Representations are discourses of imagined and rendered connections that may influence opinion or action, or effect change. They include, but are not limited to, texts, visualisations, music and landscapes. Culture is about shared ways of living and is linked to representations through meanings expressed in the material and symbolic practices of everyday life.
Representations are cultural artefacts, and culture is produced through processes that are understood as representable or non-representable. Non-representable processes are related primarily to emotions. There are great difficulties in simultaneously describing cultures, representations and masculinities because each has real effects on the others. Cultures are experienced and understood through our bodies. It follows that the production of culture also produces certain kinds of embodiment. An abstraction of this kind makes sense only if ‘bodies’ are understood not only as the physical ‘embodiment’ of certain kinds of people but also as a culturally constructed set of representations about what bodies are appropriate for men and women. To a large degree, the representations of popular culture are geared towards identifying what it is, and what it means, to be a man or a woman (Mitchell 2000:171). These meanings are constantly negotiated, contested and resisted through lived experiences. Popular representations such as television, radio, advertising, video-games, public service announcements, poetry, stories, books and web-pages are particularly powerful forums for displaying cultural ideals about masculinity.
Steve Neale observed in 1983 that representations of masculinity had rarely been studied (see Neale 1993). In the last couple of decades, there has been an explosion of interest in the ways men are represented in popular culture. Prior to this, masculinity was not considered a problematic or troubling category. Contemporary interest is sparked by feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, media studies and, more recently, poststructuralist theory. A powerful initiator of this work came from feminist study of film.
In 1975, Laura Mulvey rocked the world of film studies with an article that used psychoanalytic theory as a political weapon. The thrust of her attack focused on a larger political unconscious that created meaning through visual representations. Mulvey (1975:8) suggested that many mainstream movies are reinforced by ‘patterns of fascination already existing in and at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have molded them’. Hollywood cinema, she claimed, reified an important aspect of Western culture wherein the audience looked, the male character looked and the female character was looked at. Her constitution of the male gaze not only as a filmic reality but also as part of a patriarchal unconscious furthered the 1970s feminist elaboration of woman as object of desire. Mulvey’s male gaze characterises masculinity as active and powerful both in the narrative action of male characters and the political unconscious of male filmmakers and male viewers. For Mulvey and her followers, the power of Hollywood representations is opened up through psychoanalytic theory. For example, this theory positions all portrayals of bodily mutilation as genderlinked to male fears of castration. Evidence from science fiction’s cybernetic implants to the draping of human flesh over Terminators to slasher-film representations of spewing innards and gushing blood demonstrates the preoccupation with violent transgressing of male bodies.
Henry Giroux (1995) characterises the representation of male violence in Hollywood action cinema and in video-games as ‘ritualistic’. In cinema, it is commonly accompanied with male action heroes such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. Violence of this type is dramatic and visceral, serving primarily for entertainment. At the same time, Giroux argues, the focus on human/alien, good guy/bad guy divisions serves to represent violence in sexual and racial terms. Alternatively, the representation of aggression in movies like Boys Don’t Cry (1999) is ‘symbolic violence’ because it connects on-screen brutality to real human problems (in this case, cross-dressing and homophobia) and therefore serves more as critical engagement than as entertainment. Finally, Giroux argues that representations of ‘hyperreal violence’ in movies like Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) reduce brutality to an aesthetic that isolates male contexts from larger social contexts.
What does the spectator get out of representations of violence, and how does this relationship connect to gender? In her classic discussion of the slasher film, Carol Clover’s (1989) concern is how to explain the appeal to a large male audience of a film genre that invariably features a female victim-hero (such as Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien series or Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween series). Clover characterises these women as ‘Final Girl’ and notes that men’s ease at engaging with them is indicative of crossgender representations. The Final Girl’s unfemininity is marked by her abilities with ‘the active investigating gaze normally reserved for males’ (Clover 1989:93). According to Clover (1989:94), the association between Final Girl and the monster is a ‘shared masculinity, materialised in all those phallic symbols—and it is also a shared femininity, materialised in what comes next: the castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer in her hands’.
Neale (1993) points in an important direction here: if power is attained through representing men as perpetrators and sadists, what kind of power lies in the portrayal of men as objects of desire? He opens a space in Mul-vey’s thesis to argue that the elements she considers in relation to representations of women can and should be considered in relation to images of men. His point is not to detract from critiques that the spectorial gaze of mainstream cinema is implicitly male, but to note that the erotic elements that relate male images to spectators are constantly repressed and denied: ‘women are a problem, a source of anxiety, of obsessive enquiry; men are not. Where women are investigated, men are not’ (Neale 1993:19). To investigate masculine representations is to set aside norms, to embrace contradictions, and to dig deeper into what is disavowed in patriarchal contexts.
Robert Hanke (1992) argues that to understand the relations between representations of masculinity and Western culture, we need to understand the relations between hegemonic, conservative and subordinate masculinities. Hegemonic masculinity—premised on the subordination of women and other minorities and focused on a dominant male Anglo-European white culture—is frequently articulated in representations of men. Many action films, Westerns, sport telecasts, beer commercials and comic book heroes represent this form of masculinity. Conservative masculinities are represented by books, advertisements, television shows and movies that suggest a less macho and sexist narrative of middle-class professional men. This image, suggested by American television shows such as Seinfeld and Frasier, is a mythic expression of the cultural ascendancy of the professional/ managerial class. Subordinated masculinities are elaborated in representations of groups of men who are marginalised within the hegemonic culture. Hanke argues, as an example, that gay men are often negatively stereotyped as subversives, superficial or victims of ridicule.
Delgado and Stefancic (1995:210) argue that African—American men historically are portrayed as ‘criminal, lascivious, irresponsible, and not particularly smart’. The colonial depiction of black males as bestial and brutish, to their portrayal as childlike buffoons in D.W.Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) led Heidi Nast (2000) to connect cultural representations with infantilisation and ‘unconscious’ colonial violence and racism. Media images have historically played on fears of the sexual violation of white women by animalistic black males. Racist images of black men give society permission to perpetuate discrimination and injustice. Nast notes that this discrimination takes material forms such as the creation of a barrier between whites and blacks from 1900 to 1930 through Chicago’s famous elevated railway.
Suzanne Hatty (2000:165) argues that the issue of self-representation has assumed an urgency in the black community, as suggested, for example, in the work of film director Spike Lee or the so-called ‘pornography’ of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in his depiction of black male bodies. In her writing on the latter, Kobena Mercer (1994:173) argues that Mapplethorpe staged taboo sexual and racial imagery to say something about how white people look at black male bodies as different, excessive and hypersexual. Other problematic agendas foment from popular representations of naked bodies. Kelly Karrell (2003), for example, observes that working-class men in the film The Full Monty (1997) became convenient metaphors for an invigorated post-imperial national identity that preserved the oppression of British class divisions.
Representations of men as active, virile, commanding and dominant predominate in Western media through the 1960s. The idea of a ‘new man’ (which closely relates to Hanke’s conservative masculinity described above) refers to the emergence of new representations of masculinity in Western society during the 1970s and 1980s. This development reacts to critiques of chauvinism and sexism by the women’s movement and gay rights activism and also creates an important cultural response to social change through representations focused on domesticity, noncompetitiveness and gentleness as well as selfconfidence. Representations turned to a more heterosexual ‘new man’ during the 1990s in magazines such as GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly) and FHM (For Him Magazine) as suggested by a format that is highly visual but also ironic and cynical (Jackson et al. 2001).
Hegemonic masculinities hold sway through a variety of representational strategies, including portraying feminised masculinities, black bestiality and negative or humorous stereotypes of working-class masculinities. They work through both the exclusion and the inclusion of subordinated masculinities, ‘thus supporting and maintaining a gender hierarchy among men that justifies and legitimises the oppression of gay men’ (Hanke 1992:196) and other minorities. The overall cultural effect of these processes of representation is to gloss over any real questioning of power relations, gender inequities, work relations and sexual and racial politics. Through changing representations, there is a shift in the cultural meanings of masculinity without any shift in dominant social and spatial material arrangements. This notion of stasis is disputed by Katie Willis (2005), who argues that while national representations of masculinity in Latin America still focus on ‘the macho’, men’s performances as men vary significantly across space. Clearly there are important geographies as well as histories of the representations and performances of masculinity.
Engagement with video-game and musical representations is complex because different forms of interaction and performance offset static theories of spectatorship. Portable gameand music-players, Blackberries and mobile telephones enable texts, visualisations, music and other cultural representations to be accessed in relative privacy, even when in public places. Such discretion enables the possibility of subversive communities such as the production of queer spaces as well as the possibility of advertising and coercion by corporate interests. That video-game representations incite subversion and aggression is contested by data that show a sharp decline in aggravated assault among teenage boys in the late 1990s at precisely the same time that some of the most violent games (e.g. Mortal Kombat) appeared on the market.
Recent writing on embodied, emotional contexts for masculinities and their relations to empowering difference and enabling social transformations opened the door for a reappraisal of the uses of representational theory and its relations to culture. The core criticism of representations is their lack of connection to the material world. However, Deleuze (1986), in particular, claims their uselessness for understanding the embodied affects that are deeply part of culture. Deleuzian poststructural theory suggests a new set of relations with the material world, one that challenges static representations of identity that, in turn, facilitate a caricature of men embedded in a form of power that is always about the construction of dominant hierarchies (Aitken 2006). In contrast, the call to understand emotional bodies and images is certainly a call for the fluidity of male subjectivity, and it is also a call to understand the relationships among representations, masculinities and places and contexts.
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