 Brian A. Monahan’s book examines the changing work practices in the mainstream

media, underscoring the economic, technological, and cultural shifts that have affected

the news industry, which has turned into a for-profit business over the last twenty

years. While the first chapter of the book provides a theoretical overview of what the

author defines as “public drama,” in reference to the news packages devised by the

media to attract a larger audience, the second chapter focuses on a constructionist

analysis of the treatment of 9/11 in the media (television, press and the Internet), and

the third chapter assesses the consequences of this media strategy, through the

memory it constructed of the events. The focus on Ground Zero in on-location news

reports prompted journalists to pinpoint the involvement of fire fighters in the

emergency response. Dubbed the “knights in shining fire helmets” by the New York

Times, the fire fighters were turned into heroes and their collective valorisation

continued for weeks and months after September 11 (140).

2 “We are in the age of the endless news cycle,” asserts the author considering that 24-

hour television news networks such as MSNBC and the Internet have contributed to the

transformation of news into entertainment (3). News workers have been driven away

from long-standing values that defined the core of their profession, including

“objectivity, public interest, the pursuit of truth” (3), and encouraged to shape

compelling stories into “newsworthy” information that “make it sell,” prioritizing

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highly dramatic and emotional news items that include “stirring accounts, heartfelt

moments, captivating images, harrowing encounters, and compelling characters” (xii-

xiii). News workers play up the dramatic stories of news items through words, statistics

and images that sensationalize the events; they create plots and shape characters to

transform individual news items into dramatic news story lines. The author highlights

the impact of the devised strategy: “newsworthiness” and “public drama” develop and

sustain the visibility of individuals whose newly gained fame and celebrity combine

with “moral currency.” Provided they continue to draw media attention, these people

may use the legitimacy accrued in the process to speak or act on specific issues.

3 The author chronicles how 9/11 was treated by the media on a day-to-day basis from

the moment news broke out that a plane had hit the Twin Towers to September 17. Not

only does he compare various shows and television channels, but he is also able to

pinpoint the progressive shift in focus by retracing how the events were framed from

morning to afternoon and evening programs. Monahan emphasizes that 9/11 was

interpreted through the “moral shock” it produced (58-64); the media advanced the

notion of American victimization and the need for a military hunt for justice. By

quoting from the programs he mentions, illustrating the simplifying narratives that

were shaped at the time, he demonstrates the media gave the Bush Administration a

moral ground to respond militarily. The news reporters spotlighted the situation on

Ground Zero, including the rescue efforts and the tales of narrow escape or tragic

deaths, downplaying the crash of Airline Flight 93 in western Pennsylvania.

4 Looking back to the media footage of the period, Monahan singles out the role of the

fire fighters, who embodied the characters and provided the gripping stories necessary

for the construction of public drama. The Official Fire Department City of New York

(FDNY) gained power and visibility because fire fighters were hailed as the heroes of

9/11 across the media spectrum. The FDNY’s newfound public status made them able to

use their “moral currency” (37-38; 154-170) to resist Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s decisions to

reduce the number of rescue workers on site in November 2001 (160). On the other

hand, President Georges W. Bush and other political elites exploited the symbiotic

relationship between the FDNY and Ground Zero to articulate domestic and

international policies. While Democrat Jim McGreevey and Republican Bret Schundler

both courted the fire fighters’ endorsement during the campaign for New Jersey

governor (165), New York governor George Pataki repeatedly praised fire fighters in an

attempt to capitalize on their popularity (166). For Monahan, the media have taken

part in constructing the “ideology of September 11,” which has become “a morality tale

about patriotism, loss, victimhood and heroes” (172). He underscores the rhetorical use

of 9/11 in George W. Bush’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s speeches, suggesting the

media helped create support for the Bush administration’s surveillance policies.

5 The author alludes to other events that have undergone identical media treatment –

Hurricane Katrina, the O.J. Simpson trial, the disappearance of Chandra Levy, among

others, thus demonstrating that his frame of analysis can be transferred to other cases.

He underscores that the mainstream news media influence our perception of social

reality by ascribing meaning to the events they present through specific framing.

However, laying stress on what is deemed as newsworthy and valuable information to

attract more viewers may often prove distorting. The chaos following Katrina was all

too often framed as an issue of law and order, downplaying the humanitarian crisis that

wreaked havoc in New Orleans and the race and class dimension of the drama.

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6 Monahan’s book provides the viewer with the theoretical tools necessary to

comprehend the media logics and politics. Based on a close analysis of media framing in

the wake of 9/11, the author manages to express a critical view about a time of

confusion. The book also implicitly hints at all the unsaid, suggesting the mainstream

media can no longer be deemed as a reliable source of information considering its

infotainment slant. The author pinpoints the limits of public drama when he points out

that packaging news as a dramatic and emotionally gripping story all too often

produces misrepresentations – “a significantly slanted picture of reality” (182).

AUTHORS

DELPHINE LETORT

Université du Maine – Le Mans

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Rock History and CultureChristophe Pirenne, Une histoire musicale du rock (Paris: Fayard, 2011,800 p.); Claude Chastagner, De la culture rock (Paris: PUF, 2011, 277 p.)

Éric Gonzalez

1 Two ambitious works written by French-speaking scholars tackle rock music as a

research object, from different but complementary perspectives. Both are a definite

must-read for anyone interested in the contextualisation of rock music in western

popular culture.

2 In Une histoire musicale du rock (i.e. A Musical History of Rock), rock music is approached

from the point of view of the people – musicians and industry – behind the music.

Christophe Pirenne endeavours to examine that field from a musicologist’s perspective.

He chooses to define rock as a generic term designating recorded music “encompassing

the legacies of African-American music in North America, ie rock in the strict sense of

the word, but also a myriad of related genres, such as soul music, funk, rap, electronic

music or reggae” (11-13). The passages describing the modus operandi of the music

industry are quite illuminating and shed light on the numerous and concise

musicological analyses of songs which punctuate this quasi-comprehensive history of

numerous types of music, ranging from early rock ’n’ roll to techno, hip-hop and even

doom metal. Pirenne’s knowledge of the subjects he deals with is nothing short of

impressive. Popular music fans, who will enjoy the accessible style of the author, will at

– very rare – times question Pirenne’s assertions1, but Une histoire musicale du rock will

prove an invaluable reference book to music lovers and researchers alike. However,

both types of readers will lament an editorial work which is not always on a par with

the quality and the scope of the author’s research. The index is limited to names of

musicians and song titles, but entries like ‘blue notes,’ ‘power chords’ or – to choose an

admittedly less common phrase – ‘skank beats’2 would have made such an ambitious

and expansive work much easier to use.3

3 In De la culture rock (i.e. Of Rock Culture) Claude Chastagner focuses less on the music

itself than on the social, political and cultural significance of rock, and more

particularly its subversive content. His is a cross-disciplinary methodology in which he

draws conceptual tools chosen from various fields – sociology of culture, philosophy,

aesthetics and cultural history – to find a third way between the blind optimism of

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cultural studies and postmodernist theory’s fatalistic premises and assumptions.

Chastagner’s thematic approach is particularly enlightening not only in our

understanding of rock music and musicians, but also certain crucial aspects of western

culture as a whole, with keywords such as institutionalisation, cultural hierarchy and

creative industries serving as points of reference. The pervasiveness of rock enables

him to depart from academics’ tendency to shy away from expressing and

substantiating actual opinions about aspects which would lead them to step outside

their research domain. Some of his conclusions – for example the parallel he draws

between rock’s loss of rebel potential and Christianity’s loss of relevance in the 21st

century – are arguable, of course, but all are extremely stimulating and written in a

clear and concise style. Chastagner’s knowledge of rock and his command of the

concepts he uses are equal to the task he sets himself. Few essays have managed to take

the study of that subject to such levels of competence and critical distance. Once again

though, an index would have been a welcome addition.

NOTES

1. For instance, in “Rock Music” on the Pixies’ Bossanova album, Black Francis does not rumble

pseudo-lyrics that make no sense (468), but pronounces actual words: “Your mouth’s a mile

away/I’m already gone/Hey you know me/Encantuse ». The example of Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely

Heart” to illustrate the ubiquity of the C major, F major and G major chord sequence is not totally

convincing either (66).

2. ‘Blue note’ is the name given to the seventh, and, to a lesser extent, third degrees of a scale

when they are flattened by a semitone or less, giving jazz, blues and rock music an unmistakeably

‘bluesy’ feel. Rock guitar players very often use ‘power chords’ which consist of only the tonic

and the fifth; the third is omitted, which makes it possible to play a power chord in both major

and minor keys. A ‘skank beat’ is a snare on the downbeat and kick on the upbeat drum pattern,

very often used in thrash metal, giving the illusion of a doubling of the tempo.

3. A complementary online index could be relatively easy to implement, Cf. Frederic Martel,

Mainstream (Paris : Flammarion, 2010), 6, 455.

AUTHOR

ÉRIC GONZALEZ

Université Rennes 2-Haute Bretagne

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