Embodying Masculinities: Towards A History of The Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature

Armengol_dd cb:Layout 1 11/17/2012 9:23 AM Page 1
The body remains the most visibly gendered social and cultural construction. Not only
does it classify individuals into two different sexes from the very start of their lives,
3 MAS C UL IN ITY STUDIES
but some of the most obvious social divisions—such as race and nationality, age and
Embodying
physical appearance, religion, or class—are also written on the body. Although most
ARMENGOL, ED.
studies have focused on women’s bodies, the present volume seeks to explore both
the construction and deconstruction of the male body in and through U.S. culture and
Masculinities
literature from the early twentieth century up to the present. In so doing, this book
illustrates not only the changing nature of the male body but also its recurrent use
as a political weapon throughout U.S. cultural and literary history. Embodying
Masculinities sketches the first history of the male body in modern U.S. culture and
literature. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of gender and mas-
culinity studies as well as those in American studies.
Towards a History of the Male
Embodying Masculinities
Body in U.S. Culture and Literature
Josep M. Armengol received his Ph.D. in English from the
University of Barcelona. He is currently Associate Professor of
English at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. A
renowned masculinity scholar, he has published in prestigious
academic journals such as Signs, the Hemingway Review,
and Men and Masculinities. His books include Debating Mas-
culinity; Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (Lang,
2010; winner of the 2010 literary scholarship prize of the Spanish Association for Anglo-
American Studies); Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and
Cinema; and Queering Iberia: Iberian Masculinities at the Margins (Lang, 2012). He
is an international advisory editor for the journal Men and Masculinities and is work-
ing on a book on African American masculinities.
PETER LANG
EDITED BY
Josep M. Armengol
www.peterlang.com
Armengol_dd cb:Layout 1 11/17/2012 9:23 AM Page 1
The body remains the most visibly gendered social and cultural construction. Not only
does it classify individuals into two different sexes from the very start of their lives,
3 MAS C UL IN ITY STUDIES
but some of the most obvious social divisions—such as race and nationality, age and
Embodying
physical appearance, religion, or class—are also written on the body. Although most
ARMENGOL, ED.
studies have focused on women’s bodies, the present volume seeks to explore both
the construction and deconstruction of the male body in and through U.S. culture and
Masculinities
literature from the early twentieth century up to the present. In so doing, this book
illustrates not only the changing nature of the male body but also its recurrent use
as a political weapon throughout U.S. cultural and literary history. Embodying
Masculinities sketches the first history of the male body in modern U.S. culture and
literature. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of gender and mas-
culinity studies as well as those in American studies.
Towards a History of the Male
Embodying Masculinities
Body in U.S. Culture and Literature
Josep M. Armengol received his Ph.D. in English from the
University of Barcelona. He is currently Associate Professor of
English at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. A
renowned masculinity scholar, he has published in prestigious
academic journals such as Signs, the Hemingway Review,
and Men and Masculinities. His books include Debating Mas-
culinity; Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (Lang,
2010; winner of the 2010 literary scholarship prize of the Spanish Association for Anglo-
American Studies); Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and
Cinema; and Queering Iberia: Iberian Masculinities at the Margins (Lang, 2012). He
is an international advisory editor for the journal Men and Masculinities and is work-
ing on a book on African American masculinities.
PETER LANG
EDITED BY
Josep M. Armengol
www.peterlang.com
Embodying
Masculinities
MASCULINITY STUDIES
Literary and Cultural Representations
Josep M. Armengol and Àngels Carabí

General Editors
Vol. 3
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Embodying
Masculinities
Towards a History of the Male Body

in U.S. Culture and Literature
EDITED BY
Josep M. Armengol
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Embodying masculinities: towards a history of the male body
in U.S. culture and literature / edited by Josep M. Armengol.
p. cm. — (Masculinity studies: literary and cultural representations; vol. 3)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Men. 2. Masculinity. 3. Masculinity in popular culture.
4. Human body—Social aspects. I. Armengol, Josep M.
HQ1090.E447 305.31—dc23 2012041676
ISBN 978-1-4331-1891-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-0962-1 (e-book)
ISSN 2161-2692
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
Chapter 7 originally published as Martín, Sara. “El retorno de de Leónidas de Esparta: El fracaso de
la hiper-masculinización del héroe en la novela gráfica de Frank Miller y Lynn Varley 300 y su
adaptación cinematográfica”. Josep Martí & Yolanda Aixelà (coord.), Desvelando el cuerpo:
Perspectivas desde las ciencias sociales y humanas. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas & Institución Milà i Fontanals, copyright, 2010. 223–236. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the

University of Castilla-La Mancha for its financial support
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in Germany
CONTENTS
Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and

Literature: An Introduction
Josep M. Armengol 1
1 The Complete Body of Modernity in the 1920s: Negotiating

Hegemonic and Subordinated Masculinities in Ernest
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí 13
2 Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s American

Culture and Literature
Josep M. Armengol 31
3 Invisibilizing the Male Body: Exploring the Incorporeality of

Masculinity in 1950s American Culture
Mercè Cuenca 49
4 Breaking the Mold: Male Rock Performance, Glam, and the

(Re-)Imagination of the Male Body in the 1960s and 1970s
Esther Zaplana 63
5 The Cyborg and the Representation of Masculinity and

Femininity in the American Science Fiction Literature and
Film of the 1980s
Ángel Mateos-Aparicio 83
6 Action and Reaction: The Villain’s Body and Its Role in

Shaping the Heroic Body in Hollywood Action Films of
the 1990s
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci 103
vi Embodying Masculinities
7 Leonidas’s New Body: The Failed Hyper-Masculinization

of the Hero in Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s Graphic
Novel 300 (1998) and Its 2006 Film Adaptation
Sara Martín 125
8 Voicing the Father’s Body in Janice Mirikitani’s Asian

American Poetry
María Isabel Seguro 145
9 Contemporary Terrorist Bodies: The (De-)Construction of

Arab Masculinities in the United States
Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias 163
Contributors 185
Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S.
Culture and Literature: An Introduction
Josep M. Armengol
University of Castilla-La Mancha
Bodies are and always have been shaped according to the

specific cultural moment. There has never been a “natural” body:
a time when bodies were untainted by cultural practice.
Susie Orbach, Bodies (2009)
Probably, the body remains the most visibly gendered social and cultural
construction. Not only does the body classify individuals into two different
sexes from the very start of their lives, but some of the most obvious social
divisions⎯such as race and nationality, age and physical appearance,
religion, or class⎯are also written on the body. The body, as Todd W.
Reeser has argued, functions as one kind of “tabula rasa or inscriptive
surface…for culture, and discourse is inscribed on that matter, asserting its
power through inscription and reinscription” (91).
Yet, despite the growing body of theory on gender and the body, most of
the available studies on the subject, from the classical French feminism of
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Hélène Cixous’s “The
Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) to transatlantic texts such as Susan Bordo’s
Unbearable Weight (1993) or Writing on the Body (1997) by Conboy et al.,
have focused on women’s bodies.1 One need only take a look at the
bibliography to realize that most of the works on “the body” within feminist
and gender studies are really texts on “the (female) body.” Thus, for
example, Susie Orbach’s Bodies (2009), despite its general title, leaves the
male body largely unexplored, focusing instead on the links between sexual
politics, female dieting, and anorexia.2
There is, admittedly, a number of reasons for the explicit linkage
between women and the body. First of all, Western culture and philosophers,
from classical Greece to Descartes, have long established a clear-cut
dichotomy between masculinity and reason, on the one hand, and femininity
and the body, on the other. In an effort to secure the superiority of
masculinity, patriarchal culture has ensured that men be associated with
rationality and the mind, while women have been confined to the “less
important” realm of the body and its emotions.3 On a completely different
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Embodying masculinities: towards a history of the male body
in U.S. culture and literature / edited by Josep M. Armengol.
p. cm. — (Masculinity studies: literary and cultural representations; vol. 3)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Men. 2. Masculinity. 3. Masculinity in popular culture.
4. Human body—Social aspects. I. Armengol, Josep M.
HQ1090.E447 305.31—dc23 2012041676
ISBN 978-1-4331-1891-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-0962-1 (e-book)
ISSN 2161-2692
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
Chapter 7 originally published as Martín, Sara. “El retorno de de Leónidas de Esparta: El fracaso de
la hiper-masculinización del héroe en la novela gráfica de Frank Miller y Lynn Varley 300 y su
adaptación cinematográfica”. Josep Martí & Yolanda Aixelà (coord.), Desvelando el cuerpo:
Perspectivas desde las ciencias sociales y humanas. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas & Institución Milà i Fontanals, copyright, 2010. 223–236. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the

University of Castilla-La Mancha for its financial support
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in Germany
Towards a History of the Male Body 3
male and female nudes. Thus, for example, in 1972 Cosmopolitan published
a daring centerfold of Burt Reynolds (with his penis hidden between his
hands), while in 1977 John Travolta appeared in briefs as Tony Manero in
Saturday Night Fever, which was followed by the “musculinity” fever of the
1980s Hollywood industry,5 and Calvin Klein’s campaigns with beautiful,
young, muscular underwear models in the early 1990s. In line with this
increased social visibility, there has since the 1970s been as well a growing
number of studies on the body, in general, and male bodies, in particular.6
This has contributed not only to exploring the dynamics of the male body as
erotic object, but also to challenging the traditional dichotomy established in
visual culture between masculinity/activity/looking, on the one hand, and
femininity/passivity/to-be-looked-at-ness, on the other.7
While it seems clear, then, that there has recently been a fast-growing
interest in the male body in both social and scholarly terms, the present study
seeks to expand, and on occasion to tamper with, the existing theoretical
work in a number of ways. While several classic studies, perhaps most
notably by Foucault (History and Discipline) and Butler, devote several
pages to exploring the body, it must be remembered that their focus is on
sexuality and the (hetero)sexual regulation of bodies rather than the body
itself. Unlike these texts, then, the present study is centrally concerned with
the (male) body as a symbolic and gendered construction, not (just) with its
role within a politically heterosexist economy.
Second, some of the best-known books on the subject have come from
the fields of philosophy (Bordo Male; Foucault History and Discipline,
Butler; Laqueur), anthropology (Le Breton), and psychology (Orbach). Much
less has been written, however, on the issue of bodily representations,
particularly literary, even though one can only concur with Richard Dyer that
“it has become increasingly clear that at all levels how we think and feel we
are, how we are treated, is bound up with how we are represented as being”
(x).
Moreover, the study of cultural and literary representations of male
bodies, though growing, tends to focus on very specific texts and/or periods.
Thus, for example, Richard Dyer’s classic and highly influential study on
bodies and film limits itself to three selected Hollywood celebrities, while
Susan Jeffords or Yvonne Tasker concentrate on the muscleman hero of the
Hollywood action cinema of the 1980s. If these texts thus focus on bodily
representations from specific, yet isolated, historical moments, the present
4 Embodying Masculinities
study explores representations of male bodies in U.S. culture, particularly

literary and filmic, from the 1920s up to the present with a view to rethinking
male bodies from a comparative and trans-historical perspective. Even as
several scholars have analyzed the body as a specific cultural and historical
construction, most of these studies have provided a synchronic rather than
diachronic analysis. As a result, male bodies, though inscribed in their
specific cultural and historical context, have been largely disconnected from
each other, and from their own historical evolution. In this respect, this book
attempts not only to put male bodies in (their) context, but also in relation to
each other, so as to demonstrate their cultural and historical variability. In so
doing, we hope to be able to gain a deeper insight into both the continuities
and discontinuities of male bodily representations from different cultural and
historical moments.
Since the construction and representation of the (male) body has, as we
shall see, always been inflected by specific social, cultural, political, and
historical influences, the present study is also centrally concerned with
showing how the (male) body has recurrently been used as a political tool
reflecting and/or contesting different ideologies in different ways at different
points. While the body has long been read as social construction, this study
attempts to go one step further, suggesting how bodies are not only objects of
social practice but also agents in social practice. As Connell and
Messerschmidt have eloquently argued, bodies participate in social action by
establishing courses of social conduct and, therefore, the body must be seen
as “a participant in generating social practice” (851). In other words, this
study starts off from the critical assumption that bodies shape social action
and politics as much as they are shaped by social action and politics.
While scholarship has increasingly recognized that the body is a complex
social and political artifact that, because of its very visibility, has been put to
different uses at different times, most of the available studies have centered
on the political relevance of the body to a very specific time and place. Thus,
Stefan Dudink, for example, has discussed the meanings of visual
representations of violently opened male bodies vis-à-vis the growing
influence of the impermeable, neo-classical male body in late eighteenth-
century European political culture,8 whereas scholars such as Susan Jeffords
have analyzed the political significance of the rise of the muscleman hero in
the Hollywood action cinema of the 1980s.9 This study, on the other hand,
aims to explore the continued political relevance of the body to American
society and culture all through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Of course, we do not attempt to provide (were it possible) the definitive
history of the male body in the United States, nor do we expect to explore all
the complex social and political changes that have had a bearing on the
historical construction of the male body in 20th- and 21st-century American
culture. Rather, our overview of U.S. cultural representations of the male
body simply hopes to illustrate a few connections between male bodies and
their political context, as well as explore some recurrent political uses,
particularly those of remasculinization and/or feminization, to which male
bodies seem, as we shall see, to have been put.
Given its emphasis on the body as a political weapon, it should come as
no surprise, then, that this book is devoted to cultural representations,
especially literary and filmic, of male bodies.10 After all, writing itself, as
Calvin Thomas reminds us, is a “bodily function” which has the potential to
“alienate, to abject, to ‘feminize,’ to ‘de-mean’—and even to ‘queer’—a
heteronormative subjectivity ‘caught in the act’ of writing (to) itself” (63).11
In Thomas’s view, the repression of the male body demands a displacement
of the body, and all that it materially entails, onto the feminine. Since we also
write with the body, the materialization of the body in writing might pose a
radical challenge to heteronormative masculinity. If we consider male
disembodiment as a patriarchal strategy, then the project of male
reenfleshment, of writing on and through the male body, acquires, in
Thomas’s own words, “a certain feminist urgency” (71).12 It would thus seem
that focusing on textual representations of male bodies may be particularly
relevant to our aim here⎯i.e., to explore, and illustrate, several political uses
of the male body throughout twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. cultural
history.
In the opening chapter of the book, Teresa Requena-Pelegrí examines the
social and historical context for the construction of a manly ideal in the
1920s to then focus on the analysis of the white male body in one of the most
well known literary texts of the decade, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also
Rises (1926). Initially, she concentrates on the development of a standard of
manliness at the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries to later trace its
consolidation in the 20th century. Drawing from the work of gender theorists
such as Raewyn Connell and George Mosse, Requena-Pelegrí proceeds to
examine the notion of the whole male body in the context of modernity, and
relates it to the technological advances and the new possibilities for both
bodily perfection and compensation that such advances offered. In the second
part of the chapter, she goes on to explore the representation of male bodies
in The Sun Also Rises, paying special attention to its protagonist Jake Barne’s
emasculated body. Her analysis of the novel concentrates on the ways in
which masculinities constitute strategic performances that entail a
negotiation with both hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculine positions,
rather than an unfaltering alignment with one or the other.
The next chapter will analyze how the economic crisis that devastated
the country during the years of the Great Depression determined specific
constructions of masculinity and representations of the male body. The
workplace, a key definer for the American Self-Made man, turned to be
insecure, unreliable, or simply inexistent. Millions of unemployed men lived
this reality as a humiliating loss of their (male) status before their women,
their children, and before other men. Thus, they perceived themselves as
emasculated and impotent patriarchs. Feeling deprived of the optimism
which had characterized the Roaring Twenties, and having lost their faith in a
market economy which asserted their manhood, men’s masculinity and their
physicality had to be rethought in the 1930s. On the one hand, America made
an attempt to remasculinize its men through, for example, large New Deal
public murals and Proletarian novels depicting hard bodies at work. Yet, at
the same time, documentary literature, illustrated by well-known photo artists
like Dorothea Lange, tried to record the effects of the Depression providing
images of vulnerable, yet dignified, male bodily representations. On a similar
line, the discovery of poverty led many writers and artists to responsible
moves to the political Left from where they tried, like Steinbeck, to call for a
less physical and more relational way to assert manhood. The chapter
concludes, then, by exploring how writers such as John Steinbeck and
painters like Paul Cadmus problematized the hegemonic image of
“Proletarian musculinity” and, as a consequence, helped reformulate
hegemonic representations of the male body at the time.
In the next chapter, Mercè Cuenca describes the decade of the 1950s as
the core of the early Cold War era, characterized by its ideological
demonization of left-wing ideas, but also by its heterosexist enforcement of
gender binaries. While mainstream masculinity was explicitly defined as
pertaining to those men who fulfilled the roles of breadwinner, heterosexual
husband and father, the corporeality of men was not considered central to the
development of manhood. As a matter of fact, the capitalist idealization of
the middle-class, white-collar worker, who came to embody the “common

man” in mid-twentieth century America, had the paradoxical effect of
invisibilizing the male body as a marker of masculinity. In this chapter,
Cuenca will explore how this erasure of the masculine body as visible proof
of manhood can be traced in cinematic and literary texts of the 1950s, such as
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear
Window (1954).
Chapter 4, by Esther Zaplana, engages in a cultural analysis of rock
performance, in particular the Glam rock subgenre that emerged in the early
1970s, with the aim of exploring the meanings attached to the male body and
the artist’s (self-)representation on stage. The discussion will bring a
selection of performative images to illustrate the extent to which narratives of
the corporeal in rock open up questions about self-imaging in relation to the
gender-identified subject and the audience. Countercultural and oppositional
discourses in the 1960s and 1970s created a space that allowed for the
destabilization of hegemonic models of masculinity and impinged on the
interest rock artists showed in the referential power of the body and its
potential to subvert rigid gender distinctions and move beyond the limits of
patriarchal representations.
By the time Donna Haraway had published her “Manisfesto for Cyborgs”
(1985), the cyborg was already a well-established fictional character in the
American science fiction literature and film of the 1980s. Novels like
William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and films like Stanley Donen’s
Saturn 3 (1980) and James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) had already
popularized diverse representations of this compound of human and machine.
It was Haraway, however, who turned this fictional icon into a powerful
subversive myth, because she emphasized the multiple, hybrid nature of the
cyborg’s body, and read the cyborg as a challenge to traditional assumptions
about the human body based on binary oppositions such as
natural/technological, male/female, and white/colored. Cyborgs therefore
emerged as determined trespassers of gender and race barriers, and cyborg
novels and movies have consistently raised questions about the re-
conceptualization of sex and gender relations, reproduction, and family at a
time when the representation of masculinity and femininity in American
culture was undergoing a complete re-evaluation due to the influence of the
feminist movements and cultural shock motivated by the defeat in the
Vietnam War. In this chapter, Ángel Mateos-Aparicio will thus focus on how
the novels and films mentioned above, and others like Paul Verhoven’s
Robocop (1987) and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), enact the
struggle to portray the new models of femininity and masculinity in
American culture during the 1980s. This cultural uncertainty is represented
as a fiction battle between figurations of the cyborg as a subversive and
ambiguous hybrid creature, as Donna Haraway suggested, and visions of
what Cynthia Fuchs has called the “machocyborg:” an aggressive, solid,
muscular, hyper-masculine and Caucasian figuration of the cyborg that
represents the conservative reaction of the Reagan Era against the new
notions of identity generated by feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern
theories, and that is epitomized by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body in The
Terminator movies.
Moving onto the 1990s, Amaya Fernández-Menicucci explores the
relationship between the cinematic representation of the villain’s body and
the political and socio-cultural transition from the Second Gulf War to the
War on Terror. Her chapter focuses on the repercussions that a progressive
depolitization and deflation of the villainous body have on the action hero,
addressing the mechanisms through which the hero’s physical dimension
becomes relative to the bodily construction of his nemesis. To this end, she
centers her analysis on the role the male villain plays in shaping the white
male heteronormative heroic body as presented by Hollywood film industry
and, more specifically, in some of the most successful films in the action
genre, in an effort to expose the way in which the configuration of the
physical dimension of the masculine body (re)produces mainstream
conceptualizations of masculinities. In 1993, after the U.S.S.R. had collapsed
and the Vietnam ghost had been exorcized with the first U.S. victory on
Saddam Hussein, it was no longer necessary to present an image of national
power in terms of capacity for military aggression. Bill Clinton’s successful
presidential campaign, in fact, had been based on the necessity, on behalf of
the country, to focus on itself and on its internal struggle to boost economic
growth. This renewed concern for financial and industrial success, together
with Clinton’s foreign policy of “selective leadership,” will be reflected in
the way Hollywood heroes progressively become less engaged in physical
conquests and more preoccupied with projecting an image of moral and
intellectual supremacy. This becomes particularly evident in the conscious
choice of “politically correct” heroic bodies, whose self-confident
masculinity need not be overstated. In the wake of 1980s “hypermusculated”
and “hypermasculine” representations of mainstream cinematic heroes, the

last decade of the 20th century begins with a distinctive tendency towards
drawing on such heroicized bodies as those made popular by characters
Detective McClane in Die Hard and cyborg T-800 in Terminator. However,
the heroic body commercialized by the Hollywood Academy during the
1990s is also evidently subjected to a significant metamorphosis, which will
culminate in the 1980s cyborgs being turned into the slim and sleek digital
bodies of The Matrix (1999).
For her part, Sara Martín devotes her chapter to analyzing the popular
film 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006), a faithful adaptation of the eponymous
graphic novel about the battle of Thermopylae by Frank Miller and Lynn
Varley (1998), which unleashed considerable controversy due to its hyper-
masculinized, ultraviolent representation of the Spartan heroes led by King
Leonidas, and to its blatant homophobia in the characterization of Persian
Emperor Xerxes I. Miller’s work actually rewrites the sword-and-sandal epic
film The 300 Spartans (Rudolph Maté, 1962), a text much more discreet in
its presentation of the male body and the conduct of the patriarchal hero.
Martín argues that we must, therefore, wonder why the hyper-muscular body
of both hero and villain has been exaggerated to the point of being (arguably)
parodic or even plain ridiculous. The essay suggests that 300, both graphic
novel and film, assumes a naive, in-your-face masculinist stance in order to
offer contemporary American male spectators an imaginative space to
celebrate a patriarchal model of idealized masculinity, symbolized by Sparta,
which even women appear to support. Nonetheless, Leonidas’s new body⎯a
product of the modern gym or, as rumored, of digital special effects⎯, the
extreme brutality of the battling Spartans, and the homophobic portrait of
Xerxes undermine this renewed patriarchal hero, unwittingly deconstructing
his idealized masculinity and exposing him as just a new barbarian.
Moving beyond the hegemonic (i.e., white) body, the final two chapters
are devoted to analyzing non-white bodies in contemporary U.S. fiction.
Japanese American poet and activist Janice Mirikitani’s oeuvre is particularly
characterized by voicing anger and rage against negative stereotyping of the
racial feminine Other. However, Seguro shows how the poet’s commitment
to communal values and human rights, and her belief in creating empathetic
relationships so as to achieve a more egalitarian society, has inevitably led
her to address the issue of how Asian American male bodies have also been
inscribed with meaning. Looking at the material effects of such codification,
Seguro reads Mirikitani’s poetry as offering an insightful criticism of the

politics of representation which for generations has enhanced the silence of
the Asian American body politic and the indifference of a largely indifferent
civil society.
Like Asian men, Arab men have been highly stereotyped in the West
through a pervasive vilifying image, reproduced in cultural products such as
the media, films, or television series. This stereotyping has been theorized in
books as well known as Edward Said’s Orientalism, and can be summarized
through two main images: the Arab man as an emasculated, degenerate and
inept individual, as opposed to the portrayal of Arab males as
hypermasculine warriors, terrorists, and religious fanatics. Both images are
encapsulated in the same body: an Arab man with dark skin and beard,
wearing traditional clothes, and maybe even a turban. This imagery has been
emphasized in the last decade, since the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent wars
in the Middle East, which have helped reinforce the notions of Arab men as
inferior, as well as terrorist individuals. In her chapter, Marta Bosch-
Vilarrubias will first look at the pervasively negative and vilifying
construction of Arab and Muslim male corporealities that circulate in the
United States, and will then go on to consider the use of these bodies in Arab
American literature as a means of deconstructing these images. To do so,
Bosch will analyze a number of selected works of contemporary Arab
American women writers such as Diana Abu-Jaber, Mohja Kahf, and Laila
Halaby, among others.
Notes
1
Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir famously argued that the price men have to pay for
representing the universal is a loss of embodiment, whereas women’s confinement to the
body causes them to lose their subjectivity.
2
Similarly, Mari Luz Esteban’s anthropological study on the body, while insisting that any
gender identity is always a bodily identity, focuses on women’s gender identities and
bodies almost exclusively. Indeed, her literature review of the most significant feminist
studies on the body (29-44) tends to repeatedly equate “feminist studies” with “women’s
studies,” and “bodies” with “female bodies.” Furthermore, she associates Western ideals
of beauty and youth mostly with women, thus ignoring the growing influence of such
ideals on men, both gay and straight, whose bodies remain clearly understudied and
underrepresented throughout her book.
3
See Seidler. For a history of the genealogy or invention of the body as a separate entity,
see Le Breton (29-80), who argues that the separation between man and body is a
specifically Western construction that may be traced back to the rise of anatomy in
Western Europe in the sixteenth century, particularly after the publication of Vesalius’s
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), as well as to the birth of individualism in the

seventeenth century, as a result of Mechanicist treaties such as Descartes’s Discourse on
the Method (1637).
4
Stefan Dudink, for example, has noted the highly visible presence of the naked male
body in late 18th-century political culture, before the 19th century began to associate
“nude” with “female nude” almost exclusively. In Dudink’s view, the neo-classical
model of the male body held a special place in the 18th century, since its impermeability
became a perfect symbol of the newly achieved stability and order of a post-revolutionary
modern political culture aspiring to moral rectitude. “Its air of calm strength,” he argues,
“that spoke of a controlled dynamics was just what modern society needed” (155-156).
The permeability of women’s bodies, on the other hand, is also what, according to several
classic theorists, made them “naturally deficient in…the capacity to create and maintain
political right” (Pateman 96).
5
For an analysis of the idea of “musculinity” in the Hollywood action cinema of the
1980s, see Tasker. See also Jeffords.
6
On bodies in general, see, for instance, Foucault, a classic reflection on bio-power and the
regulation of bodies by the State. On male bodies, see, for example, Bordo; Jeffords;
Tasker.
7
See Mulvey, who argued that, within mainstream cinema, “the male figure cannot bear
the burden of sexual objectification” (20).
8
In his view, society and politics under democracy are of an open-ended nature and so
“opened bodies testify to this and unsettle the appearance of political stability and
‘closure’ that representations of the ideal body attempt to create” (153).
9
Jeffords interprets the muscleman hero as a backlash against the feminism of the 1970s,
as indicative of a new conservatism in both national and sexual politics, and ultimately as
part of an effort to “remasculinize” America after its emasculating defeat in Vietnam.
10
Indeed, this book is part of a larger research project on cultural and literary
representations of masculinity in the United States directed by Professor Àngels Carabí
(University of Barcelona): www.ub.edu/masculinities. Funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Economy, the project aims to explore the changing history of American masculinities in
and through American culture and literature. This book may thus be seen as a first step in
this direction.
11
That writing may be seen as a bodily function may be demonstrated by the fact that, in
traditional Indian society, for example, “there are four occurrences after which one is
expected to wash one’s hands: having sex, urinating or defecating, touching dead bodies,
and writing” (Thomas 77).
12
Elaborating on this, Thomas, himself borrowing from Lee Edelman’s concept of
“homographesis” (i.e., putting homosexuality into writing), contends that both misogyny
and homophobia are inscribed in writing. Thus, a “radically reenfleshed writing,” open to
the possibility of “our permeability and penetrability,” might eventually contribute to the
“deformation and transformation” of the patriarchal gender order (Thomas 77-83).
Bibliography
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———. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge,
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Gardiner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 60-89.
CHAPTER 1
The Complete Body of Modernity in the 1920s:
Negotiating Hegemonic and Subordinated
Masculinities in Ernest Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí
University of Barcelona
The relationship between bodies and social processes, between the production
of meanings and the physical surface on which they are inscribed, have
increasingly become central concerns within masculinity studies. Ranging from
analyses of the male body in sports (Messner) to studies on disability
(Gerschick and Miller; Fore), the body has been shown to “matter” to
contemporary theoretical discussions on masculinities. In this chapter, I intend
to analyze the construction of the white male body in relation to the strategic
performance of what has been identified as hegemonic and subordinated
masculinities (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee; Mosse; Demetriou; Connell Gender
and Masculinities; Connell and Messerschmidt). More specifically, I contend
that male bodies in Ernest Hemingway’s best-known novel The Sun Also Rises
(1926) take up different subject positions in which subordinated masculinities
engage in a critical negotiation with normative masculinity. First of all, I apply
the notion of hegemonic masculinity to the creation of the 1920s manly ideal,
whose main constitutive element, as we shall see, was bodily wholeness.
Subsequently, I analyze the construction and representation of male bodies in
The Sun Also Rises to show the ways in which masculinities are performative
configurations that entail a negotiation, as will be argued, with both hegemonic
and non-hegemonic positions, rather than a single alignment with one or the
other.
Constructing the Body of Hegemonic and Non-Hegemonic Masculinities

As is known, the terms hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, as
well as subordinated femininity, were coined by Raewyn Connell in Gender
and Power (1986). Ever since, the notion has been widely used in fields as
diverse as gender studies, gay studies, criminology, or prison sociology,
among others. The model of hegemonic masculinity as originally defined by
Connell takes up Gramsci’s theorization on hegemony and power in order to

carry out a critique of the “male sex role” literature of the 1970s,1 proposing
instead a model of multiple masculinities and power relations.
Fundamentally, hegemonic masculinity is hierarchically distinguished from
other forms of masculinities, the so-called subordinated masculinities, in that
it entails the most honored and normative way of being a man. In other
words, it is described as a form of masculinity that emerges as dominant,
more socially central, and clearly associated with power, thus guaranteeing
the dominant position of men and the subordination of women at different
points in time. Although the existence of hegemonic masculinity does not
require that all men attempt to live by it, and some actually oppose it by
developing alternative masculinities, all men, Connell argues, position
themselves in relation to it. Even if only a minority of men might actually
enact it, men who do not act by the hegemonic model but still passively
maintain it, and therefore sustain the patriarchal social structure, are regarded
as performing a complicit masculinity (Connell Gender; Demetriou). In this
way, it may be argued that hegemonic masculinity is both pervasive and
unavoidable.
One of the most recent revisions of the concept has come from
Demetriou, who has expanded Connell’s initial formulation. Demetriou
acknowledges Connell’s significant contribution to the theorization on
hegemonic masculinity in framing the complex nature of both masculinities
and femininities; the power relations between genders and within genders, as
well as the possibility of change generated internally (339). However,
Demetriou wishes to dispense with what he identifies as Connell’s essential
dualism in the formulation of hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities.
Thus, he argues that Connell’s theory fails to account for the formative
process of hegemonic masculinity as a reciprocal one, that is, as conforming
to a dialectic of both appropriation and marginalization of non-hegemonic
masculinities (335). Although Connell seems to recognize the interaction of
different forms of masculinities, and she even coins the term “authorization”
to refer to the appropriation of some elements of subordinated masculinities
by hegemonic masculinity, Demetriou contends that such interaction needs to
be reformulated and expanded on in order to further emphasize the central
dynamics of negotiation and appropriation that characterize the process. To
do so, Demetriou draws on Gramsci’s concept of “historic bloc” and
Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity” so as to argue that hegemonic masculinity “is
The Complete Body of Modernity 15
not a purely white heterosexual configuration of practice but it is a hybrid

bloc that unites practices from diverse masculinities in order to ensure the
reproduction of patriarchy” (337). Thus, in opposition to Connell’s
formulation of hegemonic masculinity, his theory entails a “non-reified and
non-dualistic understanding of masculine power and practice” (348) that
opens up the possibility of identifying non-hegemonic elements within
hegemonic masculinity as sign of hybridization and flexibility rather than
contradiction or weakness (348). Demetriou further complements his
theorization by dividing hegemonic masculinity into external⎯understood as
dominance over women⎯and internal⎯dominance of some men over other
men.
Demetriou’s contribution to the debate is, I would argue, grounded in his
desire to transcend the intrinsic dualism found in Connell’s formulation and
to recognize permeability in the construction of both hegemonic and non-
hegemonic masculinities. If hegemonic masculinity appears “as an
essentially white, Western, rational, calculative, individualist, violent, and
heterosexual configuration of practice that is never infected by non-
hegemonic elements,” then non-hegemonic masculinities could never
penetrate the hegemonic model (Demetriou 347). Such a definition, however,
essentially rests on a relational dependence on non-hegemonic forms, which
are defined (by opposition) as black, non-Western, irrational, effeminate, or
non-violent. Therefore, hegemonic masculinity’s dependence on sub-
ordinated masculinities for definition proves Demetriou’s claim about the
hybridity and permeability of the two categories. At the same time, it
acknowledges the creation of a third space or “masculine bloc” based on the
combination of features from both hegemonic and non-hegemonic subject
positions.
Demetriou’s claims have been acknowledged by Connell and
Messerschmidt themselves in “Hegemonic Masculinity: Revising the Concept”
(2005), wherein they thoroughly review the critical reception of the term and
suggest a reconsideration of some of the principles initially associated with it.
Actually, Connell and Messerschmidt accept the ambiguities in usage when
critics refer to the actual characteristics that in point of fact conform
hegemonic masculinity. Thus, they conclude that hegemonic masculinity
should not be understood as a fixed or transhistorical model since such a
usage ignores the massive evidence of change in social definitions of
masculinity (838).2 Connell and Messerschmidt also recognize Demetriou’s
conceptualization of dialectical pragmatism and the appropriation of specific

subordinated masculine practices by hegemonic masculinity and its resulting
creation of a hybrid third space. Actually, Demetriou’s notion of hegemonic
bloc, that is, the resulting “third space” into which diverse non-hegemonic
elements that are seen as pragmatically useful for continued domination are
appropriated, seems to allow for the existence of multiple hegemonic
masculinities. On this point, Connell and Messerschmidt are clear:
“[w]hatever the empirical diversity of masculinities, the contestation for
hegemony implies that gender hierarchy does not have multiple niches at the
top” (845). Thus, Demetriou’s hybridity may become a partial one in which
the central elements defining hegemonic masculinity at a given historical
period may interact with elements from non-hegemonic masculinities, even
as such contact does not necessarily entail the creation of a new category or
“third space,” in Demetriou’s terms. Actually, Demetriou’s example for the
hybridization of a hegemonic masculine bloc is the increasing visibility of
gay masculinity in Western societies and the appropriation of some of its
elements by white heterosexual men. However, Connell and Messerschmidt
question that the hybridization that Demetriou describes is actually
hegemonic (845).
Wholeness and the Hegemonic Male Body of the 1920s

But, what characterized hegemonic masculinity in the 1920s? I would
like to suggest that one of the key features defining the construction of the
hegemonic (white) male body in the 1920s was wholeness. In turn, I will be
arguing that the production of a hegemonic white masculinity in the 1920s
based upon the myth of the whole body⎯tough, aggressive, domineering,
homophobic, and misogynist⎯was the product of a twofold historical
process. On the one hand, the diachronic emergence of a normative model
during a specific period of time, that is, the turn from the eighteenth to the
nineteenth centuries. On the other, the synchronic configuration of the body
in relation to the modern period in the United States.
In The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, George L.
Mosse traces the historical association of wholeness with the male body back
to the creation of what he has termed a “standard of masculinity” in the late
eighteenth century. This was a period of deep social transformations
characterized by the emergence of modern bourgeois society, when the body
underwent a process of reinterpretation. In it, old aristocratic stereotypes

were slowly left behind and, eventually, the body itself became the
prominent signifier of manliness, with its corresponding moral attributes of
strong willpower, moral fortitude, and martial nobility. This process is well
exemplified by the development of physiognomy in the nineteenth century
and its systematization of the linkage between body and soul, morality and
bodily structure.
Mosse’s theorization on “the standard” of masculinity posits that the
ideal model of manliness was centrally based on the neoclassical male body
and its perfection, an aspect that, as Connell (Gender and Masculinities) has
also recognized, provided the model for hegemonic masculinity. Mosse’s
study shows the ways in which the modern age was characterized by a
preoccupation with beauty and the human body, aspects that became central
constitutive elements of a manly ideal that continues to exert a strong
normalizing influence. As Mosse argues:
The stereotype of modern manliness has now been established as it built upon an
ideal of bodily beauty, symbolizing the attributes that a true man ought to
possess...The stereotype of manliness...remained singularly stable, surmounting all
challenges, defining normative masculinity for the nineteenth century and during
most of the twentieth...The manly ideal corresponded to modern society’s felt need
for order and progress, and for a countertype that would serve to increase its self-
confidence as it emerged into the modern age. (77)
Thus responding to what Mossse deems a specific need of modern society,

that of order and progress, the neoclassical model came to represent the need
for self-confidence that a society increasingly at crisis seemed to demand. It
may be useful here to draw on another of the characteristics associated with
the male neo-classical model of masculinity, which Dudink terms
“impermeability” (158). In tracing the representation of the neo-classical
model, Dudink highlights the individuated nature of the male bodies, “an
individuation that resulted, among other things, from their being rigidly
enclosed within strict boundaries” since “the neo-classical male body is a
body separated from its environment and from other bodies by seemingly
impermeable boundaries; its perfection resided partly in its impermeability”
(158). I suggest that the notion of impermeability constitutes a central feature
of the bodily crisis described in the 1920s, since the development of
technological permeability threatens to destabilize hegemonic masculinity.
The establishment of the hegemonic model of masculinity based upon

the male neo-classical model as described by both Mosse and Dudink does
indeed bear a close relation to the specific context of the early twentieth
century, in which deep social and historical transformations took place. In
Modernism, Technology, and the Body, Tim Armstrong has addressed the
complex web of interrelations established among the male body, the rise of
technology, and modernity in the creation of a normative, hegemonic
masculinity based upon the notion of the perfect whole body. Armstrong’s
starting point is the notion of embodiment and performance, which suggests
that the modern period was characterized by the body being “re-energized,
re-formed, subject to new modes of production, representation, and
commodification” (2). Armstrong locates such centrality in two different
sources. On the one hand, the revolution in perceptions of the body in the
nineteenth century, among them the possibility of its “penetrability” through
the development of a barrage of devices such as the stethoscope,
ophthalmoscope, or powerful microscopes that could examine bacteria. On
the other hand, in developments such as Darwinian science, which identified
a layer of primitive material within the body and brain that signaled the body
as a contingent mechanism, incorporating both evolutionary survivals as well
as widespread fears of regression and, therefore, destabilizing relations
between self and world. The tension created between these two forces
reflected the stress placed on the body by civilization and raised the need to
develop compensatory strategies through, most significantly, technological
devices (2).
If modernity reveals the body as essentially flawed, it will also offer
compensation strategies for achieving the fantasy of the complete body. If
the up-to-then desires for bodily perfection had encountered a central
hindrance in the means through which it could be achieved, the
compensation for bodily lacks through technology will now become a real
opportunity. Thus, the cultural idea of the perfect body circulated through
advertising, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and cinema, all of them prosthetic
in the sense that they promised the completion of a fragmented or incomplete
male body (Armstrong 2-3).
The necessary wholeness of the modern hegemonic body also found a
field of application in the 1920s fascination with sports, for, as Connell
argues, “[t]he embodiment of masculinity in sport involves a whole pattern
of body development and use, not just one organ” (Masculinities 54). Indeed,
the integral performance of the whole body was greatly admired in the
greatest examples of competitive sport of the time, such as the baseball
player Babe Ruth, who came to stand for the socially valued characteristics
of toughness, competitiveness, and ability, which Michael Messner has
identified as key features of the hegemonic male body in his analysis of
masculinities and sports.
Another interesting example that proves the centrality of the cultural
ideal of the whole male body to the modern period is the research carried out
by Thomas de la Peña, who analyzes the development of electric belts, which
were designed to compensate for male impotence through an electric power
source. Electric belts consisted of a light metal woven pouch that was
connected by clips to the lower part of the belt and thus enclosed the penis
and testicles with galvanic current. The direct relation between erection and
male sexual performance testifies to the completeness of the male body as a
central constitutive element in hegemonic masculinity of the period. As
Thomas de la Peña argues in her analysis of the advertisements for electric
belts of the period, these devices did perform a function beyond the physical
one. They were meant to regain a sense of hegemonic masculinity related to
a healthy and strong white body, thus placing the emasculated or
dysfunctional male body in the realm of subordinated or internal
masculinities. As Thomas de la Peña herself argues, the images of naked men
that appear in the advertisements of electric belts of the period “highlight...a
naked, visibly muscular body and allow the reader to make the connection
between this ‘product’ and the ostensibly being sold. One notices, for
example, the strong arms and muscular thighs and buttocks of
Pulvermacher’s model before focusing in on the belt around his waist and
genitals.” The correlation here is clear, those devices did present a possible
physical solution but, most important, they “promised to make men more
powerful figures in the modern world” (Thomas de la Peña 279).3
Having established the social and historical context for the construction
of a hegemonic white male body in the 1920s⎯which was defined as
essentially whole and as endowed with certain qualities such as strength,
virility, or youth⎯, I will now center my analysis on the representation of
male bodies as portrayed in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926).
My analysis will focus on the strategic performance of hegemonic and non-
hegemonic male subject positions, thus following Connell’s theorization of
gender as being constantly produced and reproduced in social practice. As
Connell and Messerschmidt contend, “[m]asculinity is not a fixed entity

embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals. Masculinities are
configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action and,
therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a particular social
setting” (836). Such a premise entails a synchronic dimension in the
performance of gender, the taking up of different male subject positions at
specific moments in time and the possibility of shifting these positions
accordingly. Specifically, Connell and Messerschmidt argue that “[m]en can
dodge among multiple meanings according to their interactional needs” and,
thus, “[m]en can adopt hegemonic masculinity when it is desirable; but the
same men can distance themselves strategically from hegemonic masculinity
at other moments. Consequently, ‘masculinity’ represents not a certain type
of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive
practices” (841). Thus allowing for the strategic performance of different
subject positions, Connell and Messerschmidt’s performative premise can be
complemented by Demetriou’s formulation of the masculine bloc. For, rather
than keeping a dichotomy between hegemonic and non-hegemonic
categories, we may read both elements as permeable, thus arguing for a
certain hybridity. That this hybridity eventually leads to the creation of a
third space, of the masculine bloc that allows for the re-articulation of a new
historical combination as Demetriou contends, may be, however, called into
question. Rather than the creation of a third space, there exists, as I will
argue, a constant negotiation between hegemonic and non-hegemonic
masculinities that may, at a given historical time, highlight some specific
dominant aspects over others.
Bodies in Action: Negotiating Hegemonic and Non-Hegemonic

Masculinities in The Sun Also Rises
Hemingway’s involvement in the First World War as an ambulance
driver volunteering for the Red Cross transformed him into a firsthand
eyewitness to the atrocities of the conflict. Such awareness was heightened
by some of the tasks he was made to perform, such as carrying mutilated
bodies and bodily parts. Later, he was himself seriously wounded by
fragments from a mortar shell, which exploded just a few feet away from
him. The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious, killed an Italian
soldier, and blew the legs off another. As a result of the accident,
Hemingway suffered wounds in his legs from the fragments thrown out by
the shell, about 200 pieces of shrapnel. He was later awarded the Italian
Silver Medal for Valor, in which the inscription read, “Gravely wounded by
numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an admirable spirit of
brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered generous assistance
to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did
not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been
evacuated” (Lynn 80-81). Hemingway’s story of sacrifice, war, and heroism
was later transcribed into the semi-autobiographical A Farewell to Arms
(1929). Most interestingly, however, was the fact that it became part of
Hemingway’s own public display of masculinity, as evidenced by his interest
in boxing matches, bullfighting, hunting or soldiering. Hemingway’s
masculine persona led him to reject the model of upper-class gentility into
which he had been born in order to embrace a “rough-hewn artisanal
manhood demonstrated and tested in the most highly ritualized ways”
(Kimmel 141).
Nevertheless, such performance of hegemonic masculinity has
increasingly come under scrutiny, especially after the publication of The
Garden of Eden (1986), Hemingway’s posthumous text that promoted new
critical directions by laying bare the author’s own anxieties about his
masculinity as well as his sexual identity at large. In this respect, much
critical attention has been paid to Jake Barnes’s sexual impotence in The Sun
Also Rises, with numerous parallelisms being drawn between Jake’s
emasculated body and Hemingway’s own injuries as a result of his
participation in WWI. Fore, for instance, has explored Hemingway’s anxiety
over disability and its association with moral and physical breakdown,
situating The Sun Also Rises in what she terms a “body-obsessed cultural
milieu.” Indeed, the early twentieth century witnessed an increase in pension
claims, which helped to re-energize debates over which veterans “deserved”
charity and which did not, or the way in which the popularization of eugenic
theories in the United States combined to make the war-wounded body a site
for particularly intense fears about “degeneration” (74).4 Fore argues that
traditional critical readings of Jake Barnes either align him with the figure of
the disabled man who receives a compensatory “gift” of artistic and
emotional sensitivity because of his impairment, or accept the notion that he
is “turning” gay because of his injuries (76-77). Focusing on Hemingway’s
own experience of convalescence in an Italian hospital, she analyzes the
writer’s attitudes towards wounds and masculinity in order to conclude that

the text ultimately upholds the belief that “disability ‘turns’ men into
homosexuals or childlike, asexual beings” (76). Thus, according to Fore,
Jake will never achieve the psychological stability he craves because he
finally accepts prevailing social and medical philosophies about his injury.
These ideas, in turn, will always leave him vulnerable to the fear that he will
“degenerate” into an invalid or a “pervert” (76).
Examining the trope of male feminization in The Sun Also Rises, Todd
Onderdonk, combining as well biographical and literary analysis, also argues
that there exists in the text a gendered hierarchy in male homosocial
relations, which distinguishes between “males and inauthentic males, where
to be ‘less male’ in a sense is to be ‘like a woman’” (70). For Onderdonk,
acting or being treated “like a woman” entails “adopting or being forced into
states of shameful passivity or disempowerment” (61). Elaborating on this
argument, Onderdonk (73) suggests that Hemingway’s opposition between
“authentic” and “inauthentic” males leads him to portray Jake’s masculine
“authenticity” (and hence “true” manliness) in opposition to the “male
inauthenticity” (and therefore “feminization”) of other male characters such
as Robert Cohn. Odendornk’s analysis of the gender dynamics in the text is
thus based on a rigid hierarchy between authentic and inauthentic
masculinities, which he eventually connects to Hemingway’s own
assumptions on the subject. He thus concludes that Jake embodies male
normativity, which he also terms “authentic authorial manhood” or
“epistemological masculinity,” and which he associates with Hemingway’s
own interest in traditionally masculine activities such as womanizing or
boxing (72).
I wish to argue, however, that the text offers a gendered hierarchy of
masculinities that is intrinsically connected to the construction of the male
body, and, more importantly, that there exists, within this very hierarchy, a
wide range of male subject positions. Thus, I suggest transcending the binary
logic of ability/disability and authenticity/inauthenticity inherent in Fore and
Odendork’s arguments in order to examine the ways in which Jake Barnes
and other male characters in Sun strategically negotiate different hegemonic
and non-hegemonic subject positions by which hegemonic masculinity is
revealed as permeable. Specifically, Jake will be invited, as we shall see, to
inhabit temporary instances of hegemonic masculinity in which his
“incomplete” body is “authorized.” In other words, he is allowed by different
characters embodying (at least partly) hegemonic masculinity to inhabit a

hegemonic male subject position that presupposes a body that is whole.
Even though the performative dimension of masculinity and its specific
application to the reading of male characters in The Sun Also Rises has been
taken up by a number of critics from different perspectives (Onderdonk;
Elliott; Strychacz), the negotiation and strategic performance of hegemonic
and non-hegemonic male subject positions in The Sun Also Rises constitutes
a central pattern of analysis that has not been so thoroughly addressed. One
of the central reasons for gender instability or for the impossibility of
sustaining its performance is, as Connell has argued, physical disability
(Masculinities 54). From this point of view, Jake cannot sustain the
performance of a hegemonic white masculinity because he misses a central
constitutive element, bodily wholeness. His “incomplete” body, his “lack,”
which makes him sexually impotent, rules him out from such hegemonic
ideal. His emasculation, however, does not restrict him to the exclusive
performance of a subordinated masculinity. Rather than rely on a strict
dichotomy of inclusion or exclusion, Jake is able to negotiate his bodily lack
and make it invisible to the relationships he establishes with other male
characters. In so doing, he manages to embody a hegemonic position of
dominance, although his emasculation necessarily places him in the domain
of a subordinated masculinity. Jake’s castrated body represents the
confluence of two different sets of social dynamics that, as Gerschick and
Miller argue, typically exist in the lives of men with physical disabilities. On
the one hand, the demands of hegemonic masculinity while, on the other, the
stigmatization of people with such disabilities (455). Jake will find himself at
the crossroads of such situations and his masculinity will thus be primarily
defined by the fluctuation among different subject positions.
The text opens with a straightforward formulation of the ideal hegemonic
body of the 1920s as whole, white and virile, thus introducing the model
against which several characters will be measured at different stages in the
text. Jake starts his narration by describing his friend Robert Cohn as a “once
middle-weight boxing champion,” whose interest in boxing and physical
display is connected to his experience of discrimination as a Jew at
Princeton:
[Cohn] cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully
and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on
being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he
could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being a very shy and
a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. (7)
The paragraph thus shows Jake’s awareness of Cohn’s hegemonic

masculinity as a strategic positioning, which compensates for the
subordinated model of masculinity that his racial heritage places him in.
Thus, as the text makes clear, Cohn’s interest in boxing allows him to adopt a
strategic subject position in which the normative body, defined by its
strength and toughness rather than by other subordinated qualities such as
non-whiteness, figures prominently. As Cohn’s case evinces, the possibility
of inhabiting a male subject position that allows for the temporary invisibility
of non-hegemonic masculine qualities, such as a disabled or a non-white
body, is achieved through the negotiation of a temporary hegemonic position.
This normative position “authorizes” the inclusion of a non-hegemonic
subject into a space of normativity by making hegemonic features, the white
strong body, dominant while reducing other non-hegemonic ones, such as
Cohn’s Jewishness or Jake’s emasculation, to temporary invisibility.5
Jake’s encountering of a group of young men at the bal musette
constitutes yet another instance of the strategic performance by which a
character may temporarily inhabit a hegemonic male subject position. Jake’s
reading of these men is based on his interpretation of their specific bodily
performance. The inscription of their sexuality upon the body through a set
of signs is, as Elliott suggests, what leads Jake to read them as
“homosexual,” their “grimacing, gesturing, talking,” their “jerseys” and
“shirt-sleeves,” their “newly washed, wavy hair,” their “white hands” and
“white faces,” becoming the very symbols of their homosexuality (79).
The challenge to hegemonic masculinity that is posed by these men’s
behavior leads Jake to perform an example of what Demetriou has defined as
“internal hegemony”⎯the hegemony of one model of masculinity over other
forms of masculinities⎯by displaying his disgust and anger, “I was very
angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to
be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any
one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure” (20). Jake thus
acknowledges the proper social discourse he is expected to endorse, that of a
normative heterosexual man whose body is whole, in opposition to the
flawed bodies he is observing. In so doing, he also reveals his thoughts about
using physical strength, the superior strength of the white male normative
body, as a way to impose a hierarchy in which “simpering” (i.e.,
“effeminate”) men are relegated to their “proper” subordinated position as
non-hegemonic males.
Jake’s self-positioning at the top of the internal hierarchy of
masculinities is further exemplified by his exchanging glances with the
policeman at the door. As Elliott explains, “Jake’s ‘diagnosis’ is confirmed,
his own masculinity momentarily consolidated, by the policeman near the
door of the bar, who, in a gesture that bonds the two ‘real’ men and
marginalizes the homosexuals as ‘other,’ looks at Jake and smiles” (79). In
this way, the exchange of glances indicates a shared space of hegemonic
masculinity that Jake momentarily occupies through his ostensibly dismissal
of the homosexuals. Thus, Jake is allowed to partake of what, in Connell’s
formulation, is deemed as a “complicit masculinity,” that is, a strategic
subject position of complicity with hegemonic masculinity. In this specific
instance, there is a special complicity with the wholeness of the male body,
in opposition to the “flawed” bodies both Jake and the policeman are
asserting their authority over, which allows Jake to turn his own wound
invisible by being temporarily authorized into a hegemonic space.
Throughout the novel Jake will indeed continue to entertain the
possibility of obliterating his physical lack by rendering it invisible, and
therefore, non-relevant to the construction of a hegemonic male subject
position. This becomes apparent, for example, thanks to his interactions with
the bullfighters Montoya and Pedro Romero. In the first case, the relationship
between Montoya and Jake is structured on a complex interaction in which
both characters fluctuate between hegemonic and subordinated positions.
Initially, Montoya invites Jake to enter a space of hegemonic masculinity that
implies strength, notoriety, virility, and wholeness, concepts commonly
associated with the world of bullfighting. Such an invitation comes through
Montoya’s repeated touching of Jake on his shoulder, an action that, as in the
case of the policeman, is suggestive of a special masculine, secret bond
between the two characters:
Montoya put his hand on my shoulder...He smiled again. He always smiled as

though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us...He put his
hand on my shoulder again embarrassedly...When they saw that I had aficion [sic],
and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a
sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive
and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the
shoulder, or a ‘Buen hombre.’ But nearly always there was the actual touching. It
seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain. (Sun 110)
The complicity that transpires between the two men in their exchange of
touching and glances entails Jake’s acceptance into the group of men who are
“true” bullfighters or aficionados. This invitation, which comes from
Montoya’s apparently dominant position, actually coexists with Montoya’s
own subordinated masculinity, which is specifically associated with his body
(we are told he is well past his prime) and with his having lost the “acting”
gift that made everybody admire him while bullfighting. As Hemingway
writes, “when he retired the legend grew up about how his bull-fighting had
been, and when he came out of retirement the public were disappointed
because no real man could work as close to the bulls as Belmonte” (Sun 178;
emphasis added). In opposition to his past as a respected bullfighter,
Belmonte is now trying to impose his rules on the choice of bulls,” not too
large, nor too dangerously armed with horns” (178), and is “sick with
fistula,” which makes him move with greater difficulty, eventually eliciting
the crowd’s disdain. Thus, Montoya’s old and sick body dispossesses him of
his former hegemony symbolized by a whole, healthy, and young masculine
body. Despite Montoya’s showing off his contempt for the audience, he
nevertheless partakes of a subordinated form of masculinity that is eventually
made fun of by his former admirers.
The other bullfighter in the text, Pedro Romero, also exemplifies the
hybrid display of both hegemonic and subordinated masculine subject
positions. Romero’s body figures prominently in Jake’s perception of the
bullfighter, as he is repeatedly described as “the best-looking boy I have ever
seen,” as a “handsome” and “good-looking kid” (136). In opposition to the
other bullfighters, Romero is a “real” torero, and as Jake explains, “there had
not been a real one for a long time,” which clearly suggests a comparison
with Montoya (136). Following Mosse’s formulation of the classical male
body reflecting inner nobility, we can argue that Romero’s position as a
hegemonic male role model for Jake does indeed describe this type of inner
sense of dignity. Thus, he comes to represent the “real” spirit of bullfighting,
since he embodies the necessary purity of form and spirit when confronted
with the bull. As Jake explains, “he had the old thing, the holding of his
purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull
by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the
killing” (Sun 140).
Thus established as a true masculine character, embodying courage,
honor, and a command of his performative gift with audiences, Romero ends
up posing a challenge to Jake’s own masculinity since, rather than engage in
a heterosexual relationship with Brett, Jake simply watches the relationship
between Romero and Brett into being. “Acting as a mediator, translator, and
consultant to the desires of others,” as Strychacz (83) has it, “Jake takes
center stage only to discover his own humiliation” (83). The blatant
exclusion from hegemonic masculinity that constitutes Jake’s watching of
Pedro Romero’s relationship with Brett as a mere spectator constitutes, it
seems to me, Jake’s realization of his subordinated masculinity. Thus, Jake’s
witnessing of Brett and Romero’s affair just reinforces what Strychacz terms
the role of “failed performer” in “the theater” of normative masculinity (85),
serving as a reminder of Jake’s reason for being excluded from a relationship
with Brett.
The construction of Romero as an example for hegemonic masculinity is,
however, subverted by his also adopting subordinated male subject positions.
Thus, while we are made to admire Romero’s prowess in the bullring, we
also see Cohn knock Romero down several times while the two men fight for
Brett. Although Romero exemplifies the honor of the masculine hegemonic
code by standing up to Cohn’s beating repeatedly, the exchange will
ultimately reveal Romero’s physical fragility in opposition to Cohn’s strong
body. In turn, such negotiation of different male subject positions will also
involve Cohn, who leads the beating and displays an obvious physical
superiority over Romero, but who is nevertheless feminized through his
recurrent crying for Brett, who simply tells him “not to be a ruddy ass” (168).
Thus, Cohn seems to embody the hegemonic model of masculinity, but this
is ultimately seen to coexist with subordinated forms of masculinity as well.
Conclusion
From what has been argued here, it would seem, then, that Jake’s
performance of different masculine roles involves strategic subject positions
that are taken up both actively, as with the policeman at the bal musette, and
passively, as in his role as spectator of Romero and Brett’s relationship.
While his wound places him in a non-hegemonic position because it marks
his body as “incomplete,” he is also capable of strategically aligning himself

with hegemonic masculinity, and of inhabiting the space of the whole male
body, even if temporarily. Ultimately, what his performance of strategic
positions reveals is the relational dimension of gender and the power
structures that are always implicit in it. In being offered the possibility of
momentarily obliterating his bodily lack, hegemonic and non-hegemonic
masculine positions are finally shown to intersect, and constantly interact,
with one another.
Notes
1
The sex role literature of the 1970s suggested that gender identity was based on clearly
differentiated sex roles for men and women. Thus, masculinity and femininity were seen
as separate rather than relational entities, with men performing a fixed set of “masculine”
roles and women another set of “feminine” ones. Thus, this (psychological) theory saw
gender identity as based on a binary gender role model, ignoring the existence of multiple
and varied gender patterns, as well as of unequal gender relations. For a discussion (and
critique) of the male sex role literature of the 1970s, see Kimmel (202-210).
2
Margaret Wetherell and Nigel Edley, for instance, argue that Connell leaves the exact
enactment of the prescriptive social norms that make up hegemonic masculinity unclear.
3
See Wetherell and Edley for a discussion of the pattern of identification or “imaginary
positioning” that different men take up in relation to what they identify as “heroic
masculinity,” the equivalent to Connell’s formulation of hegemonic masculinity.
4
Early twentieth-century visions on impotence typically saw it as a “fault disease,” that is
a condition for which the man in question was to be held responsible for. Thus,
correlations between specific practices as a direct cause for impotence were circulated
widely in advertisements and disseminated by the medical discourse. As De La Peña
argues:
The advertisements reinforced the idea that impotence was seen as a ‘fault’
disease; the family physician would know you had wasted vital force and the
druggist would make fun of your dirty little secret. Were your wife to know,
she might wonder about undisclosed youthful indiscretions. Before innovations
in printing technology made inexpensive mail advertising possible, most men
probably suffered from actual or believed impotency in silence. Given the
climate of silence, electric belts probably seemed a better treatment option than
most. Secrecy, however, was not the only reason men purchased electric belts.
(280)
5
See Wilentz for a discussion on anti-semitism as a thematic element in the novel.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
Connell, R. W. Gender and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

———. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept.” Gender and Society 19 (2005): 829-859.
Demetriou, Demetrakis Z. “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique.”
Theory and Society 30 (2001): 337-361.
Elliott, Ira. “Performance Art: Jake Barnes and ‘Masculine’ Signification in The Sun Also
Rises.” American Literature 67 (March 1995): 77-94.
Fore, Dana. “Life Unworthy of Life? Masculinity, Disability, and Guilt in The Sun Also
Rises.” The Hemingway Review 26 (Spring 2007): 74-88.
Gerschick, T. J., and A. S. Miller. “Gender Identities at the Crossroads of Masculinity and
Physical Disability.” Men and Masculinities 2 (1994): 34-55.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006.
Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987
Messer, Michael A. Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity. Boston: Beacon,
1992.
Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Thomas de la Peña, Carolyn. “Designing the Electric Body: Sexuality, Masculinity and the
Electric Belt in America, 1880-1920.” Journal of Design History 14 (2001): 275-289.
Wetherell, Margaret, and Nigel Edley. “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary
Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices.” Feminism and Psychology 9 (August 1999):
335-356.
Wilentz, Gay. “(Re)Teaching Hemingway: Anti-Semitism as a Thematic Device in The Sun
Also Rises.” College English 52 (February 1990): 186-193.
CHAPTER 2
Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s
American Culture and Literature
Josep M. Armengol
We must preserve not only the bodies of the

unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect,
their self-reliance, and courage and determination. 1
This chapter explores the cultural and literary representation of male bodies
during the Great Depression in the United States.2 While the mainstream
model of American masculinity has traditionally linked men’s identity to
their breadwinning role, the chapter shows how the Great Depression caused
millions of American males to feel emasculated by their incapacity to
provide for their families. It is argued, therefore, that the Roosevelt
administration aimed, at least in part, to “remasculinize” America by
promoting numerous images of “hard” bodies at work, as may be seen in
several New Deal public murals of the time. This remasculinizing effort was
complemented by Marxist authors and critics, perhaps most notably Michael
Gold, who established a correlation between gender and class by suggesting
a dichotomy between hard/masculine/working-class authors, on the one
hand, and soft/effete/upper-class writers, on the other. Nevertheless, this
study concludes by calling this very binary into question, underlining several
counterimages and contradictions that inevitably inform it. If documentary
literature questioned Mike Gold’s hypermasculine view of the proletariat by
providing images of vulnerable yet dignified male bodies, writers such as
John Steinbeck and painters such as Paul Cadmus also problematized, as we
shall see, Gold’s masculinist and homophobic rhetoric from particularly
interesting and subversive perspectives.
Depression and/as Emasculation

In Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), the sociologist
Michael S. Kimmel rightly argues that self-making has traditionally been
regarded as the hegemonic ideal of American masculinity. As the historical
product of the rise of capitalism and industrialization in the early nineteenth

century, the American self-made man was designed from the start to adopt
social mobility and economic success as fundamental markers of
masculinity. While the model of self-made manhood has taken different
forms in different historical periods, the compulsion to prove masculinity
through accumulated wealth and social status has remained a central
component of American culture from the early nineteenth century to our day.
“In the first few decades of the nineteenth century,” as Kimmel himself
explains, “American men began to link their sense of themselves as men…to
their economic success” (7).
Nevertheless, the stock market crash of October 1929, which marked the
beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, posed a radical
challenge to the American dream of self-made manhood. Caught up in wild
speculation and euphoria, America had been making, spending, and
carelessly playing with money at a record pace all through the 1920s. With
the volume of sales on the New York Stock Exchange exceeding 1.1 billion
shares in 1928 (Minter 148), the market continued to skyrocket until the fall
of 1929. While scary economic indicators had been there for years,3 nobody
seemed willing to recognize the very real dangers of speculation. On
December 4, 1928, in his last address to Congress, President Coolidge
assured the nation that it could “regard the present with satisfaction and
anticipate the future with optimism.” In his now infamous inaugural address,
his successor, President Herbert Hoover, insisted that the future of the nation
was “bright with hope.” “I have no fears for the future of our country,” he
declared. Even if Hoover continued to utter words of assurance after the
Crash, insisting that America was “sound,” it became increasingly clear, as
Gilbert Seldes famously replied, that America was indeed “sound,” but that
the sound was “hollow.”4 By the winter of 1932-3, America was undergoing
the deepest crisis it had faced since the Civil War. In three years following
the Crash, national income, as David Minter (148) elaborates, fell from $81
to $41 billion; 85,000 businesses failed; and over 5,000 banks closed, doing
away with more than 9 million saving accounts. Between 1930 and 1934,
industrial production fell by 50 percent, unemployment tripled, leaving
around 16 million people jobless (about one-third of the labor force), and the
value of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange fell 78 percent.
Unable to pay the rent, many people were evicted and lived in shacks in
quickly formed shantytowns called “Hoovervilles,” built on garbage dumps,
Embodying the Depression 33
while thousands of hungry men and women had to line up for bread and daily
rations at soup kitchens (Minter 148-149; Zinn 387, 391, 394).5
Clearly, then, the optimism ushered in by the Roaring Twenties was
ushered out by the Great Depression and the widespread unemployment of
the 1930s. While the hegemonic ideal of American masculinity had been
based on self-making and economic success, the workplace suddenly turned
out to be insecure, unreliable, or simply nonexistent. Millions of American
men thus felt deprived of their traditionally masculine identities, which they
had also associated with their twin identities as household heads and
breadwinners (Kimmel 140-145). For most men, then, the Depression proved
to be emasculating both at work and at home. Besides seeing themselves as
impotent patriarchs, unemployed men underwent a loss of status before other
men, as well as with their wives and children. Not only did they feel ashamed
of themselves for being unable to work; they were usually despised by their
own families, too, who saw them as equally “unmanly.” “Even if
contemporary readers would not go as far as to blame women for
reemasculating their husbands in some twisted incestuous plot,” Kimmel
elaborates, “we cannot but feel compassion for men whose twin identities as
worker and father/husband, a dual identity expressed in the term
‘breadwinner,’ was suddenly eroded, seemingly beyond repair” (145).
Feeling bereft of the optimism that had characterized the Roaring Twenties,
and unable to rely on the market economy which had helped define and
assert their manhood, they usually ended up seeing themselves as
emasculated patriarchal figures. In Kimmel’s words:
Never before had American men experienced such a massive and system-wide
shock to their ability to prove manhood by providing for their families…With nearly
one in four American men out of work, the workplace could no longer be considered
a reliable arena for the demonstration and proof of one’s manhood. (140-141)
The “Remasculinization” of America

If, as it seems, the Depression forced many men to give up their faith in
the marketplace as a proof of their manhood, masculinity had to be
reconceived in a number of ways. One of the most obvious remasculinization
strategies consisted in (re-)turning to the male body and, in particular, the
strong, muscular, brawny body of the working-class male.6 Just as the
famous 1936 M-F (Masculinity-Femininity) Test by psychologists Terman
and Miles contributed to divorcing gender identity from achievement in the
public sphere, redefining masculinity as the gendered expression of a certain

inner sense of oneself,7 so too did the Depression help redefine the notion of
success away from personal income. Failing money, success might as well be
signified by a masculine physique, with physical strength symbolizing
strength of character. Coinciding with Charles Atlas’s opening of his first
gymnasium in 1927, which turned bodybuilding into one of the most
successful businesses even (and especially) during the Depression (Kimmel
152-153), American culture during the Depression became increasingly
obsessed with muscular, rather than success-oriented, manifestations of
masculinity.
Marked by the spectacular transformation of a wimpy bespectacled
newspaper reporter into an alluring muscular hero called Superman,8 the
whole decade was indeed replete with depictions of hard bodies, as
evidenced in the large New Deal public murals painted by the artists of the
time. Indeed, in 1933, and as part of President Roosevelt’s policies, one
million dollar was allocated for the employment of artists within the Civil
Works Administration (CWA). The idea was to foster a Public Works of Arts
Project (PWAP) to employ needy artists, at hourly wages, to create murals,
sculptures, prints, and paintings to embellish public buildings. For the first
time in history, artists, as Barbara Haskell (226) rightly notes, were officially
recognized as performing a valuable service to the community, just as their
art was expected to go beyond mere aestheticism and connect with the social
and political problems of the day. Murals were meant to be uplifting,
promoting Americans’ self-esteem and faith in their country and providing
testimony to the enduring aspects of the American way of life. The paintings,
as Haskell (236) elaborates, aimed to recover a quintessential American
identity in the present and in the past to counter the nation’s uncertainty and
to reassure Americans about their ability to endure and succeed. Besides
celebrating the values of work and community through images of daily life, a
common theme became an idealized (agrarian) past in which people labored
together for a common good. Because of the allegiance to the ideals of
community, self-reliance, and hard work as sources of national pride and
endurance (Haskell 226), many artists turned to “the people” as a source of
national strength. Instead of glamorous or affluent characters, the heroes of
the age thus became “the common people,” representing simplicity, purity,
resilience, and integrity. Even F. S. Fitzgerald, the author of The Great
Gatsby (1925),9 began to study the writings of Karl Marx, describing Dick
Diver of Tender Is the Night (1934) as “a communist-liberal-idealist, a

moralist in revolt” (Bruccoli 347-348).10
Since art was meant to be democratic and accessible to the public, it is no
wonder, then, that most of the murals, painted on the walls of post office and
justice buildings across the country, were centrally concerned with depicting
working-class male bodies at work. In so doing, they celebrated the muscular
potency of the working-class male body, which was contrasted (implicitly at
least) with the flaccid, enervated, and emasculated bodies of both middle-
and upper-class males. The ideal male body for the Roosevelt administration,
as Melosh has argued, was located within images of working-class men,
particularly farmers and laborers. She describes the ideal male form in her
analysis of Allen Thomas’s mural “Extending the Frontier in Northwest
Territory.”11 “The powerful lines of the man’s body, shown in the arduous
work of plowing,” she rightly notes, “accentuate masculine strength; his
body angles resolutely toward the horizon” (33). It was the image of
masculinity as strong, muscular, and hopeful that, she insists, acted as the
national image of masculinities at the time. A similar example is provided by
Conrad A. Albrizio’s best-known mural “The New Deal,” dedicated to
President Roosevelt.12 Like the “Extending the Frontier” painting, this mural
offers another representation of working-class males at work, their muscular
bodies constituting yet another symbol of (national) strength and endurance
in hard times. While President Roosevelt insisted on preserving not only “the
bodies of the unemployed” but also their moral strength and integrity “from
destitution,” it might be argued, therefore, that preserving the bodies of the
victims of the Depression became part and parcel of the very same effort
made by the New Deal administration to preserve their manhood, which
Roosevelt beautifully defined as “their self-respect, their self-reliance, and
courage and determination.”
This “remasculinization” of American culture was reflected in literature
as well. Indeed, Proletarian fiction, which was on the rise throughout the
1930s, was centrally concerned with gender concerns, particularly the
opposition between the ideal of “masculine toughness” personified by the
working-class male and the “feminine softness” symbolized by the man of
the leisure classes (Penner 29). It is true that, for fairly obvious reasons,
cultural and literary critics have usually focused on economic and social
issues (poverty, unemployment, working-class life, etc.) when approaching
literary works of the Depression. Thus, for example, the novels of John
Steinbeck and the plays of Clifford Odets, to name but two famous examples,
have been read as social protest literature depicting the struggles of the
working-class during the Depression. As a result, gender has often played a
secondary role in the analysis of such texts. Nevertheless, a number of
scholars, perhaps most notably Paula Rabinowitz and James Penner, have
recently set out to question such a critical trend, demonstrating not only that
gender is a central component of most Depression literature, but also that
class identity was often grounded in gender ideologies. In Penner’s own
words:
Given that we cannot separate gender from the representation of certain political
ideas, we need to examine carefully how the binary of the masculine/feminine is
central to several of the most popular literary genres of the 1930s⎯particularly,
social protest fiction and political drama…The dichotomy of working-class virility
and leisure-class impotence becomes a central trope for the American Left of the
1930s: the movement often imagines itself⎯and its future⎯through the robust male
body. (28-29)13
The dichotomy between working-class virility and leisure-class effeminacy

becomes nowhere clearer, perhaps, than in several writings by Michael Gold,
a Marxist literary critic and the author of Jews Without Money (1930), the
working-class memoir that made him famous during the Depression.14 In
1930, Gold published an article in The New Masses titled “Proletarian
Realism” in which he set out to explain his conception of the genre. After
praising all those “vigorous” and “bold” young men who are experimenting
with the materials of proletarian literature worldwide, he goes on to
enumerate the main features that, in his opinion, should define a “proletarian
Shakespeare” (206). Besides “technical precision,” the Proletarian writers
should aim at depicting “the real conflicts of men and women who work for
a living,” as opposed to the “sentimentalities” and “sickly” mental states of
the “idle” Bohemians (206). Stressing the social function of Proletarian
fiction, Gold insists that proletarian fiction is never “merely confectionery,”
but makes use of a lean and masculine style (“swift action,” “clear form,”
“the direct line”) in contrast to the obsession of modernist writers (“verbal
acrobats”) with formal experimentation, which he sees as just another form
of “bourgeois idleness.” Insisting further, he sets Proletarian realism against
the over-refinement and spirituality of writers such as Marcel Proust, whom
he defines as the “master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature.”15
Literature, he concludes, should always draw on the materials of the

“common man” (“Proletarian” 206).
Interestingly, then, Gold’s celebration of Proletarian fiction not only
shows his overt contempt for the leisure classes, and what he sees as their
moral and spiritual bankruptcy; he also explicitly draws on a gendered binary
which ends up associating the genteel literary tradition with sickliness and
effeminacy, and Proletarian fiction with vigor and masculinity.16 Thus,
proletarian authors are seen as “bold” and energetic youths writing about
“real” conflicts in a direct and unsentimental manner, whereas genteel writers
such as Proust are seen as affected, oversentimental, idle, and even depraved
masturbators, whose work is equated to “merely confectionery.” It follows
from this that Gold sees literature (and class) in clearly gendered terms,
pitting the “tough” fiction of the proletariat against the “effete” tradition of
the middle and upper classes. As Penner argues:
Much of Gold’s criticism rests on the premise that one’s social class is necessarily
reflected in one’s masculine identity. Gold’s gender-inflected Marxism also posits
that one’s masculine identity and persona are necessarily linked to one’s social class
and the labor he performs. (2)
Based on a “hard/soft” binary, what Penner terms Gold’s “macho criticism”

(3) may thus be said to align class and gender in fairly obvious ways,
transforming the male writer into a Marxist ideal and using gender a as a
political weapon to promote his own class interests. Thus, authors such as
John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, Sinclair Lewis, or Clifford
Odets, all of whom write about the working class and class conflicts, tend to
be praised by Gold, whereas others, such as Henry James or Thornton
Wilder,17 are dismissed as belonging to a “feminine” tradition. Hence his
famous plea for an unambiguously “masculine” literature and literary
criticism, based on bold social criticism, away from the effete genteel
tradition:
O Life, send us a great literary critic…Send us a giant who can shame our writers
back to their task of civilizing America…Send us a poet who loves the
masses…Send…a man of the street. Send no mystics⎯they give Americans the
willies. Send no coward…Send us a man fit to stand up to skyscrapers…Send us a
joker in overalls…Send a Bolshevik. Send a man. (“America Needs” 138-139)
Once again, then, Gold establishes a more than explicit connection between
masculinity (“Send a man”) and Communism (“Send a Bolshevik”), which
seems to be understood as the very epitome of virility. His promise of

utopian (socialist) renewal goes hand in hand with the myth of phallic
potency. Indeed, the association of the working-class male with the
obviously phallic image of the skyscrapers may be said to transform the
Proletarian writer into a phallic symbol himself. Ultimately, then, Gold’s
criticism clearly argues for a “remasculinization” of American literature
absorbing the virile energy of the masses as a remedy for the feminization of
the upper classes, the “boudoir bards” and “minor Oscar Wildes” who claim
that “art is never useful” (“America Needs” 133).
Even though Gold played a central role in forging the links between
masculinity and Proletarian fiction, other authors contributed as well to
strengthening the association throughout the 1930s. If Georges Bataille
celebrated Proletarianism as the highest expression of virility in 1930s
France,18 Philip Rahv followed in Gold’s steps throughout the American
Depression. Co-founder of the Partisan Review, the literary companion to the
New Masses at the time, Rahv, himself a Trotskyite, did indeed write his
classic essay “Paleface and Redskin” (1939) clearly inspired by Gold’s
masculinist reading of American literature. In this essay, Rahv established a
distinction between “paleface” authors such as Henry James, whom he saw
as lacking in masculine vigor and phallic potency, and “redskin” writers such
as Walt Whitman, whom he classified among the virile figures endowed with
“aggression” and “lived experience.” While the “paleface” model is literally
associated with writers who spend much of their time in libraries, drawing
rooms, and literary salons, “red skin” writers used to being outdoors and that
many of them have rubbed shoulders and spent time on the frontier.
Obviously, as in Gold’s case, a class dichotomy is thus established between
working-class and upper-class writers, who are described as virile and effete,
respectively. Accusing several writers of the past of being pale-faced (read
“effete”) aesthetes for having thought of art as above politics, he encourages
the new red skin (read “masculine”) writers to produce serious⎯i.e,
politically committed⎯texts.19 Like Gold, Rahv ends up pitting a masculine,
serious, working-class literature against an effete, refined, decorous genteel
literary tradition. Once again, then, he connects physicality to literary
creation, with the male body itself becoming a reflection of class identity. As
James Penner has it:
The American literary text is indelibly marked by the body type that it produces. In
Rahv’s physiological view of literary production, the crucial dichotomy is leisure-
class impotence and working-class energy, which emphasizes the notion that certain
bodies (hard/soft, young/old) produce particular styles of prose (masculine/effete)
and genres of literature (the Jamesian novel, social realism, etc.). (8)
Gold and Rahv’s theses were highly influential during the 1930s. Indeed,
Depression literature spills with heavily “masculine” fictions by and about
working-class males, including Proletarian novels about coal miners (Edward
Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs), steelworkers (Thomas Bell’s Out of This
Furnace), or bricklayers (Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete). Some texts,
like Conroy’s The Disinherited, incorporate changing settings, moving from
coal mines to railroad shops to rubber plants. In all these novels, the
working-class protagonists are portrayed as “tough” guys resisting stoically
as victims of a brutal political economy. Clearly, their hard bodies do
themselves become symbols of moral integrity and strength vis-à-vis
economic injustice. As Minter suggests, “the Great Depression threatens to
engulf everything except the counterforce of angry protest that they
exemplify” (187). Though perhaps less obviously, this tough-guy model of
masculinity was also embodied by the new private eye heroes of the decade,
as depicted by detective fiction writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, among others. Indeed, the hard-boiled hero
has many aspects in common with the struggling American man of the
1930s. Admittedly, most hard-boiled fiction, unlike Proletarian fiction,
avoided depicting the Depression explicitly, thus joining other male escapist
fantasies of the time.20 However, the working-class status, together with the
toughness and dignity, of the hard-boiled hero allowed many working-class
American men to identify with him. Thus, detective fiction, as David Minter
(159) rightly notes, helped bridge the gap between “Proustian” characters and
those who lived in the streets. As Raymond Chandler eloquently described
the hard-boiled hero in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”:
He must be a complete man and a common man…He is neither a eunuch nor a

satyr…He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a
common man or he could not go among common people…He will take no man’s
money dishonestly... (1)
Chandler’s description of the private eye hero as both a “complete” and

“common” man leaves no doubt as to the author’s conflation of gender and
class ideals. For Chandler, being a complete man and a common man are one
and the same thing. Moreover, the fact that the private hero, as Chandler
makes sure to insist, cannot be “a eunuch” just reinforces his masculinity,
divorcing him from the “effete” characters of other literary genres. The
masculinity of the hard-boiled hero is further reassured by his usual
callousness, individualism, and suspicion of all relationships, particularly
romantic ones.21 There is little doubt, then, that the traditionally tough,
unsentimental guy of the spare, new hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s captured
the spirit of the age and its social milieu. As David Madden has argued:
An unusually tough era turns out the hard-boiled hero. A traumatic wrench like the
depression, its evils and despair touching all facets of human society, causes a
violent reaction in these men…Those hardest hit become down-and-out, the
disinherited, and soon develop a hard-boiled attitude that enables them to maintain a
granite-like dignity against forces that chisel erratically at it. (xvii)22
Hard versus Soft Bodies: Counterimages and Contradictions

From what has been argued here, it would appear, then, that the Great
Depression caused men to feel emasculated and so America simply set out to
“remasculinize” them by providing images of hard bodies, as seen in several
New Deal public murals, Proletarian novels, and detective fiction of the time.
However, the image of masculinity during the 1930s is, as we shall see, far
more complex and contradictory than it may seem. Indeed, one finds a
number of alternative images throughout the 1930s that qualify, and even
contradict, the tough-guy image that, as we have seen, pervaded the decade.
Thus, for instance, one cannot forget the great relevance to the period of
documentary literature, which tried to record the effects of the Depression on
“the suddenly visible poor” (Minter 197) and, in so doing, provided
numerous images of vulnerable, though dignified, bodies. A curious
combination of pictures and literary texts, the documentary project, funded
by the Roosevelt administration as part of its New Deal policies, was based
on the joint collaboration of writers and photographers of the first rank,
whose words and photographs commented on one another. In books like
Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937), Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939), or
Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941),
hundreds of images and words were devoted to depicting, and celebrating,
American bodies afflicted by deprivation, hunger, and the worst effects of the
Depression.
Aiming at social criticism and responsiveness, documentary literature
became a political weapon that served different though interrelated purposes
(Haskell 242). First of all, it served to create a socially responsible art, not
merely ornamental, that communicated through a language understandable to
“the people.” Thus, for example, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a
photo-essay book produced by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White and
the novelist Erskine Caldwell, became the decade’s most influential protest
against the tenancy practice, as well as a powerful indictment of Southern
tenant farming (Haskell 242). If Hollywood movies offered several
imaginary avenues of escape, documentary literature also showed what
Hollywood did not show, underlining the discrepancies between America’s
ideals and its realities (Haskell 242; Minter 153). Even more important to our
purposes here is documentary literature’s alternative bodily representations,
which moved away from the (hegemonic) model of Proletarian muscularity
found in most New Deal public murals. While focusing on skinny rather than
muscular bodies, documentary photographs avoided representing the
afflicted working-class bodies as objects of ridicule, or even pity, but rather
rendered them with both respect and pathos. Thus, for instance,
photographers such as Dorothea Lange, in famous pictures such as “Migrant
Mother”23 or “Migrant Farm Families,”24 managed to elicit beauty, as
Haskell (242) rightly notes, from even the humblest and most battered of
bodies by conveying dignity and respect for the process of survival. While it
is true that documentary literature radically questioned the American myth of
plenty by focusing on the suffering of the neglected and voiceless poor, such
works thus exemplified as well the dignity, energy, and endurance of the
working-class body.
If, as it seems, documentary literature radically undermined “Proletarian
musculinity” by providing alternative images of male (and female) bodies,
the (hegemonic) tough-guy Proletarian model was also problematized from
different but equally subversive perspectives.25 While Michael Gold praised
John Steinbeck’s best-known novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in the New
Masses as evidence that the “proletarian spirit had battered down the
barricades set up by the bourgeois monopolists of literature” (qtd. in Minter
190), it must be remembered that Steinbeck’s male characters can hardly be
said to embody the pattern of muscular Proletarianism defended by Gold. In
reality, neither Tom Joad, the protagonist of Grapes, not George and Lennie,
the protagonists of Of Mice and Men (1937), his second most famous novel
about the Depression, appear to conform to this model. Rather than embody
hypermasculinity, most of Steinbeck’s male characters do actually seem to
opt for a softer, less aggressive, more “feminine” pattern of manhood based
on tenderness, sweetness, companionship, and (working-class) solidarity
with each other.
This alternative model of manhood is clearly reflected in Steinbeck’s
bodily representations. Thus, Of Mice and Men, for example, depicts George
as “quick” and sharp-featured but “small,” whereas his mentally disabled
traveling companion, Lennie, is referred to as “a huge man” but also as
“shapeless of face.” Furthermore, Lennie’s “wide” shoulders are described as
“sloping,” as he walks with his arms “hung loosely” and dragging his feet
“the way a bear drags his paws” (Steinbeck 4). If George’s superior
intelligence is qualified by his physical smallness, Lennie’s superior physical
strength is similarly diminished, then, by his awkwardness as well as his
mental disability. While George and Lennie are depicted as antithetical
characters from a physical (and psychological) viewpoint, their physical (and
intellectual) differences are thus shown to be far less significant than their
comradeship, with George acting as a surrogate father to the mentally
disabled Lennie.
If 1920s American culture had been obsessed with keeping one’s
physical appearance and the body beautiful,26 Steinbeck’s works, set in the
context of the Depression, move from individual to social and communal
values and, in so doing, they celebrate the strength and resilience of “the
people” above and beyond the individual body and its external image. Far
from embodying “musculinity,” Steinbeck’s literary figures may be old and
crippled, as in the case of Old Candy in Of Mice and Men, or even mentally
disabled, as in the case of Lennie, but they are united by the more important
values of friendship, emotional connection, community-mindedness and,
above all, their shared working-class status. Only these seem to offer
Steinbeck’s characters a respite from the effects of economic marginality. As
Lennie tells George, “guys like us got no family,” although “we got each
other, that’s what, that gives a hoot in hell about us” (Steinbeck 104).27
I would like to conclude this chapter by turning to the painting of Paul
Cadmus as yet another (counter-)example of male bodily depictions in
Depression America. If, as we have seen, Steinbeck’s literature
problematizes stereotypical views of the Proletarian male body as

hypermasculine (and heterosexual), Cadmus’s New Deal murals make even
more explicit the plurality, complexity, and contradictions surrounding the
representation of male bodies in 1930s American culture.
Most murals commissioned by the Roosevelt administration as part of
their New Deal policies depict, as has been argued, the hard bodies of
laborers, sharecroppers, and farmers as symbols of national strength, moral
integrity, and resilience during the Depression. Like other muralists and
needy artists, the gay painter Paul Cadmus signed on as an employee of the
federally funded Public Works of Art Project. However, his first major work
for the PWAP was the infamous “The Fleet’s In!”,28 which can hardly be said
to uphold the traditional American ideals promoted by Roosevelt. In this
canvas, a group of well-built, muscular, handsome sailors on leave are
drinking with prostitutes and transvestites, with a gay couple also attending
the party. It is little wonder, then, that when Admiral Hugh Rodman saw the
picture of these corpulent, strong, and virile men in tight clothing getting
“too friendly” with each other, he ordered the immediate removal of the
painting from an exhibition of government-sponsored paintings at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art on the grounds of obscenity. Paradoxically, though,
Cadmus’s name was splashed across newspaper headlines as a result of this
scandal, which contributed to launching his career as a “serious” artist.29
Even more important, perhaps, is Cadmus’s highly subversive re-view of the
New Deal public murals. For, even if he adopted the dominant image of
“musculinity” promoted by the Roosevelt administration, his painting was
banned for making explicit the obviously homoerotic aspect underlying such
representations of male bodies. What Cadmus’s painting reveals, then, is that
Depression America seemed incapable of separating masculinity from
heterosexuality, gender from sexual orientation, excluding homosexual desire
from the very definition of “Americanness.”
However, because Cadmus continued to present himself as simply an
“observer” rather than a participant, he was commissioned a series on
“Aspects of Suburban Life” (1936) by the Treasury Relief Art Project as
murals for a post office in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington. In
their crude depiction of the working class (vis-à-vis the leisure classes), most
of these paintings⎯including the best known “Golf”30 and “Main
Street”31⎯would indeed seem to be in line with New Deal policies.
However, Cadmus’s ruthless critique of the snobbism of the new rich,32 and,
especially, of socioeconomic inequality caused his works to be deemed

“unsuitable for a federal building.” Interestingly, much of the social criticism
inherent in these paintings springs, once more, from Cadmus’s bodily
representations. Thus, in “Golf,” for example, the new rich are depicted as a
group of the chubby golfers who seem more interested in smoking cigars and
showing off their wealth than in the sport itself.33 Moreover, two of the male
characters are clearly gay, directing all their attention at the young,
handsome, and muscular caddy. The fact that the caddy wears a poorer man’s
clothes, and even has holes in his shoes, emphasizes the distance between his
social class and theirs. Once again, then, the painter draws on visible bodily
differences to highlight social differences, pitting the beauty of the
Proletarian body against the ugliness of the overweight upper class.
Unlike his licentious portraits of sailors, Cadmus’s suburban series
would thus seem to really focus on the struggling working class and
economic marginality. However, Cadmus was fired by the government after
painting these pictures for a post office mural that was never completed.
Subsequently classified as one of the great American realists, he was
dismissed by the New Deal administration for his stark realism, for
unabashedly depicting poverty and, especially, social (as well as sexual)
differences in the most realistic ways. Paradoxically, then, he seemed to lose
his job for doing exactly what he was commissioned to do. For, even if the
(official) discourse of the Roosevelt administration asked the publicly hired
artists to record, paint, and write about what they saw, it is clear now that
they always expected certain things to be kept hidden, certain red lines not to
be trespassed.
Notes
1
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address (1935): http://www.let.
rug.nl/usa/P/fr32/speeches/su35fdr.htm
2
I would like to thank Professor Àngels Carabí (University of Barcelona) for her
bibliographical assistance with this chapter and for reading it thoroughly, providing
many valuable insights and suggestions.
3
As David Minter reminds us, “farm income and industrial wages remained low
throughout the twenties, and by 1929, with 35 percent of all personal income going into
the pockets of 5 percent of the population, even the middle class was showing signs of
stress” (147).
4
For the Presidents’ and Seldes’ quotes, see Minter (148-149).
5
On the Crash of 1929, see also Galbraith; on the Great Depression, see Cowley;
Schlesinger; Bird; Wecter.
6
I am using the verb “(re-)turn” purposefully here, since the male body has been
recurrently used as a “remasculinization” strategy throughout U.S. cultural history. See,
for example, Kimmel’s analysis of the American obsession with muscularity and sports
at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries (101-104), or Jeffords’s insightful
analysis of 1980s Hollywood action movies, which she interprets as symbolic attempts
to “remasculinize” America after its “emasculating” defeat in Vietnam.
7
As Kimmel explains, the M-F scale aimed to measure “gendered behaviors, attitudes,
and information by which parents could plot their child’s ‘mental masculinity and
femininity’⎯the successful acquisition of gender identity” (150). Moreover, Terman
and Miles contended that if a man or a woman failed to express the “correct” attitudes,
traits, and behaviors, s/he was in danger of becoming a homosexual. This test was thus
posited as an early diagnosis of “sexual deviance” and, therefore, as a first step towards
its “cure.” For a critique of this model and the gender biases and stereotypes on which it
was based, see Kimmel (150-152); Penner (40-49).
8
Interestingly, it was Atlas’s advertisements for his physical fitness programs that graced
the first issue of Superman in 1939 and virtually every issue since (Kimmel 154).
9
As Haskell reminds us, The Great Gatsby was actually out of print by 1933. Indeed,
there are remarkable differences between the heroes of the 1930s and the characters of
the previous decade. Unlike Gatsby, for instance, the protagonists of the thirties do not
move voluntarily from place to place but involuntarily, driven by privation and despair
(Minter 153).
10
Even if many writers of the 1930s made conscious moves toward the Left, it must be
remembered that Fitzgerald’s political commitment was short-lived, probably because
the Communist ideology conflicted with his (upper-class) status. While in the 1930s the
nation was less materialistic and more community-minded than in any other decade of
the twentieth century, most writers did indeed appear to stick to nativist and nationalist
ideals, and so Communism was considered more attractive as a theory than as a program
for specific action. As Minter elaborates, “even writers whose work was most
revisionary…retained a fascination with the nation’s culture that was at bottom a form
of loyalty to it” (151).
11
http://www.flickr.com/photos/auvet/5878628527/
12
http://research.archives.gov/description/196024
13
In a similar vein, feminist scholar Paula Rabinowitz has argued that while “gender was
not recognized as a salient political category” (4) by the Left in the 1930s, class and
gender identity were ideologically connected in the left-wing (women’s) literature of the
time.
14
As Penner notes, “during the 1930s, Gold’s class-based criticism was popular because
the literary establishment had begun to shift to the left during the Depression. Literary
editors sought him out because he was a leading authority on proletarian art and a bridge
to a nascent working-class audience of readers” (3).
15
Gold’s scorn for Proust’s ornate and decorous style is evidenced in Jews Without Money,
which Penner sees as “a conscious rejoinder” to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
In his words, “Gold’s ‘tough Jew’ persona, which stems from his working-class
upbringing on the Lower East Side, is presented as the masculine alternative to the
Proustian male” (31).
16
The genteel tradition of American letters “maintained that literature should respect
decorum and the polite social dictates of upper-class society” (Penner 4). See also
Penner (33-37).
17
In a 1930 book review column of the New Republic, Gold actually attacked Thornton
Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928) for its refined, decorous, effete style,
explicitly linking this style to the effeminacy of the upper classes. For an analysis of
Gold’s viciously homophobic attack on Wilder as a (homosexual) poet of the “parvenu”
leisure classes, see Penner (25-29). See also Penner (39-40) for an analysis of the
recurrent association between homosexuality and the upper classes, particularly between
gayness and the reckless hedonism of the Roaring Twenties, as well as the anti-gay
reaction of the 1930s. Indeed, throughout the 1930s homophobia gained force due to the
homosexual’s association with the self-indulgence of the 1920s, which was believed to
have plunged the nation into the Great Depression.
18
As Susan Rubin Suleiman has argued, Bataille saw all moral values associated with
class superiority as depriving “distinguished” men of proletarian virility (70).
19
“If the keynote of the writers of the ‘twenties is ‘tragic sense of life,” George Orwell
famously proclaimed, “the keynote of the new writers is ‘serious purpose’” (qtd. in
Minter 150).
20
Indeed, 1930s American culture may be defined as fundamentally “escapist.” While
several films produced outside the Hollywood studios provided stark images of reality,
the Hollywood film industry flooded the market with “escapist” fantasies, from the
comic genre (with the Max Brothers in A Night in the Opera), to adventure films (with
Errol Flynn, for example, as Captain Blood), to westerns, to Mickey Mouse animation.
Moreover, as music (especially concert music with folk and popular culture) was
integrated into the American mass-market entertainment, a dance fever caught America,
as illustrated by the increased presence of dance on film or the success of Broadway
musicals (and of music bands and ballroom contests) throughout the 1930s. Obviously,
such “escapist” manifestations of culture helped America’s recovery from the
Depression. See Minter (167-181).
21
“In the genre of tough-guy fiction,” as James Penner points out while discussing James
M. Cain’s novels, “the attraction to the feminine leads to death… ; hence, the hard-shell
male often strives to avoid all forms of feminine contamination” (50).
22
Interestingly, Barbara Haskell (274-275) claims that the success of hard-boiled fiction in
the 1930s was due, at least partly, to the resilience of American individualism. Despite
the influence of writers such as John Steinbeck or James T. Farrell, Proletarianism failed
to completely capture the popular imagination because many American people felt
uncomfortable with the calls to collectivist action grounded in Communist ideals. Thus,
hard-boiled fiction, with its celebration of individual stoicism and strength, thrived in the
1930s.
23
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html
24
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/index.html
25
The term “musculinity” is borrowed here from Tasker, who applies it to the
representation of the action heroes in 1990s Hollywood cinema.
26
See Requena-Pelegrí.
27
In this respect, it seems paradoxical, to say the least, that Michael Gold’s masculinist
and homophobic biases did not prevent him from selecting Steinbeck as a paradigmatic
example for working-class virility and masculinity, for the love between George and
Lennie poses a radical challenge to traditional (hetero)normative masculinities and
gender relations. Indeed, Steinbeck’s fiction is as male-centered and homosocial as
homoerotic. As Slim, one George’s fellow ranchers, tells him:
Funny how you an’ him string along together…Hardly none of the guys ever
travel together…they just come in and get their bunk and work a month, and
then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody. It
jus’ seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you
travelin’ together. (Steinbeck 40)
28
http://www.history.navy.mil/ac/cadmus/cadmus.htm
29
See Spring; Eliasoph.
30
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=3605
31
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charmainezoe/5374852315/
32
See, for example, “Polo:” http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=3606
33
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=3605
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and Theater. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Minter, David. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Penner, James. Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary
Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression
America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Rahv, Philip. “Paleface and Redskin.” 1939. Literature and the Sixth Sense. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1969.
Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Requena-Pelegrí, Teresa. “The Complete Body of Modernity: Negotiating Hegemonic and
Subordinated Masculinities in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.” Embodying
Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature. Ed.
Josep M. Armengol. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “State of the Union Address (1935).” Web. 2 June 2012. http://
www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/fr32/speeches/su35fdr.htm
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. The Crisis of the Old Order. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957.
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Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. New York: Penguin, 1998.
———. Of Mice and Men. 1937. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Bataille in the Street: The Search for Virility in the 1930s.” Critical
Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 61-79.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Wecter, Dixon. The Age of the Great Depression: 1929-1941. New York: Macmillan, 1948.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper, 2005.
CHAPTER 3
Invisibilizing the Male Body: Exploring the
Incorporeality of Masculinity in 1950s American
Culture
Mercè Cuenca
Historians...have shown to what extent historical
processes were involved in what might seem to be
the purely biological base of existence.1
When I first began writing this essay on the representation of the male body
in 1950s American culture, I (mistakenly) thought that physicality was going
to be a fundamental issue. However, when one tries to explore the traces of
masculinity as expressed in and through the representation of the body in the
literature and the cinema of mid-twentieth century America, the fact is they
are scarce. Paradoxically, normative masculinity did not appear to be
discursively linked to corporeality in the 1950s. Indeed, it is my contention,
as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, that the white, middle-class,
heterosexual male, the “common man,” to use a much-loved expression of
the decade, who embodied hegemonic masculinity during the period, seemed
to be purposefully disembodied.
Undoubtedly, nowadays flesh is still understood to constitute
corporeality in Western cultural discourses, just as sexual identity is still
largely equated to specifically gendered categories–hence, the contemporary
importance of the male body, ideally understood to be a tough physique, a
signifier which points to masculinity in mainstream culture. However,
despite the fact that the binaries “male/female” and “masculinity/femininity”
are still running strong in our social imagination, it is undeniable that the
narrations which define these categories shift according to specific cultural
and historical settings.2 In this essay, I would like to suggest, therefore, that
1950s American mainstream culture challenges the traditional equation of
hegemonic masculinity with a developed, “hard” male body. Thus, one is
faced with a Cold War construction of sexual maleness, of corporeal
masculinity, which differs significantly from that of the ideal twenty-first
century male, whose gym-modelled, athletic, visually pleasing body has
become, through the influence of discourses mainly fostered by the media, an
unequivocally aesthetic sign of normative masculinity and a social class

marker. Clearly, then, both the (male) body itself and the narratives which
textualize it are invested within a fluctuating historical economy. But, what
were the specific reasons behind the cultural “disappearance” of the body as
a sexual marker in 1950s American culture?
Invisibilizing the Male Body in 1950s American Culture: The “Common

Man” and His Representation in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
(1949)
When exploring the reasons behind the “disappearance” of the male body
as a signifier of hegemonic masculinity in 1950s American culture, it
becomes necessary to examine how the construction of that very masculinity
changed with the advent of the Second World War. Many critics concur that,
after the conflict, there was a crisis of masculinity owing to the shift in the
roles that mainstream men were expected to conform to, shaped by the
economic situation of the nation, which had changed dramatically. Prior to
the war, during the years of the Great Depression, there was a narrative on
normative masculinity which was largely informed by the concept of the
“self-made man,” understood as a strong, athletic man whose bravery made
him capable of facing and domesticating nature⎯witness Tarzan. In a
country where there was no work and men often could not make ends meet,
let alone take financial care of a family, dreams of a solid body and an
essential male identity, which needed no other marker than biology, provided
the male with a solace which was sorely needed. Of course, the hardships of
battle only came to reinforce this emphasis on the tough physique of men.
Not so after the war, when the demands of a thriving economy gave rise to a
body politic which no longer had any use for the muscle-bound hero, who
was relegated to a few comic strips. In this connection, it is revealing that
even the savior of “Democracy,” Superman, had a mainstream alter ego, the
run-of-the-mill Clark Kent, always dressed in an incospicuous suit and
perpetually wearing distinctively unheroic eyeglasses.
Indeed, the cherished heroes of everyday life in the 1950s were the Clark
Kents of America. Men whose bravery had been proved during the war and
whose courage now had to give way to an ethics of hard work, to the
willingness to blend in which became imperative in order to belong to the
mainstream in Postwar America. The ecclosion of capitalist consumerism
which is the hallmark of early Cold War America, with its characteristic
Invisibilizing the Male Body 51
multiplicity of office jobs owing to the boom of corporations, demanded that

men “prove” their masculinity indoors, not oudoors. Instead of standing out
from other males because of their imposing corporeality, they had to blend
into the group by becoming one of the many “common men” who was
capable of adjusting to the everyday life of a “nine to five job” after the
conflict. If a man was successful at doing this and, as a consequence, able to
become the sole provider for his wife and children, he could consider himself
a “self-made man,” a “common man,” one of the rough ones. What effects
did this new ideology on hegemonic masculinity have on the male body?
Basically, that the male body was made to disappear because it ceased to be
an essential piece of the puzzle which shaped masculinity.
Michel Foucault argues that the political dimension of the corporeal is
largely conditioned by forces of production, that is, by the relation of the
body to the labor market (173). Such an insight is particularly useful when
exploring the reasons behind the efacement of the “common” man’s body in
1950s American culture. Since being self-made was now equated with the
ability to make money, and not with the capacity to domesticate the
elements, the predominance of the body in the creation of hegemonic
masculinity gave way to the privileging of an image, of the tailoring of the
office man, and even, one might say, of clothing in order to signify it. Just as
mainstream men were being domesticated by the hegemonic role of
heterosexual husband, father and breadwinner, their bodies were being
covered in the typically “gray flannel suit” of the white-collar worker.3
Hence, the narrative on the ideal body of men during this period radically
contradicted the saying “It’s not the clothes that make the man.” Now, if a
man signified his white-collar status through his clothing, he was giving
proof of his maleness.
Indeed, immediately after the war, men were interpellated to curtail their
lives according to a certain economic market, which circumscribed orthodox
masculinity to the pursual of a white-collar job. This type of corporate office
work was coveted by would-be-mainstream men because it both symbolized
middle-class status and the possibility of upward social mobility.4 The
importance of the physical image projected in order to achieve this coveted
job should not be underestimated, as Robert J. Corber explains in his study
Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of
Masculinity (1997):
In the corporate world, men occupied a traditionally feminine position in relation to

others. Post-war success literature and advice manuals urged men to develop
qualities that would attract, please, and impress their superiors in the corporate
hierarchy. Moreover, they were encouraged to pay careful attention to how they
dressed, perhaps the most obvious sign of their feminization...The reorganization of
work reduced men to instrumentalizing their own appearance in order to increase
their exchange-value. (35)
Corber’s argument is interesting in that it shows how the traditionally

unkempt “masculine” image of men to signify maleness was discarded in
favor of the care for one’s external appearance, the dawning of apparel which
had, until then, been associated to femininity. While, as Corber argues, this
“feminized” men, as it introduced their bodies into the consumerist dynamics
of grooming, it is no less true that the normativity of their middle-class
masculinity was signified by their acceptance of this new image of the white-
collar worker. Ironically, the development of a traditionally tough body was
now associated to the working-class male, whose developed muscles were a
tool in the pursuit of a physically demanding blue-collar job. In this way, an
imposing masculine physique also became the visible marker of a man’s lack
of economic success within the new consumerist ethos which swept Postwar
America, and was thus to be avoided if one wanted to embody hegemonic
masculinity.
This shift in the bodily image which constituted normative masculinity
can be appreciated by the narratives which were spun about it in the culture
of the period. Thus, Susan Bordo notes in her study The Male Body: A New
Look at Men in Public and in Private, published in 1999, that a developed,
sexy male body was not cherished as desirable during the 1950s because of
its inevitable link with sexual activity. As she further explains, “during much
of the fifties, sex (especially sex for sex’s sake, not aimed at marriage and
family) was portrayed as nasty, dirty, evil” (126). Bordo notes that a side
effect of this was the representation of alluring male torsos in characters who
were “othered” in terms of race or social class and, thus, oversexed. She
mentions such “perfect” bodies as those of originally Russian actor Yul
Brinner, or Kirk Douglas’s imposing corporeality in his role as slave
Spartacus in the 1960 homonymous movie by Stanley Kubrick. However,
Bordo mentions Marlon Brando’s physique as the icon of male sexuality at
its peak when he played Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s 1951 adaptation
of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (137). Needless to say,
Stanley is nothing but the reverse of the hegemonic 1950s male; not only is
he clearly not succeeding in making a decent living (he and his wife live in
the poorest neighborhood of New Orleans), but he has no prospects of
bettering his upcoming family’s material conditions with his blue-collar
factory job. To boot, his success in army life has not enabled him to adapt to
peacetime America, and the only outlet he has for his excess of physical
prowess turns out to be his oversexed marriage⎯in case there were any
doubts, the negative connotation of his sexual excess is evidenced by his
raping his sister-in-law Blanche DuBois. Hence, Stanley’s corporeality
becomes a visual marker, a signifier, for his devious, “other” masculinity.
His perfect body signifies that he is not “the right type of guy.”
Both the play and the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire
textualize the anxiety brought about by a rapid shift in the hegemonic model
of masculinity. Another such text which has become emblematic for the
period, and which inaugurates the problematization of the new hegemonic
male, the new “self-made man,” is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, first
published in 1949. In his play, the salesman’s death is, of course, both literal
and metaphorical: Willy Loman cannot surface economically and, hence,
decides to do away with himself, thus ensuring that his family, his wife and
two sons, Biff and Happy, who cannot quite seem to make it either, receive
insurance money. The play is far too well known to dwell on the details of its
development here; suffice it to say that Willy’s predicament is summarized
by his famous statement “I still feel⎯kind of temporary about myself” (40).
Bearing in mind that Willy has come to epitomize the “common man” of the
postwar era, something was obviously terribly amiss with normative
masculinity during the period.
The fact that Willy is a salesman is interesting for the purposes of this
essay since of his main professional preoccupations is, precisely, to be liked
by other people. For a salesman, everyone is a potential customer and, hence,
the outward presentation of the self becomes really important. Actually, one
of Willy’s main concerns in the play is the fact that his body is ageing. Much
has been made of the symbolic decay of his household, whose appliances he
has not been able to pay for in a lifetime of work. However, this decay
mirrors his own body’s transition towards old age and how it hampers his
salesmanship. Willy himself explains this to his wife Linda:
WILLY: I’m fat. I’m very foolish to look at, Linda. I didn’t tell you, but Christmas-
time I happened to be calling on F. H Stewarts, and a salesman I know, as I was
going in to see the buyer I heard him say something about⎯walrus. And I⎯I
cracked him right across the face. I won’t take that. I simply will not take that. But
they do laugh at me. I know that.
LINDA: Darling . . .
WILLY: I gotta overcome it. I know I gotta overcome it. I’m not dressing to
advantage, maybe.
LINDA: Willy, darling, you’re the handsomest man in the world.
WILLY: O no, Linda. (29)
Interestingly, Willy considers the fact that his body is deteriorating as one of
the main causes why he is not selling as much as he used to. Clothing is also
a central concern for this salesman, who thinks that, perhaps, if he were
dressed correctly or, at least, more smartly⎯as a successful, white-collar
worker, one presumes⎯he would probably be more successful.
Clearly, Willy’s anxiety about his self-(re)presentation as a white-collar
man is related to his incapacity to blend in, to become invisible in a new
market economy which begs men to have a concrete, clean-cut appearance.
The outward apparel which invisibilizes the male body, and thus brings to the
fore a suitably domesticated masculinity, does not seem to suit Miller’s
salesman. Of this, Corber argues:
The salesman’s transformation into a white-collar worker provides the basis for
Miller’s tragedy. Willy is unable to withstand the pressures placed on him to
conform to the domestic model of masculinity…He does not want to become a mere
cog in an impersonal, bureaucratic corporation but longs to express the initiative and
daring that are characteristic of the entrepreneurial spirit. (38-39)
This analysis of Willy’s predicament pinpoints Willy’s ambivalence about

what the new corporation system demands of him: that he make himself
invisible, a “cog” in a machine, to use Corber’s words. I would argue that
though Willy might be reticent to conform, he is very much aware that there
is no other way towards success⎯an awareness which, interestingly enough,
seems to escape his elder son Biff (hence their flawed relationship).
The father-son conflict which Miller includes in his play does indeed
serve to further dramatize the traumatic transition towards new models of
“self-made manhood.” Biff, who is described by Miller as “well-built” (14),
clings to the aforementioned narrative of the outdoor, physical worker, the
man who can domesticate nature, even as it had become outmoded after
WWII. A successful sportsman during his teenage years, Biff later succeeds
at nothing, if not the physical. That is, his talent for bodily labor makes him
happy but, paradoxically, does not allow him to get ahead in the corporate
world. Having come home in order to try to please his father and find a
white-collar job, Biff explains his predicament to his brother Happy:
BIFF: Hap, I’ve had twenty or thirty different kinds of job since I left home before
the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska where
I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas. It’s why I came
home now, I guess, because I realized it…What the hell am I doing, playing around
with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m thirty-four years old, I oughta be
makin’ my future. That’s why I come running home…I’ve always made a point of
not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to
waste my life. (16-17)
The conundrum in which Biff seems to be trapped has to do with his inability
to rise in the social scale. His problem is that he has a talent for jobs which
are, socially speaking, considered secondary, and which identify him as a
man whose main strength is his rugged corporeality.
While, as has been explained, Willy has trouble adapting to the new
model of white-collar worker which is demanded of him, he desperately tries
to make Biff follow the herd. In fact, he is sorely disillusioned by his eldest
son’s investment in jobs which he sees will not afford him any chance of
upward mobility. As Willy tells his wife:
WILLY: How can he [Biff] find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand? In
the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him
to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. But it’s more than ten years now and he
has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week! (11)
Perhaps, that is why one of the last pieces of advice Willy gives to Biff, who
tries⎯albeit unsuccessfully⎯to become a businessman, is, “But don’t wear
sport jacket and slacks when you see Oliver [Biff’s prospective job
interviewer]…A business suit” (50). Indeed, as Corber very well explains,
“Willy…knows that one of the consequences of resisting the domestication
of masculinity is downward mobility” (39), which his son’s well-shaped and
untailored body unequivocally projects.
Observing and Going Unobserved: The Male Body Domesticated in

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954)
Paradoxical as it may seem, the invisibilization of the male body in mid-
twentieth century America was not exclusive to written culture, but also
became a distinctive signifier, a visual signpost, for the mainstream man in
the cinema. When watching Postwar American movies, one does indeed
realize that the main male character to be admired, the “goody,” has a
corporeal presence which is suitably negligible, a body that tends to be
ignored in the face of other more important traits which come to constitute
his characterization and/or performance as the ideal man. In a nutshell, it is
moral characteristics that make the (ideal) man in 1950s cinema⎯honesty,
loyalty, perseverance, effort⎯not bodily strength or beauty.
One of the main actors of the period who epitomized this new type of
“visual” male role model was James Stewart, who, interestingly, became one
of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite performers. If Hitchcock, despite his British
nationality, became one of the key directors of Postwar American cinema,
James Stewart’s career also reached a peak when he went to work in the
United States. It was, perhaps, his foreign point of view on American society
that enabled him to embody the ambivalent gendered economies which
thrived in the new heterosexist scenario of Postwar American culture.
Actually, Hitchcock has been considered conspicuous for having questioned
the strict heterosexist gender roles that shaped hegemonic masculinity and
femininity during the early Cold War era. Hence, his choice of Stewart, the
all-American male, the wholesome “common” guy as a token actor, has an
ironic, subversive twist to it.
As a matter of fact, Hitchcock’s work has been widely analyzed within
the cultural and gender studies fields as being prominent in its cinematic
representation of women and men who deviate from the norm: in the case of
women, Hitchcock inscribes a type of femininity which, although ultimately
contained, foreshadows the possibility of a new, freer woman; in the case of
men, Hitchcock’s representation of male homosexuality has been widely
noted⎯witness the case of Strangers on a Train (1951) or Rope (1948).5
Notwithstanding, it is my contention that the director’s works can also be
analyzed fruitfully within masculinity studies by analyzing his inclusion of
cinematic heterosexual male characters who also deviate from the gendered
norms of the time, but are somehow perceived to be orthodox enough to be
inscribed as male role models. This is precisely where his choice of the actor
James Stewart becomes revealing. While enacting the cultural ambiguities
about the new role model of masculinity which, as has been explained above,
was being ideologically imposed on American society, Stewart was also able
to epitomize the new “disembodied” man, whose personality loomed over his
corporeality.
However, this “double-discourse,” or ambiguous visual economy, does
not only cater to the representation of masculinity itself, but also to its
relation to the opposite sex. As Dennis Bingham argues in his book Acting
Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint
Eastwood (1994), “Whatever else he may have been, Hitchcock was a master
of the dichotomy in mainstream film whereby conservatism and subversion
exist side by side…[T]o Hitchcock ‘typical American couple’ means
something distinctly sinister” (76-77). How does Hitchcock manage to
represent this faultline in mainstream heterosexist ideology? And,
particularly, how does he endeavor to represent this devious identification
with normative masculinity through the representation of the mainstream
American, heterosexual man without seeming to undermine it? I would argue
that he does so by ensuring that his male characters’ corporeality remains
suitably invisible; that is, his male protagonists may undergo severe internal,
spiritual dilemmas as regards the masculine roles that they are to adapt to in
Postwar America, but their corporeal image, their bodies, remain suitably
contained and inconspicuous.
Such is the case of Rear Window (1954), a movie whose very action is
structured around the forced immobility of the main character played, of
course, by none other than James Stewart. The very premise of the film,
where the protagonist, a photographer named Jeff (short for L. B. Jeffries)
played by James Stewart, is compelled to remain seated in a wheelchair, due
to his having broken a leg in an assignment, gives us the measure of how
insignificant the role of this man’s body is going to be for the development of
the action. As Bingham notes, Stewart’s towering frame, usually shot from a
low angle in many movies (74), is undermined in Rear Window by his sitting
or reclining position which holds him either at a level with the spectators or
is shot from above. Jeff, who can now do nothing but stare out of his rear
window, which faces the court and his neighbors’ apartments, avowedly does
not spend his days in an office dawning a grey flannel suit, as the “common
man” of the 1950s would. However, he spends the day in his apartment,
CHAPTER 2
Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s
American Culture and Literature
Josep M. Armengol
We must preserve not only the bodies of the

unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect,
their self-reliance, and courage and determination. 1
This chapter explores the cultural and literary representation of male bodies
during the Great Depression in the United States.2 While the mainstream
model of American masculinity has traditionally linked men’s identity to
their breadwinning role, the chapter shows how the Great Depression caused
millions of American males to feel emasculated by their incapacity to
provide for their families. It is argued, therefore, that the Roosevelt
administration aimed, at least in part, to “remasculinize” America by
promoting numerous images of “hard” bodies at work, as may be seen in
several New Deal public murals of the time. This remasculinizing effort was
complemented by Marxist authors and critics, perhaps most notably Michael
Gold, who established a correlation between gender and class by suggesting
a dichotomy between hard/masculine/working-class authors, on the one
hand, and soft/effete/upper-class writers, on the other. Nevertheless, this
study concludes by calling this very binary into question, underlining several
counterimages and contradictions that inevitably inform it. If documentary
literature questioned Mike Gold’s hypermasculine view of the proletariat by
providing images of vulnerable yet dignified male bodies, writers such as
John Steinbeck and painters such as Paul Cadmus also problematized, as we
shall see, Gold’s masculinist and homophobic rhetoric from particularly
interesting and subversive perspectives.
Depression and/as Emasculation

In Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), the sociologist
Michael S. Kimmel rightly argues that self-making has traditionally been
regarded as the hegemonic ideal of American masculinity. As the historical
product of the rise of capitalism and industrialization in the early nineteenth

century, the American self-made man was designed from the start to adopt
social mobility and economic success as fundamental markers of
masculinity. While the model of self-made manhood has taken different
forms in different historical periods, the compulsion to prove masculinity
through accumulated wealth and social status has remained a central
component of American culture from the early nineteenth century to our day.
“In the first few decades of the nineteenth century,” as Kimmel himself
explains, “American men began to link their sense of themselves as men…to
their economic success” (7).
Nevertheless, the stock market crash of October 1929, which marked the
beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, posed a radical
challenge to the American dream of self-made manhood. Caught up in wild
speculation and euphoria, America had been making, spending, and
carelessly playing with money at a record pace all through the 1920s. With
the volume of sales on the New York Stock Exchange exceeding 1.1 billion
shares in 1928 (Minter 148), the market continued to skyrocket until the fall
of 1929. While scary economic indicators had been there for years,3 nobody
seemed willing to recognize the very real dangers of speculation. On
December 4, 1928, in his last address to Congress, President Coolidge
assured the nation that it could “regard the present with satisfaction and
anticipate the future with optimism.” In his now infamous inaugural address,
his successor, President Herbert Hoover, insisted that the future of the nation
was “bright with hope.” “I have no fears for the future of our country,” he
declared. Even if Hoover continued to utter words of assurance after the
Crash, insisting that America was “sound,” it became increasingly clear, as
Gilbert Seldes famously replied, that America was indeed “sound,” but that
the sound was “hollow.”4 By the winter of 1932-3, America was undergoing
the deepest crisis it had faced since the Civil War. In three years following
the Crash, national income, as David Minter (148) elaborates, fell from $81
to $41 billion; 85,000 businesses failed; and over 5,000 banks closed, doing
away with more than 9 million saving accounts. Between 1930 and 1934,
industrial production fell by 50 percent, unemployment tripled, leaving
around 16 million people jobless (about one-third of the labor force), and the
value of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange fell 78 percent.
Unable to pay the rent, many people were evicted and lived in shacks in
quickly formed shantytowns called “Hoovervilles,” built on garbage dumps,
while thousands of hungry men and women had to line up for bread and daily
rations at soup kitchens (Minter 148-149; Zinn 387, 391, 394).5
Clearly, then, the optimism ushered in by the Roaring Twenties was
ushered out by the Great Depression and the widespread unemployment of
the 1930s. While the hegemonic ideal of American masculinity had been
based on self-making and economic success, the workplace suddenly turned
out to be insecure, unreliable, or simply nonexistent. Millions of American
men thus felt deprived of their traditionally masculine identities, which they
had also associated with their twin identities as household heads and
breadwinners (Kimmel 140-145). For most men, then, the Depression proved
to be emasculating both at work and at home. Besides seeing themselves as
impotent patriarchs, unemployed men underwent a loss of status before other
men, as well as with their wives and children. Not only did they feel ashamed
of themselves for being unable to work; they were usually despised by their
own families, too, who saw them as equally “unmanly.” “Even if
contemporary readers would not go as far as to blame women for
reemasculating their husbands in some twisted incestuous plot,” Kimmel
elaborates, “we cannot but feel compassion for men whose twin identities as
worker and father/husband, a dual identity expressed in the term
‘breadwinner,’ was suddenly eroded, seemingly beyond repair” (145).
Feeling bereft of the optimism that had characterized the Roaring Twenties,
and unable to rely on the market economy which had helped define and
assert their manhood, they usually ended up seeing themselves as
emasculated patriarchal figures. In Kimmel’s words:
Never before had American men experienced such a massive and system-wide
shock to their ability to prove manhood by providing for their families…With nearly
one in four American men out of work, the workplace could no longer be considered
a reliable arena for the demonstration and proof of one’s manhood. (140-141)
The “Remasculinization” of America

If, as it seems, the Depression forced many men to give up their faith in
the marketplace as a proof of their manhood, masculinity had to be
reconceived in a number of ways. One of the most obvious remasculinization
strategies consisted in (re-)turning to the male body and, in particular, the
strong, muscular, brawny body of the working-class male.6 Just as the
famous 1936 M-F (Masculinity-Femininity) Test by psychologists Terman
and Miles contributed to divorcing gender identity from achievement in the
public sphere, redefining masculinity as the gendered expression of a certain

inner sense of oneself,7 so too did the Depression help redefine the notion of
success away from personal income. Failing money, success might as well be
signified by a masculine physique, with physical strength symbolizing
strength of character. Coinciding with Charles Atlas’s opening of his first
gymnasium in 1927, which turned bodybuilding into one of the most
successful businesses even (and especially) during the Depression (Kimmel
152-153), American culture during the Depression became increasingly
obsessed with muscular, rather than success-oriented, manifestations of
masculinity.
Marked by the spectacular transformation of a wimpy bespectacled
newspaper reporter into an alluring muscular hero called Superman,8 the
whole decade was indeed replete with depictions of hard bodies, as
evidenced in the large New Deal public murals painted by the artists of the
time. Indeed, in 1933, and as part of President Roosevelt’s policies, one
million dollar was allocated for the employment of artists within the Civil
Works Administration (CWA). The idea was to foster a Public Works of Arts
Project (PWAP) to employ needy artists, at hourly wages, to create murals,
sculptures, prints, and paintings to embellish public buildings. For the first
time in history, artists, as Barbara Haskell (226) rightly notes, were officially
recognized as performing a valuable service to the community, just as their
art was expected to go beyond mere aestheticism and connect with the social
and political problems of the day. Murals were meant to be uplifting,
promoting Americans’ self-esteem and faith in their country and providing
testimony to the enduring aspects of the American way of life. The paintings,
as Haskell (236) elaborates, aimed to recover a quintessential American
identity in the present and in the past to counter the nation’s uncertainty and
to reassure Americans about their ability to endure and succeed. Besides
celebrating the values of work and community through images of daily life, a
common theme became an idealized (agrarian) past in which people labored
together for a common good. Because of the allegiance to the ideals of
community, self-reliance, and hard work as sources of national pride and
endurance (Haskell 226), many artists turned to “the people” as a source of
national strength. Instead of glamorous or affluent characters, the heroes of
the age thus became “the common people,” representing simplicity, purity,
resilience, and integrity. Even F. S. Fitzgerald, the author of The Great
Gatsby (1925),9 began to study the writings of Karl Marx, describing Dick
Diver of Tender Is the Night (1934) as “a communist-liberal-idealist, a

moralist in revolt” (Bruccoli 347-348).10
Since art was meant to be democratic and accessible to the public, it is no
wonder, then, that most of the murals, painted on the walls of post office and
justice buildings across the country, were centrally concerned with depicting
working-class male bodies at work. In so doing, they celebrated the muscular
potency of the working-class male body, which was contrasted (implicitly at
least) with the flaccid, enervated, and emasculated bodies of both middle-
and upper-class males. The ideal male body for the Roosevelt administration,
as Melosh has argued, was located within images of working-class men,
particularly farmers and laborers. She describes the ideal male form in her
analysis of Allen Thomas’s mural “Extending the Frontier in Northwest
Territory.”11 “The powerful lines of the man’s body, shown in the arduous
work of plowing,” she rightly notes, “accentuate masculine strength; his
body angles resolutely toward the horizon” (33). It was the image of
masculinity as strong, muscular, and hopeful that, she insists, acted as the
national image of masculinities at the time. A similar example is provided by
Conrad A. Albrizio’s best-known mural “The New Deal,” dedicated to
President Roosevelt.12 Like the “Extending the Frontier” painting, this mural
offers another representation of working-class males at work, their muscular
bodies constituting yet another symbol of (national) strength and endurance
in hard times. While President Roosevelt insisted on preserving not only “the
bodies of the unemployed” but also their moral strength and integrity “from
destitution,” it might be argued, therefore, that preserving the bodies of the
victims of the Depression became part and parcel of the very same effort
made by the New Deal administration to preserve their manhood, which
Roosevelt beautifully defined as “their self-respect, their self-reliance, and
courage and determination.”
This “remasculinization” of American culture was reflected in literature
as well. Indeed, Proletarian fiction, which was on the rise throughout the
1930s, was centrally concerned with gender concerns, particularly the
opposition between the ideal of “masculine toughness” personified by the
working-class male and the “feminine softness” symbolized by the man of
the leisure classes (Penner 29). It is true that, for fairly obvious reasons,
cultural and literary critics have usually focused on economic and social
issues (poverty, unemployment, working-class life, etc.) when approaching
literary works of the Depression. Thus, for example, the novels of John
CHAPTER 4
Breaking the Mold: Male Rock Performance,
Glam, and the (Re-)Imagination of the Male Body
in the 1960s and 1970s
Esther Zaplana
Introduction
Rare video footage of American rock idol Iggy Pop performing live with the
Stooges at the Cincinnati Pop Festival on June 1970 illustrates the raw power
of an all-encompassing body, half naked, trembling, shaking rhythmically to
the highly-charged rock sound, and placed at the centre of the gaze of
thousands. The vocalist is shown to accomplish some of the stage antics his
gigs have been associated with. Whilst delivering the theme song “TV Eye”
(TV Eye Live, 1977), Pop’s body moves frantically to the electrifying sound
of the guitars. He addresses the audience, howls, wanders about the stage and
spontaneously jumps off the platform on to the standing area, literally
merging with the crowd. This was new stage behavior, described as “an act
of the new generation.”1 After a minute or so Pop rises above the multitude
hoisted up on the hands of many. He starts waving at the crowd triumphantly.
“I was walking over the crowd, I just walked down and [it] was a beautiful
thing, it felt like Jesus,” he would later comment of his stage dive.2 The
messianic mood of this event at this point in time is hardly surprising, if we
consider that the young generations that lived through the 1960s and 1970s
experienced a profound rejection of long-established social and political
views and ideologies, and were ready to embrace iconic figures that
embodied the revolutionary spirit and the newly shared values of their
generation. At the same time, Pop’s pioneering performance shares the
context and intent of the artistic transformations that took place in the 1960s.
More specifically, his spontaneous crowd merging adventure is redolent of
the “act out” events that intended to make the audience part of the art through
interaction and aimed to transform the art scene by making it more politically
engaged.
The two-way relation between the theatricality exhibited in Pop’s rock
concert performance and the meaningfulness ascribed to it by his audience
draws attention to the centrality of the body in this exchange. Not only is the
body instrumental in the dissolution of the boundary that separates performer
from audience, but the startling physicality of the performance puts also on
view the display of the male body as a spectacle, a position traditionally
reserved for the female body. Among the trademarks of Pop’s artistic
persona are to perform shirtless, which makes the audience feel closer to the
artist’s bodily presence, and to execute onstage a series of suggestive
movements, stretches, and contortions that are intensively charged with
sexual energy. His playfulness with the microphone (which he swings around
and sometimes holds inside his jeans) and his prolonged close-mike
vocalizations may also be seen as deliberate and overt displays of masculine
sexuality. Pop’s Cincinnati performance raises some of the questions that, as
we shall see, will become central to this chapter about non-canonical,
groundbreaking representations of the male body in the late 1960s and early
1970s.
Indeed, the chapter will focus on rock artists Iggy Pop, David Bowie and
Lou Reed, and the ways in which their imagination of the male body depart
at this time from dominant models of masculinity and subvert the limits of
patriarchal representations. All three knew each other, and Bowie in
particular collaborated with both Reed and Pop in the production of some of
their music. They also coincided at a historical moment of twentieth-century
American culture marked by rebelliousness and confrontational gender
politics and were all participants, to a greater or lesser extent, in the synergy
of art and music that converged in New York’s cultural milieu in the 1960s
and 1970s. Rather than the music per se, the chapter will concentrate on the
performative images of the male body generated by the artists in the 1960s
and 1970s, and for this purpose a selection of materials⎯either in video,
photographic, or textual form⎯will be brought into the discussion. Through
a cultural and performance analysis of the narrative spaces created by the
rock artists, the readings in the chapter aim to develop an understanding of
how representations of the male body at this historically specific location
destabilized hegemonic models of masculinity, dovetailing with the radical
politics of a younger generation that strove to break the molds of an
alienating social and gendered order.
Breaking the Mold 65
The Hegemonic Male Body Ideal and the 1960s

Men have historically occupied the subject position in Western culture
and have established a relation to their own representation via a discursively
cogent (and universally understood) separation of body and mind. Their
hegemonic location has been sustained by a profound duality between the
“self-sufficient” subject, where men represent the eye and the ear, and the
objectified Other, where man’s Other(s) represent the (ostensibly passive)
recipients of the gaze and the musical mind. The secondary element in the
binary is conceptually linked to the bodily, to female corporeality, and
embeds a conservative mode of femininity not necessarily reserved to
women, but associated also with gender anxieties around effeminate
manifestations of masculinity and homosexuality. The times when men have
moved from their representational position in the binary, and have become
part of the visual, they have tended to follow a canonical model of an
idealized and powerful physicality.
The canonical model of the male body has been thoroughly saturated
with an ideological significance that harks back to classical Greek culture:
the ideal muscular body, the beau idéal of balanced body proportions, the
standardized attributes of body parts, and the small (or hidden) genitalia. All
these features have set the standard for a canonized representation of the
ideal male body as a power-symbol (Dutton 11-18).3 Yet, the symbolic
powers of this corporeal masculine ideal inherited in Western culture from
the Greeks are in contrast with the silence surrounding masculine physicality
in the Hellenic and later discourses. The subsequent concealment of the male
body in Western discourse emerges as symptomatic of a notion of
masculinity that becomes visible when it is detached from the body. Indeed,
Peter Lehman has argued that the silence surrounding the sexual
representation of the male body has only served to reinforce the traditional
patriarchal discourse; he indicates that dominant images of the male body in
Western culture either perpetuate the mythic power of the phallus or prompt
its pathetic, often humorous collapse (Lehman 5-6).
A heightened interest in undermining the patriarchal discourse and re-
imaging the sexual representation of the male (and female) body, as well as
the representation of the phallus, emerged in the 1960s and continued during
the 1970s, largely as a consequence of radical countercultural politics,
particularly feminism. Due to disenchantment with conventional methods of
expression, representational change also came about as a result of creativity

being ricocheted back on to the artist’s own body.4 This led to a major
challenge to the way imagery of the body was projected to the viewer, an
aspect that would be taken up by rock artists, as we shall see.
Oppositional discourses that questioned rigid gender distinctions and
called for an end to the patriarchal, militaristic, and powerful male prototype
prompted the collapse of the ideal of muscularity and strength associated
with the traditional model for the male body. Mike Kelley elaborates on this
point that radical youth culture in 1960s America was to a large extent a
byproduct of the anti-Vietnam War movement, given that disenchanted white
youths wanted to fight back against conscription and the brutality of the war.
They found a model of political protest in the Black Civil Rights Movement
and the connection of these two very different constituencies, according to
Kelley, gave rise to a renewed awareness of the patriarchal gender
dichotomy, in which militarism was identified with man, and where woman
represented the greatest “Other.” As a sign of resistance, the antidote to the
war, then, was both to embrace the “prototypically feminine” and to accept
male homosexuality, since one of the ways to elude conscription was to
pretend to be gay. Kelley (2-3) also argues that this is at the root of the
popularity enjoyed by a number of rock subgenres in their adoption of camp
aesthetics and/or homosexual posturing: glamour, “queerness,” and a
feminine pose were celebrated for their “abject nature in American society.”
The Subversive Young Rock Rebel

Pop, Bowie, and Reed were not by any means alone in the late 1960s in
re-inventing the self-performative image of the male body on the rock
musical scene, and yet their enactments serve as paradigmatic examples of
this new cultural logic. Significantly, a mass-culture musical style such as
rock, which has been associated with a monolithic masculinism, generated in
the late 1960s and early 1970s a segment of rock music that set out to
construct a narrative of the performative body that displaced rigid gender
distinctions. Rock has traditionally been characterized by its adversarial
beliefs against the establishment, and ever since the 1950s, it had legitimated
the image of the young rebel, often encapsulated in the pervasive figure in
American culture of the (leather-clad) rock-and-roll star. Leerom Medovi, in
his study of the rebel image and masculinist politics of rock in the U.S.A.,
points out that rock’s discourse of non-conformity and oppositionality in the

1950s grew around a misogynist anxiety inherited from the contradictions of
American postwar sexual relations. The young rebel was associated with a
“deviant” or “delinquent” youthful disobedience, which ended up being
given legitimation “in terms of a boy’s acknowledged need to ensure that he
grew into manhood under adverse conditions conveniently blamed on
women” (Medovi 162). The alliance between a masculinist (white, middle
class) youth rebellion against the conventions of American life, on the one
hand, and a misogynist anxiety over feminization, on the other, came to a
head in the 1960s, when it became more difficult for rock to threaten
mainstream gendered and racial ideologies. Rock music thus splintered into
several strands that attempted to redefine rock’s alternative countercultural
project, some of which found ways to construct non-masculinist modes of
rebellion and some which did not bring about a reconciliation with the
hegemonic masculine narrative (Medovi 180).5
It has been suggested that the approach that began to reconcile rock
rebellion with the critique of the dominant model of masculinity can be
located in Glam rock and the rock-in-drag phenomenon that emerged in the
early 1970s, and continued later with punk rock and new wave music
(Medovi 181-182; Kelley 2).6 Bowie, Reed, and Pop are associated with the
glam or glitter rock aesthetics of this period, and although they have later in
their career adapted their visual style and consolidated their status as rock
icons, the three adopted in the 1970s a visual style representative of this
musical subgenre.7 Outrageous clothes and hairstyle, glitter fashion,
platform-soled boots, and representations of androgyny and camp on stage
distinguished glam rock style, and hence its followers launched a portrayal of
the male body marked by sexual ambiguity and/or homosexual posturing.
Medovi suggests that David Bowie is probably the first rock musician to
construct a narrative of a rebel who “shocked by confusing genders,” and
particularly in the song “Rebel, Rebel” (Diamond Dogs, 1974) Bowie openly
“reconceptualize[d] rock rebellion as threatening a straight world (rather than
a feminine world)” (181).
“Rebel, Rebel” was released as a single to popular success concurrent
with the time Bowie moved to America. The official video recording shows a
slim-built Bowie with red-dyed hair and dressed in a strikingly camp pirate
costume, which does not miss the lacy scarf around the neck and the
customary pirate eye patch. The look is completed with high-heel black boots
and a patterned shirt under tight-fitting red dungarees, the color of which
matches his bright red guitar.8 The symbolic phallic power of the guitar in
rock music is called into question in Bowie’s performance as he dispenses
with the strap that holds the instrument securely to his body, which leaves the
guitar loose to be strummed at intervals. The artist lifts the guitar up and
down, sometimes above his head, and holds it pointedly, having an end
coming to his chest as if it were an extension of his own body. He appears to
be teasing the viewer into thinking about the inconsistencies of a close
association between the masculinist gaze and the phallic guitar as a signifier
of male power. His playfulness with the guitar can be seen as way to
demystify the symbolic sharpness of the phallus, whilst his flashy clothes
mock the conventions of the male gaze and men’s seductive beckoning.
Although Bowie resorts to a hyperbolization of the accoutrements of
masculinity in terms of farce, he uses his body for particular gains. By
replacing the boyish masculinity of the rock rebel with boyish camp, his
performance disrupts the dynamics of masculine identification and
simultaneously unlocks the prospect for other sexually motivated male gaze
identifications linked to non-heterosexual desire.
Not only does Bowie’s video “Rebel, Rebel” performance contribute
through body display to the promotion of diverse sexual identities, but his
message is also conveyed in the lyrics of the song. The narrative constructs
here a sexually ambiguous embodied young rebel (a metaphor for Bowie’s
own stage persona) that discloses his sexual orientation through changes to
his outward appearance and the adoption of camp or feminine style; he
resists rigid gender distinctions and defies the social order (and yet the lyrics
do not seem to completely rid themselves of the underlying misogynist
narrative that holds the mother responsible for the “domestication” of boys):
You’ve got your mother in a whirl

She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl
Hey babe, your hair’s alright
Hey babe, lets go out tonight
You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing and we look divine
You love bands when they’re playing hard
You want more and you want it fast
They put you down, they say I’m wrong
You tacky thing, you put them on.9
The reference in the lyrics to both “dancing” and “bands…playing hard” is

significant in the context of rock (and pop) music vis-à-vis the imagination of
a body in motion, rhythmically led by the beats and pulsations of the musical
sound. The allusion to a male body at the mercy of the music and the speed
of the movements and action (“you want more and you want it fast”) brings
associations with bodily processes, sexual excitement, and a dynamic
sexuality that dares to tease or mislead the male listener, as well as the rest of
the audience (“you tacky thing, you put them on”). The explicit allusion to
loving rock bands in their physical “hard playing” directs our attention to the
decisive role of the performer’s body, both in the production of the music
and the creation of a masculine sexual aura around rock.
Unlike the disembodiment observed in classical works, where the
composer features as the autonomous creator whose music becomes part of
the mind and moves away from the body, rock performance aims to preserve
its popular edge of immediate experience and bodily proximity. The presence
of the body is felt close to the listener when he experiences the music, despite
(and because of) the rock musician having traditionally been defined in terms
of authenticity, male sexual prowess, and a masculine ideology of playing
live. Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel” lyrics and visuals (re-) imagine the physicality
of the male rock singer to create an altogether androgynous or queer body,
thereby breaking the silence at this crucial time about the representation of
non-heterosexual identities. The artist refuses to put a distance between his
stage persona and the idea of disembodiment in order to create a sense of
immediacy between the transgressive young rebel and the audience.
Bowie’s appropriation of the aesthetics of camp to represent an
embodied, yet dislocated, portrayal of the rock rebel illustrates the
deconstruction of the mainstream prototype of a self-assured (leather-clad or
denim jeaned) rocker, whose traditional image combined a boyish
awkwardness with “macho” posturing.10 According to Kelley, nonetheless,
the archetype of the leather-clad juvenile delinquent had already managed to
find his way into the “camp pantheon” in the 1960s via previous
experimental films in the U.S. and his acceptance in the New York
underground subculture, finally finding expression in “the leather uniform of
Punk” (6).11 Lou Reed is a notable example of the black leather garb and
dark sunglasses style adopted by the New York avant-garde scene around the
mid-1960s; he combined this look, moreover, with unambiguously bisexual
or gender blurring elements, such as colored hair and makeup. The

appropriation of the (leather-clad) “macho” posturing within the context of
the homosexual gaze set the standard for an aesthetics of representation that
signaled a range of camp strategies, which incorporated glamour, gender
slippage, cross dressing, transvestism, and homosexuality mixed with either
decadence, evil, or the horrific (Kelley 5-6).
In this sense, the self-referential power of the body as a symbol of
resistance and liberation in performances by Bowie, Pop, and Reed discloses
a connection between the sexual subjectivity of the male personas involved
in the performances and a more polymorphous sexual order, a dimension that
points to the effects of the counterculture, especially the sexual revolution
and the gay liberation movement. The strategies that the rock artists decided
to adopt to intensify their bodily presence on stage and strike a chord with
the current consciousness were nonetheless different. We may say that the
three aimed to react against hegemonic values and challenge the rock myths
of natural sex and gender, but whilst Pop projected on stage an overtly
sexualized and unruly bodily presence, drenched with connotations of
feminine excess, Glam rock exponents Bowie and Reed tapped into the
feminine by sliding between the two signifying poles of male and female.
Rock, the Body and the Performative Dimension of the Self

One of the core goals of the second wave of feminism during the 1960s
and 1970s was to uncover the manner in which patriarchy had attempted to
regulate women’s bodies. Feminism set out to challenge the way women had
been subjected to objectifying and reductionist representations of the female
body that mirrored oppressive patriarchal ideology. Inspired by the
counterculture in the 1960s, women artists focused their attention on the
importance of physicality as a locus of practical cultural control.
Representations of the body reached a peak during this time of cultural
revolution in an attempt to reorganize and redefine inherited cultural
assumptions; hence many artists took in their stride a self-referential, first
person narrative of the body (i.e., performance art and body art focused
specifically on the body). Women artists became interested in taking up new
representational strategies that put them in charge of the images they wished
to create of their bodies, of their own self-portrayals, as well as the gender
messages that they wanted to transmit through their performances and/or the
performative images they produced (Jones “Presence” 12-16).12 Amelia

Jones draws our attention to the importance of the performative dimension of
the self as a means to open up the question of “how subjectivity is
established and how meaning is made in relation to all representations of the
human body” (“Eternal” 948-949). She has looked, for example, at works by
a number of contemporary women artists who establish an exaggerated mode
of performative self-imaging that opens up new ways of thinking about the
gender-identified subject (“Eternal” 953-76).13
Male artists involved in performance at this time who were interested in
subverting conventional modes of representations of the male body display a
similar self-imaging approach to women artists: exaggeration and hyperbole,
extreme performances, dress code transgression, presenting the
explicitness/nakedness of the body and going beyond regular artistic media
and sound, amongst other (Jones “Clothes” 25-28).14 New representational
strategies and practices for the female body seem then to impinge on a
simultaneous representational shift of the male body vis-à-vis the gender-
identified male subject. The way in which the male body and the sexually-
and gender-identified male subject are interconnected can therefore yield
productive insights: as to the extent the self is open to the other (who views)
and the challenge by male artists to the entrenched meanings attached to
representations of the body. In this sense, this historical location may be seen
as marked by a cultural and artistic momentous change characterized by
discontinuity and a breakup from traditional gendered images of the body.
The rock scene that Pop, Bowie, and Reed represented partook of this
creative moment, inasmuch as their performative (self-)imaging in their
musical appearances delved into how discursive meanings of the male
subject were made vis-à-vis their unconventional representations of the male
body on stage.
Iggy Pop’s theatricality, for example, centered on his body as a means to
perform something exciting or shocking in order to break the molds and the
forms of a social and cultural order that was already programmed. He
became a model for the punk rock performers of the late 1970s and is thus
credited with being the precursor of punk rock. The exposure to the audience
of his half-naked self, including occasional frontal nudity, involves bodily
excess and over-representation of male physicality, which places his bodily
representation on the side of the feminine (Irigaray 110-111).15 As Sue-Ellen
Case argues, the naked body on stage serves as a way to stress gendering
processes and is thus “situated as object[s] of institutional, social practices of
gender” (192). A photograph of Pop taken at a concert in New York in the
early 1970s shows the artist in short pants doing back bending acrobatics on
the floor. His slim bare body and provocative posture, together with his knee-
height black boots, remind us of sexuality as excess, as well as the
implications that this has for the culturally privileged male gender in a binary
opposition that subordinates multiplicity.16 Woman has been conceptualized
as the lack and excess in the binary and hence Pop’s self-imaging of the body
does not only shift his corporeal presence into a position that women have
historically occupied, but it also raises questions around the multiplicity of
desires. As the object of the gaze, the male body “takes on the feminized
position” and yet it also suggests “a deconstruction rather than a new
construction of social practices” (Case 192). His performance activates,
therefore, the sexual desirability of the male body as object of the gaze and
spectacle, and explores the dynamics of the embodied gaze, destabilizing the
status of the masculine in the binary.
For his part, Reed’s stage presence during his time of alignment with the
sounds and the aesthetics of Glam rock walked the line between androgyny
and masculine self-assuredness. His seductive singing and lyrics and his
disaffected rock-and-roll cool were used to chronicle a lifestyle (his own and
also that of others) shaped by social exclusion, alternative sexualities, and the
use of drugs. In so doing, he brought to the public eye the sentiments of an
alienated youth. A live performance in Paris in 1974 of his song “Heroin”
(The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967) illustrates how the performative
body is used to reference the self in his work.17 The song draws from his own
experimentation with the drug and created a disturbing connection between
Reed’s narration of the effects of the opiate and some of the audience’s views
on recreational drug use. In their frustration with the system, a proportion of
the disaffected youth believed that drugs could help them find a new
perspective on their world and enhance their state of consciousness. At some
moments in Reed’s performance the music brings him to a rapturous or
ecstatic state, associating in this way the effect of drugs with his vocal
delivery of the song; he even includes some gestures that mimic the injection
of heroin in his vein (“cause when the blood begins to flow, when it shoots
up the dropper’s neck, when I’m closing in on death”),18 and thus his
rendition heightens the intensity of the song’s message whilst it
simultaneously places the body at the center of his performance. His body
becomes a self-referential symbol for the relationship between the individual
and the rejection of the institutionalized means that the 1970s society offered
to the younger generation to achieve their goals. The performance brings a
symbolic connection between the body and its potential to perform an unruly
function.
Bowie’s more flamboyant version of glam and gender crossing in his
artistic appearances, on the other hand, called into question the subjectivity
of the male stage personas involved in his performances; although his stage
characters may be read differently, they were uncompromisingly sexualized.
Bowie would later figuratively “kill” his stage personas in order to bring to
an end his need to act out the rock persona outside the stage setting. On this
point, Hans Wessels has indicated that in rock music the degree of realness
of the rock persona is “as much part of the star’s offstage persona as onstage”
and thus rock stars are normally required to “live their image everywhere”
(280). Bowie’s most famous stage persona is the enigmatic and slightly feral
character of Ziggy Stardust, who embodied the glam rock visuals of the early
1970s: glitter, sexually ambiguous posturing, drag queen style, and
androgyny.
The demands of acting out the rock persona and the self-representational
shift of the male body is illustrated in a photograph of Bowie, Pop, and Reed
taken at the Dorchester Hotel in London in 1972.19 The rock stars are posing
in each other’s arms, unzipped shirts, looking boldly at the camera. Bowie is
dressed in his Ziggy Stardust glitter clothing with distinctive mullet-type
haircut, whilst Reed appears poised behind his sunglasses, dyed hair, and
dark varnished nails. Pop, in the middle, stares defiantly at the lens, clinging
to the other two and holding a packet of cigarettes in his mouth. Since
manliness has traditionally been associated with a masculine image of sober
dress and rigid posturing, this photograph of the artists underscores the shift
towards an androgynous, more relaxed portrayal of the male body, and brings
to the fore the performative element involved in creating an individual
identity through dress transgression. As Kaja Silverman has expressed,
“clothing and other kinds of ornamentation make the human body culturally
visible…clothing draws the body so that it can be culturally seen, and
articulates it as a meaningful form” (qtd. in Wilson 69). By articulating both
the body and the psyche, and making the body visible through the
performative dimension of clothing, the rock artists appear to be emphasizing

the corporeal as a locus for the constitution of an individual's subjective
meanings and as the site for new narratives of the masculine. Glam rock
artists’ performative self-imaging of the cross-dressed body at this time can
thus be interpreted as a radical subversion of the meanings attached to
manliness and its articulation through dress convention. By giving cultural
visibility to sexually diverse identities, the rock performers were (re-
)formulating traditionally constituted notions of heteronormativity and
gender.
Rock, “Transgressive” Body Acts, and the Avant-Garde

With its desire to antagonize, its political dissension, and a sexually
charged onstage performance, rock in the 1960s and 1970s recreated an
idoneous scene for breaking the rules. It is in this context that the body
became a symbol for the liberationist drive and an instrument of exchange
between audience and performer. As Medovi (160) argues, artists adopted
strategies that rejected massified forms of human existence, as they were
seen as devoid of critical perspective and lacked room for oppositionality.
Avant-garde aesthetics were embraced in artistic production as a tactical
move to counteract an elite culture that did not offer an alternative politics,
nor did it adopt a self-critical approach to undermine the effects of mass
culture under capitalism. Paradoxically, as a form of mass culture, rock
combined the popularization of an adversarial cultural lifestyle with a post-
avant-gardist project that was “to shift the locale of cultural politics to the
arena of mass culture” (Medovi 160).20
The artistic impulse in this period also gained momentum as a result of
the production of artworks that sought the intersection of diverse media
(visual art, performance, music, and so on). In what became known as the
Pop Art style, artists became interested in making popular culture their
subject matter through the appropriation of mass-culturally produced images
and objects. They sought to push the limits of art in several directions and
blur the boundaries between high and popular culture. In America, Andy
Warhol congregated around the Factory, his New York studio, a diversity of
artists, musicians, and intellectuals, as well as a number of personalities (the
so-called Warhol superstars) that appeared in his artworks and became icons
of his experimental films.
Amongst his many projects, he collaborated with Lou Reed’s influential

rock band The Velvet Underground between 1966 and 1967. The Velvets
became part of Warhol’s multimedia events “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,”
providing the music and performing live in his traveling exhibition.21 As the
principal songwriter in the Velvets, Reed’s association with Warhol’s
Factory provided the inspiration for some of the themes on the songs in the
band’s influential first album (The Velvet Underground & Nico), as well as
later songs, following his departure from the Velvets in 1971. The connection
to Warhol’s ideas is also felt in his interest in engaging in contentious themes
that activated multiple sexual gazes, rather than the traditional male gaze.
Reed’s most famous song, “Walk on the Wild Side,” from his album
Transformer (1972), co-produced with Bowie and his lead guitarist Mike
Ronson, draws from Reed’s experiences with the Factory and has as its
subject matter snippets of the lives of some of the eccentrics and social exiles
that surrounded Warhol. The transgressive content of the lyrics breaks the
silence about alternative lifestyles and confronts the listeners with their own
indifference and preconceptions towards transvestites, transsexuals and drug
addicts. Chronicling the lives of specific individuals widened the possibilities
in the representation of gender-crossing identities and provided the listener
with a snapshot of the estrangement experienced by the “deviant” body:
Holly came from Miami, F.L.A

Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, Hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side.22
The lyrics refer here to transgendered actress Holly Woodlawn, who was a
star in Warhol’s films and had in real life to hitchhike her way to New York.
By giving a voice to the subjective experience of a transexually identified
subject, Reed’s narrative questioned long held assumptions of the gender
binary in relation to the body, and destabilized notions with regards to the
meaning of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Holly’s physical journey and
his transformation from man to woman “on the way” can be interpreted not
only as external travel, but also, metaphorically, as the internal, much more
difficult journey that a transvestite experiences when working her way
towards a new identity. The trope of the journey serves here as a means to
give signification to the transition between the protections that anonymity

offers and the perils of exposure, of living openly “on the wild side.” The
representation of a body in the process of gender transformation in Reed’s
lyrics encouraged his audience to reconsider ideas about individual
consciousness and the meanings we attach to sexuality.
Strophe two in the song speaks also of another of Warhol’s transvestite
actresses, Candy Darling, and the lyrics articulate a narrative of personal
character and outright sexual behavior. The text provocatively alludes to the
body performing fellatio:
Candy came from out on the Island

In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She says, Hey babe…23
The direct reference to fellatio, which was removed from the text when the
song was released as a single in the U.S., brings to the attention of the
listener an implicit acknowledgement of the penis as a supplementary body
part. The sexual explicitness also generates interplay as regards the
audience’s notions of gender and the readjustment the listeners need to make
if they reflect on whether the transvestite is in the position of “having the
phallus” or “being in the possession of the phallus”⎯Lacan attributes the
former to masculinity and the latter to femininity. The relationship with the
symbolic phallus is thus different for the sexes: “the man has the symbolic
phallus (or, more precisely, ‘he is not without having it’…), but the woman
does not” (Evans 141). Despite lacking the symbolic phallus, the woman
“can also be said to possess it, since not having it the symbolic is itself a
form of having” (143).
Within feminism in particular, the penis has been theorized in relation to
its controversial relationship to the Lacanian concept of the phallus. Thus the
meanings of the penis in cultural representation have been largely
conditioned by the degree of slippage between the two concepts. Lacan
conceives the phallus in terms of the role this organ plays in imaginary and
symbolic functions rather than the biological male genital organ; hence the
phallus and the penis are posited into clear opposition, which has yielded few
politically productive effects, as several commentators have pointed out (see,
for example, Silverman 1-14; Gallop 133-156; Bordo 84-104).
Jane Gallop argues that although the Lacanian phallus reads as the
“image of the life flow” and that which represents “what is living in the
subject’s being,” these assertions imply a repression and a veiling of the fact
that “the phallus functions, functions as a signifier of the primal repressed,
only when it is veiled” (Gallop 154). Gallop highlights the role of the veil in
Lacan as a way to separate the phallus from the visible. On this point, she
recalls Jacqueline Rose’s insights on the Lacanian phallus: “he [Lacan]
constantly refused any crude identification of the phallus with the order of
the visible or real and he referred it instead to [the] function of ‘veiling’”
(qtd. in Gallop 155).
In his study on masculinity and meaning attached to cultural images,
Murat Aydemir discusses the role of the Lacanian veil in relation to the
phallus/penis and argues that the veil carries a further meaning beyond being
merely responsible for the separation of phallus/penis (which entails the
invisibility of the penis and the privilege of the phallus over the former). He
argues that the thin texture of the veil makes the demarcation line between
visibility and invisibility material, rather than conceptual, since the
distinction depends on the specific moments at which the veil is drawn or
withdrawn: “[..] the veil suggests not so much the occlusion of the penis or
the discreet differentiation of the penis/phallus, but rather the heightened and
emphasized play with the male body and its visibility” (Aydemir 84).
An example of a specific moment in Glam rock performance when the
veil is figuratively withdrawn and the conceptual separation of phallus/penis
becomes blurred is illustrated in a stage act often performed by Bowie and
Ronson at the height of the popularity of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and his
band the Spiders of Mars. The image of Bowie kneeling in front of Ronson,
half partner, half worshipping slave, performing a symbolic fellatio on
Ronson’s guitar, has become one of the iconic images of Glam rock.
Photographs from 1971 and 1972 which record the moment when Bowie
goes down on Ronson’s guitar show the singer dressed in glam attire mouth
open at the base of the neck of the guitar performing a gesture that treats the
masculine articulation of the phallic guitar as equivalent to the penis.24 The
dissolution of the differentiation of the phallus as a masculine signifier and
the penis in this example becomes more poignant for its reminiscence with a
similar act performed by Jim Morrison, the lead vocalist of The Doors, at a
concert in Miami in 1969. Morrison was subsequently charged for indecency
and in the trial was found guilty of profanity and oral copulation.25 Hence,
the transgressive “fellatio” in rock performance did not only emphasize play
with the male body and its visibility, but by associating the phallic guitar as
masculine signifier with the male body organ, it also promised a
contamination of the phallus by the body’s contingency. The metaphorical
fellatio on stage was therefore viewed as a threat against prevailing
masculine values within a phallocratic power system of gender biases and
imposed roles.
Conclusion
From what has been argued here, it would appear, then, that rock artists
Bowie, Reed, and Pop used their performative (self-)representations and
transgressive gestures onstage in the early 1970s to (re-)imagine the male
body in ways that challenged inherited gender and sexual assumptions. At a
time of immense social change and radical cultural transformation,
oppositional discourses, in particular feminist and gay liberationist ideologies
that left a specific imprint on the countercultural movement, impinged on a
representational shift of the body in artistic and rock performance, laying
emphasis thereby on the potential of narratives of the corporeal to redefine
and rearticulate cultural assumptions on masculinity. Although the glam rock
aesthetic may be perceived as a parody that becomes a surface and is not
sufficiently engaged politically, it can be argued that the force of the façade
of glam and glitter is embedded in its coded messages regarding the cultural
visibility of the body, which challenged assumptions on gender binaries and
the gaze. The artists’ subversive performances in the 1960s and 1970s
presented a performative body radically at odds with the prevailing model of
the naturally gendered male rock prototype. They used their stage personas to
exploit the self-referential dimension in their work and opened up new ways
of understanding the meanings attached to the body in relation to both the
gender-identified subject and the non-heterosexual gaze.
The three artists’ interest in using the body as a locus of practical cultural
control, as well as a means to break away from canonical, non-oppositional
modes of representation, finds expression in an all- encompassing body
image in the 1960s and 1970s: the portrayal of slim, emaciated male bodies
as the ultimate transgression against the masculine physical ideal of strength
and muscularity associated with patriotic heroism, power, and militarism.
Kenneth R. Dutton indicates that rock artists in the late 1960s and early
1970s showed preference for the skeletal torso and slim hips of the
“underdeveloped body,” an image that became “at least as crucial to the
symbolism as it had been for the tradition against which it was reacting”
(212). The underdeveloped body with its overtones of androgyny and
femininity dovetailed with the politics of the counterculture. Moreover, the
emaciated body carried overtones associated with the emerging culture of
drugs in the 1960s and thus it may be figured as unruly corporeality and a
powerful symbol at this specific historical moment: its representation is
marked by a refusal to adhere to the norms of the 1960s and 1970s
hegemonic politics and ideology. The image of the male rock performer, with
thin torso, slim hips and possibly tight-fitting glam garments, forces the
viewer to engage culturally with the body and realize through the
performance its ability to make possible new ways of thinking about the self
and the self of others. As Peta Malis (169) affirms in her discussion of artistic
representation vis-à-vis its ethical implications, the power of art⎯and by
extension, the power of the rock performances discussed here⎯ “enable[s]
the formation of new bodies: bodies which perceive in new ways, which are
composed in new ways, and which have the potential to connect to others in
new ways.”
Notes
1
“Iggy Pop Stooges documentary–Rare old footage,” http:// www.youtube.com/
watch?v=erjksafj_Jw&feature=related (Accessed June 2012). See also Iggy Pop & the
Stooges- TVEye 1970 (Cincinnati Pop Festival), http:// www.youtube.com/
watch?v=NuT5kMoYc1w (Accessed June 2012).
2
Iggy Pop interviewed in “Iggy Pop Stooges documentary–Rare old footage,” http://
www.youtube.com/ watch?v=erjksafj_Jw&feature=related (Accessed June 2012).
3
For further information on the role of the muscular body and its display in Western
culture, refer to Dutton’s socio-cultural study of the male body.
4
For further information on artistic developments in the 1960s see http://
www.theartstory.org/ movement-performance-art.htm (Accessed June 2012).
5
Medovi mentions, for example, that some sixties survivors, such as the Stones and the
Who, never fully abandoned their old rebel image, and metal bands such as Iron Maiden or
Poison continued to perform outdated misogynist politics and narratives of masculine
heroes and authenticity.
6
Kelley makes a similar point to Medovi when he argues that popular homosexual
posturing finds its apex in Glam rock.
7
Refer here to Auslander’s in-depth study of Glam rock from a historical, social, and
artistic perspective; he provides information on canonical glam rock artists and their
influence, and analyzes how glam undermined rock’s faithfulness to the ideology of
authenticity (39-70).
8
See David Bowie’s official video “Rebel, Rebel” at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=KtfpsLmmdVI (Accessed June 2012).
9
Lyrics from http:// www.lyricsfreak.com/ d/ david+bowie/ rebel+rebel_20036725.html
(Accessed June 2012).
10
I am not implying here that Bowie was the first or the only rock artist to have challenged
the mainstream image of the (leather-clad) young rock rebel. Challenges to this image had
already taken place in America in the 1960s, especially with the popularization and
influence of British bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger is often
given as example of a rock artist that combined “feminine” looks with a masculine
alignment to his performances. Bowie specifically adopted camp aesthetics with the effect
of subverting the ideal physicality of the rebel, which is displayed in his “Rebel, Rebel”
video as an intersexual figure rather than a manly one.
11
Kelley mentions in particular that the films by experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger
helped to raise interest in the associations between macho posturing and the homosexual
gaze. He also clarifies that the New York underground culture represented a different
scene from the Hippie ideology, which he argues had became “Camp by default” (Kelley
3).
12
Refer here to Jones’ case studies on specific performances: Carolee Schneemann’s
“Interior Scroll” (1975) and Yayoi Kusama’s self-portrait photographs (1960s). Other
notable examples of performances whose focus is the female body are found in the work
of Shigeko Kubota’s “Vagina Painting’” (1965), Valie Export’s “Action Pants: Genital
Panic” (1969) and “Body Configurations” (1972-76), Hannah Wilke’s “Starification
Object Series” (1974), and Linda Benglis’ self-portrait photography from the 1970s.
13
Jones looks in particular at works by Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Lyle Ashton Harris,
Claude Cahun, and Laura Aguilar. See Jones (“Eternal”).
14
Jones (“Clothes”) investigates the meanings attached to performative representations of
the body and the self by male artists in the period of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ives
Klein, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, and Chris Burden.
15
On the question of feminine excess, Irigaray argues that female sexuality is subordinated
to male sexuality and there is therefore more to female desire (linked to fluid movements
and rhythms) than the phallogocentric model. See in particular her chapter on “The
Mechanics of Fluids.”
16
Pop was photographed in the opening for Blue Oyster Cult in New York in the early 1970.
See Roni Hoffman photography from the 1970s: http:// ronihoffman.com/2010/01/iggy-
pop/ (Accessed June 2012).
17
Refer to Reed’s live performance on May 25th, 1974, at the Olympia Theatre in Paris
(France), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMsGvYzedjA (Accessed July 2012).
18
‘Heroin’ lyrics from http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/lou+reed/heroin_20085231.html
(Accessed July 2012).
19
Photograph available online at several sites. See, for example: http:// www.fada.com/
view_image_iframe.html?image_no=12705 (Accessed June 2012).
20
On this point, Medovi argues that “rock is to mass culture what the avant-garde was to art:
the historical emergence of its self-criticism” (159). The highly innovative rock scene at
this time can be seen as an example of the dissolution of the distinction between high and
popular culture. Progressive rock or Art rock in particular (from which Glam rock
emerged in the late 1960s) attempted to break the boundaries of rock music by bringing in
innovative sonic textures influenced by art, avant-garde aesthetics, and classical musical
forms without departing from its popular appeal.
21
“Exploding Plastic Inevitable” included shows that featured music by the Velvets,
Warhol’s experimental films, and performances by artists within the circle of the Factory.
For further information on Warhol’s multimedia event and stars, see http://
www.warholstars.org/chron/1966.html (Accessed July 2012).
22
Lyrics from http://www.slangcity.com/songs/lou_reed.htm (Accessed July 2012).
23
Lyrics from http://www.slangcity.com/songs/lou_reed.htm (Accessed July 2012).
24
Photograps available at http:// shapersofthe80s.com/ 2010/ 09/ 28/ six-things-some-
people-might-not-know-about-bowie/ bowiebites-rex/ (Accessed July 2012) and http://
www.artnet.com/ artwork/ 426060649/904/ mick-rock-david-bowie-and-mick-ronson.html
(Accessed July 2012).
25
The Doors: rare footage from “When You’re Strange” (part 2). http:// www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Z_mbbzW5yeM (Accessed July 2012).
Bibliography
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Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Aydemir, Murat. Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Bordo, Susan. The Male Body. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Case, Sue-Ellen. “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Naked body and Theories of
Performance.” SubStance 31.2 (2002): 186-200.
Dutton, Kenneth R. The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Physical Development.
London: Cassell, 1995.
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Hove and New York:
Brunner-Routledge, 2003.
Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. C. Porter with C. Burke. Ithaca: Cornell
Jones, Amelia. ‘“Clothes Make the Man”: The Male Artist as a Performative Function.’
Oxford Art Journal 18.2 (1995): 18-32.
_____ ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.’ Art Journal,
56.4 (1997): 11-18.
_____ ‘“The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment.’
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Kelley, Mike. “Cross Gender/Cross Genre.” A Journal of Performance and Art 22.1 (2000): 1-
9.
Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.
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Malis, Peta. “An Ethico-Aesthetics of Heroin Chic: Art, Cliché and Capitalism.” Deleuze and
the Body. Eds. L. Guillaume and J. Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
165-187.
Medovi, Leerom. “Mapping the Rebel Image: Postmodernism and the Masculinist Politics of
Rock in the U.S.A.” Cultural Critique 20 (1991-1992): 153-188.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Wessels, Hans. “The Positioning of Lou Reed from a Profeminist Perspective.” Conference
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277-284. http://www.utu.fi/hum/mediatutkimus/affective/proceedings.pdf (Accessed April

2012)
Wilson, Elizabeth. “Deviant Dress.” Feminist Review 35 (1990): 67-74.
CHAPTER 5
The Cyborg and the Representation of
Masculinity and Femininity in the American
Science Fiction Literature and Film of the 1980s
Ángel Mateos-Aparicio
Introduction: A Brief History of Bodies without History
Throughout its brief history, the science fiction imagination has created a
multitude of characters that have acted as alternative visions of humanity.
Robots, androids, replicants, aliens, and monsters have all represented
different versions of otherness and have consequently been used to explore
the limits and shortcomings of the standing (and varying) definition of
human nature. This exploration includes not only the scrutiny of human
consciousness, essence and behavior, but also the science-fictional
exploration of the cultural perception of the human body. The traditional
Western division between body and mind as separate or even opposing
entities has often been metaphorically represented in science fiction by the
fictional confrontation between biological creatures (monsters, aliens) and
mechanical beings (robots, computers). In this sense, monsters have often
symbolized the part of human nature that remains closely connected to the
natural and biological world, the “animal within,” often with Freudian and
Darwinian undertones. Contrarily, robots have typically represented the
artificial and the scientific-mechanical universe, as well as tangible reality, in
contrast to the “hidden” animal in the human. The representation of aliens
follows a similar dualism. On the one hand, the extra-terrestrials that embody
the most negative, animalized human behavior are represented as monsters or
animals, as in H.G. Wells’s Martians in War of the Words (1897); on the
other, the aliens that convey the vision of a “more advanced” race display
hygienic and stylized bodies, or have even become non-physical entities like
the blue spheres of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1951).
Although some exceptions can be found, this layout of symbolic associations
in the representation of robots, monsters, and aliens remains largely
unchallenged. This means that the questioning of traditional cultural
assumptions like the separation between mind and body, and the superiority
of the former over the latter, rarely find fictional expression.
Nevertheless, there exists one frequent inhabitant of the science fiction

universe, the cyborg, whose appearance continuously causes the collapse of
these assumptions. The term cyborg was coined from “cybernetic organism”
and describes a hybrid of human and machine.1 It refers both to human
beings who have received mechanical implants and to machines which
incorporate some biological human part. Given its partly natural and partly
technological nature, the very existence of the cyborg is a challenge not only
to the traditional separation between body and mind, but also to the very
opposition between the biological and the mechanical. The cyborg stands out
for the flexibility of its representation, its malleability, ambiguity, and
changing essence; in short, as Anne Balsamo suggests (Technologies 19-20),
the presence of cyborgs uncovers the fact that the notion of the body is
constructed, variable, and subjected to discursive influences. This
inconsistency explains the great number of controversial critical reactions the
cyborg has generated. In fact, few other fantastic or science fictional
creatures have prompted a more passionate and contentious critical debate.
Although the cyborg was already a well-established character, as we
shall see, in American science fiction literature and film in the 1980s, it was
the publication of Donna Haraway’s acclaimed “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
(1985) that generated the long-lasting critical controversy over the potential
of the cyborg to subvert traditional Western dualisms. In this seminal essay,
Haraway tried to articulate a vision of the cyborg as a subversive myth,
reading this creature as a constructed entity that could counteract what she
saw as the return of 1980s American culture to the dominant Western
ideology: a racist, patriarchal, and technological capitalism. Haraway
suggested that the subversive potential of the cyborg lied in its hybrid nature,
which in itself represented a serious challenge to the long-established
oppositional categories of Western thought. Being a hybrid of human and
machine, the cyborg erased the distinction between the natural and the
artificial worlds, becoming “creature[s] of social reality as well as a creature
of fiction” (Haraway “Manifesto” 65), and obliterated the boundaries
between imagination and reality. Given its mixed nature, cyborgian ontology
could easily erase time-honoured “essential” differences. The cyborg was not
only a “creature[s] in a post-gendered world” (Haraway “Manifesto” 67), but
it could also become a creature in a post-racial, post-class(ist), and post-
human world. Cyborgian bodies denied the idea of unified identity,
consisting of several parts from diverse origins, and could therefore contain
The Cyborg and Masculinity and Femininity 85
amalgamated, multiple, plural identities in bodies that evolved towards no

definite, ultimate ideal. Having no “natural,” essential or eternal origin,
Haraway’s subversive myth of the cyborg was also free from any historical
and ideological constraints, with the cyborgian sense of historical
development having more to do with the Nietzschean notion of genealogy
than with the idea of history as a teleology with Hegelian undertones. This is
probably what Haraway meant when she concluded that “[t]he cyborg has no
origin story in the Western sense; a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the
awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating domination of abstract
individuation” (“Manifesto” 67).
Nevertheless, Haraway’s vision of the cyborg was not the end of
cyborgs’ history, nor the conclusion of the critical controversy. Haraway’s
emphasis on the multiple, hybrid nature of the cyborg body has since been
contested by critics like Claudia Springer, who argues that cyborg fiction has
failed to realize its full subversive potential: “Cyborg imagery so far has not
widely realized the ungendered ideal Donna Haraway theorizes” (66).
Instead of serving as a bridge between traditional opposing categories,
Springer thinks that the representation of cyborgs has in fact maintained and
reinforced the traditional opposing categories, and she concludes that
“cyberbodies...tend to appear masculine and feminine to an exaggerate
degree” (64). This conservative, regressive, unifying, and totalizing vision of
the cyborg can be summarized by Cynthia Fuchs’s notion of the
“machocyborg” (283), as epitomized by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
exaggeratedly muscular body in the first Terminator films. As Fuchs
suggests, Schwarzenegger’s body is “hypermasculine” (286), and therefore a
reinforcement of the traditional representation of the male body in patriarchal
ideology. Contrarily, cyborgs can also be “hyperfeminine,” as Anne Balsamo
suggested in her description of the different connotations of body-building
for male and female practitioners (Technologies 41-55).2
The controversy surrounding the cyborg thus appears to organize itself
along two major critical lines, as Scott McCraken (288) has pointed out: the
cyborg as a subversive creature whose potential lies in its hybridity, double
consciousness, as well as in its mestizo and queer qualities, on the one hand,
and the reactionary version of the cyborg as an armoured, reinforced, unified,
male traditional body, on the other. In the first case, the cyborg has been read
by critics like Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant as a subversive myth. Plant,
for example, thinks that cyborgs are an opportunity for women to appropriate
cyberspace and technology out of men’s control, which she calls
“cyberfeminism” (274).
On the other hand, critics like Springer, Adam, Doane, Balsamo, or
González, for instance, argue that most representations of the cyborg fail to
achieve this objective and are only a continuation of traditional assumptions
long established in Western culture. As an example, they mention that the
most popular fictional representation of the cyborg is not any of Haraway’s
hybrid, subversive creatures, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hypermasculine
(and hyperconservative) impersonation of the Terminator. Thus, they must
conclude that the cyborg is being used by the dominant ideology, and not as a
cultural strategy for marginalized bodies. Nevertheless, none of these
positions seems final, and the cyborg remains predominantly ambivalent, as
Melzer suggests (27), and its representation changing: there is no definite,
essential, or ideal vision of cyborg nature, so no critic or fiction writer can
claim to have created the final version.
One possible explanation for the development of this critical
confrontation may lie in the history of the cyborg itself. Haraway’s
subversive reading of the cyborg appeared after a period when several
cultural productions, mainly literary, tended to represent the subversive,
feminist version of the cyborg. During the 1960s and 1970s, several feminist
authors used the cyborg’s undetermined nature to construct a feminist vision
of the cyborg body.3 Following the pioneering work of C.L. Moore and her
story “No Woman Born” (1944), which presented a female protagonist who
became empowered after becoming a cyborg, novels like The Ship Who Sang
(Anne McCaffrey, 1969) and short stories like “The Girl Who Was Plugged
In” (James Tiptree Jr., pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, 1974) constructed
subversive versions of the cyborg as a hybrid creature. These were similar to
the hybrids between humans and aliens found at the same time in other major
science fiction writers like Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler.
This may have led Haraway to conclude that the notion of the cyborg was
mainly subversive, especially in feminist terms, resulting in the construction
of a postgendered body. In the 1980s, however, with the consolidation of a
new aesthetics in science fiction⎯cyberpunk⎯and with the increasing
presence of cyborgs in popular culture productions like movies and comics,
the tendency seems to have been reversed. Cyberpunk has shown a
preference for white, male, middle-class protagonists (Foster 15), and
therefore has “no appeal for feminists” (Adam 282). Thus, novels like
William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), which inaugurated cyberpunk, and
films like James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), which consolidated the
popular image of the cyborg, have been said to present the conservative
version of the cyborg and therefore the conventional representation of the
body. This may be why critics like Balsamo and Springer, who published
their critical works on the cyborg in the 1990s, have seen the cyborg as a
conservative rather than subversive fictional creature.
Whether or not this explanation is the key to the critical controversy over
the cyborg, some conclusions may be drawn from the previous discussion.
First of all, the cyborg may be a creature without origin and end in
conceptual terms, but it is not a character without history in its cultural
representation. In contrast to monsters, robots and aliens, whose different
forms rarely challenge established notions of the human mind and the human
body, the variations on the representation of cyborgs in literature and film
respond to cultural changes in the conception of the human. As Jennifer
González puts it, “The cyborg body thus becomes a historical record of
changes in human perception” (61). The history of the cyborg is therefore the
history of the body. Secondly, there is critical consensus on the fact that the
cyborg is all about the body or, to be more precise, about the cultural and
discursive construction of the body. Whatever the revolutionary stance of
cyborg fiction, the presence of the cyborg is a reminder of the fact that “our
sense of our own bodily limits and bodily presence is not fixed and
immovable” (Clark 59). Cyborgs therefore reinforce the idea that “[t]he
image of the physical body with which we so readily align our pains and
pleasures is highly negotiable. It is a mental construct, open to continual
renewal and reconfiguration” (Clark 61).4 The different representations of the
cyborg, then, denote the cultural changes in the perception of the human
body.
In this sense, the American cyborg literature and film of the 1980s
indicates that American culture was struggling with conflicting notions of the
human body. In this cultural battleground, science fiction novels and films
presented contradictory visions of the cyborg, which opposed each other and
consistently raised questions about the re-conceptualization of masculinity
and femininity in the American milieu. In the 1980s, American culture was
undergoing a complete re-evaluation due to the influence of the feminist and
other countercultural movements, as well as the cultural shock motivated by

the defeat in the Vietnam War. If, as McCracken has argued, cyborg fiction
is a “symbolic act” where cultural conflicts are represented (289),5 then
American cyborg fiction of the 1980s conveys a moment of conflict and
change between the subversive, postgendered vision of the cyborg dominant
in the 1960s and 1970s, on the one hand, and the reaction of American
conservative ideology in the Reagan era, on the other. This ideological
reaction promoted its own version of the cyborg as the updated and
reinforced notion of masculinity.6 In this sense, the following analysis will be
one of conflicting and opposing visions of the cyborg, and even of
contradictory readings of one cyborg. The novels and films analyzed here
present ambivalent cyborgs, like William Gibson’s Molly Millions in
Neuromancer (1984) or even Murphy, the protagonist of Paul Verhoven’s
Robocop (1987), who are somewhere between the subversive and ambiguous
hybrid creature Haraway describes, and which Fuchs has called the
“machocyborg.” In this conflicting territory, we expect at least to
demonstrate that, as Anne Balsamo suggests, with the presence of the
cyborg, “[t]erms such as gender, self, human, writing and communication are
fractured” (“Reading” 157).
Postgendered Cyborgs vs. Machocyborgs: The Gender Wars

in the 1980s
Saturn 3: The Cyborg Disrupts Patriarchal Paradise

Released at the beginning of the decade, the film Saturn 3 (1980) is an
early example of cyborg films of the 1980s, introducing two versions of this
hybrid between human and machine. On the one hand, there is the obvious
“monster” of the story, a robot controlled by an artificial brain grown from
human brain tissue. On the other, one of the three major characters in the
story, Benson (Harvey Keitel), has in fact received some implants to
“update” his human capacities. The other two characters, Adam (Kirk
Douglas) and Alex (Farrah Fawcett), are unmodified humans that will live
isolated in Saturn 3, a scientific station built on one of the moons of Saturn.
The Saturn 3 station is described as a patriarchal paradise. Its two
inhabitants, Adam and Alex, are not only workmates. Adam is Alex’s
superior at the station, and also Alex’s lover. Adam appears somewhere in
his sixties (Douglas was then 64 and had the traditional white-haired looks of
the patriarch), while Fawcett’s slim body makes Alex look young and naïve.
This ideal relationship is interrupted suddenly by Benson’s arrival at the
station. Benson brings a robot to help Adam and Alex in their research, but
from the first moment he represents a challenge to Adam’s patriarchal
kingdom, because he shows an open sexual interest in Alex. He bluntly tells
her: “You have a beautiful body. May I use it?” Although Alex seems
reluctant to be unfaithful to Adam, Benson insists, suggesting to Alex that
their sex act will be much more pleasurable because Adam is an “obsolete”
human type.
Nevertheless, what Benson is building is not exactly a robot. Its body is
completely mechanical, but its huge brain was cultivated from human brain
tissue. In order to accelerate Hector’s mental development, Benson connects
his brain through an implant at the back of his head (Benson is another
cyborg) to Hector’s brain, so the cyborg is soon ready to act just like any
other human. However, by connecting his brain directly to Hector’s, Benson
does not only transmit his rational knowledge: Hector acquires Benson’s lust
for Alex, as well as Benson’s aggressive attitude to Adam. The cyborgs’
intrusion is therefore depicted as a threat to Adam’s perfectly controlled
patriarchal utopia. Hector admittedly tries to force Alex into a perverse
human/machine sexual intercourse, and tries to eliminate the other male
competitors. Hector’s strength and intelligence is superior to Adam’s and
also to Benson’s, making them both obsolete. Adam’s final loss of his
patriarchal universe is marked by his becoming a cyborg: his only choice is
then to prepare a suicide attack on Hector using explosives to kill both
himself and the cyborg.
In the end, the male competition for Alex’s sexual favors results in the
destruction of Adam, Benson, and the cyborg itself. Adam’s isolated
patriarchal paradise breaks down and cannot continue after the arrival of the
cyborg, and his obsolete masculinity dies an honorable death, despite
suffering total defeat. The coming of the cyborg is therefore depicted as the
end of patriarchy, which will react violently trying to destroy the cyborg,
even if it means its own destruction. This aggressive response of patriarchal
ideology is also one of the main themes of James Cameron’s The Terminator,
which presents the conservative, aggressive, technological, and even
“fascist” (Larson 59) vision of the cyborg in the body of Arnold
Schwarzenegger.
The Machocyborg Strikes Back: The Terminator

James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) is the first of what is nowadays
the longest cyborg saga in the visual media. Apart from three film sequels,
Terminators have appeared on TV (The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 2008-
2009) and in videogames. Rather than the story of human-machine hybrids,
the Terminator is the tale of a family that does not fulfill the traditional ideal.
Sarah Connor never marries Kyle Reese, who dies briefly after John’s
conception (Reese does not even give the boy his surname), and Sarah has to
raise her son to become a leader on her own. So, instead of a cyborg family,
these movies present a family affected by the presence of the cyborg. In strict
terms, Sarah Connor is not and does not become a cyborg; contrarily, it is
from her relationship with the cyborg that her new, activist, and aggressive
femininity appears. The first Terminator embodies the machocyborg, but its
hypermasculine pose and disrespect for women and children increases
Sarah’s awareness: her rebellion against the Terminator is an attack on
patriarchal ideology.
The plot of The Terminator is simple enough: the movie presumes that
human technology will eventually result in the creation of intelligent
computers which will become self-aware and decide that humans are their
enemies and that they have to be exterminated. However, humans
desperately fight for their lives, and, thanks to John Connor, they seem close
to win the war. So, the machines react and try to exterminate this human
leader by killing his mother, Sarah Connor, before he is born. The machines
send a cyborg to do the job, whereas John sends a soldier, Kyle Reese, to
protect his mother. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), Kyle Reese (Michael
Biehn), and the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) are the major
characters of the story (two male, one female, as it happens in Saturn 3),
which from that moment on narrates the Terminator’s attempts to kill Sarah
and Kyle’s efforts to stop it.
While apparently simple, the implications of this plot, however, are
enormous. As it had happened in previous cyborg fiction, the cyborg
interferes in the relationship between men and women: the Terminator is an
obstacle to the developing attraction Sarah and Kyle feel for each other.
Nevertheless, in this case the cyborg is decidedly masculine and, instead of
representing a threat to patriarchy, it symbolizes the threat of it. Sarah
Connor is introduced in the film as a naïve, careless but independent young
woman in her twenties⎯in fact, her initial innocent look is similar to Farrah
Fawcett’s in Saturn 3. At the beginning of the film, Sarah matches the
patriarchal stereotype of the weak, beautiful, young woman in need of a male
companion for emotional and social stability. What she finds, however, is the
aggressive masculinity of the Terminator.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s impersonation of the Terminator is
characterized by his exaggeratedly muscular body, clearly exemplifying
Fuchs’s idea of the hypermasculine “machocyborg.” The Terminator thus
becomes the epitome of the patriarchal cyborg, which reestablishes
technology as a masculine product and becomes aggressive against the
feminist “threat.” In this sense, this version of the Terminator completely
contradicts Haraway’s vision of the subversive cyborg, which probably led
authors such as Anette Kuhn, Anne Balsamo, Claudia Springer, Chris Hables
Gray and others to conclude that the film defended the vision of the
machocyborg. Even Haraway, when commenting on the film, claimed that
Schwarzenegger’s impersonation of the cyborg “is the sign of the beast of
postmodern culture, the sign of the Sacred Image of the Same” (“Cyborgs”
xv). Nevertheless, it is necessary to keep in mind that the Terminator is not
the intended hero of the story. Its main objective is to kill a naïve, young
woman and her not-yet-conceived baby, which hardly qualifies it as a
defender of damsels in distress. The Terminator represents the blindness of
male military technology and its lack of concern for human life. In the end,
Sarah Connor, a woman and mother, destroys the Terminator (Cavallaro 47)
with a relieving “You’re terminated, fucker.”
In the same way the movie develops some of the feminist contestation to
patriarchy, it also presents an alternative masculine model. As revealed in the
film, Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father. In opposition to the
hypermasculinity of the Terminator, Reese seems “loving but vulnerable”
(Sobchak 23), or, as Golberg suggests, “the sensitive type in the film” (241).
Reese may well symbolize the shortcomings of a traditional idea of
masculinity that reinforces male aggression but discourages duties like child
caring. Sarah’s options to choose a male companion seem limited: either she
engages in a romantic relationship with a man who does not live up to his
role as a father, or she accepts the patriarchal masculine role that rejects
femininity and favors aggression and technology. This problem is solved for
her in the second movie, when she “realizes” that the cyborg, the new
Terminator (also played by Arnold, who is the “good guy” this time) could
be the perfect father for John.
The first Terminator created the image of the machocyborg, which from
then on would be associated with Schwarzenegger’s hypermasculine body,
but it also highlighted the negative side of a patriarchy, based on a blind faith
in technology and a militaristic notion of masculinity. The movie carries out
these characteristics to the extreme in fiction, since it predicts the violent
patriarchal reaction to feminist ideology and activism. However, the film
expects the viewer to side with Sarah’s defense of her unborn baby rather
than with the murderous intentions of the machocyborg.
Molly Millions: Hyperfeminine or Hyperfeminist Cyborg?

Sarah Connor’s evolution in the Terminator series from a naïve young
girl to a fighting woman places her with other strong female characters in
science fiction film: Lt. Ripley in Alien (1979) and Trinity in Matrix (1999).
Patricia Melzer suggests they are “extraordinary female characters” that can
be included into the category of “warrior women” (128). This category is
highly controversial, as Melzer herself explains (129). Strictly speaking,
however, none of these three heroines is a cyborg: they have not been
upgraded with implants or any kind of genetic modification. In fact, what
they have in common is that they fight against machocyborgs. Sarah fights
against the Terminator, while Ripley has to kill the android Ash in Alien.
Similarly, Trinity also wages war against machines. By seemingly rejecting
technology, however, these warrior women hardly fulfill Haraway’s vision of
the subversive hybrid between human and machine, or Plant’s female
empowerment through technology. Contrarily, Molly Millions, one of the
major characters of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984),
represents the upgraded, implanted, cyborg woman who uses these newly
acquired powers to thrive in a society where technology means power and
power rests in male hands.
Like Sarah Connor, Ripley and Trinity, Molly is a very controversial
character. Molly is definitely a cyborg: her body is full of implants that allow
her to see at night, have fast reflexes, and kill easily with sharp implants
under her “burgundy” nails, as she warns Case, the protagonist of the novel:
“Because you try to fuck around with me, you’ll be taking one of the stupidest
chances of your whole life.”
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a
barely audible click, ten double edged, four centimeter scalped blades slid from their
housing beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew. (37)
Molly’s upgraded body allows her to work as a bodyguard of Neuromancer’s

main character, the cyberspace cowboy Case. She is faster, stronger, and
more deadly than him. Molly clearly defends her implants and uses them
against men so as to remind them that she is not the passive female ideal.
When told that “[i]n Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
modifications,” she actively affirms herself: “It’s my show, Jack” (110).
Besides, she has a negative attitude to men who abuse women; in general,
she does not like to feel inferior to them.
This self-sufficiency and aggressive attitude towards men allows us to
see Molly as an example of the post-gendered, subversive cyborg. Molly’s
pose may correspond to the empowerment that technology allows women.
Molly takes the active, physical, risky part of the action in the novel. As the
novel progresses, Case and Molly become attached to each other and have an
affair, but it is Molly who begins and ends it with a message that discards
any romantic involvement, as if Case had just been another job in the
bodyguard business:
HEY IT’S OKAY BUT IT’S TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE
BILL ALREADY. IT’S THE WAY I’M WlRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS
OKAY? XXX MOLLY. (313)
However, for all her subversive, hyperfeminist characteristics, Molly

Millions has not become the epitome of Haraway’s post-gendered cyborg.
The main reason for this is that the same features that position her as a
warrior woman can in fact be attributed to a change in male attitudes. Molly
could well be the updated version of 1980s male tastes. In fact, she could be
the very object of masculine desire for sporadic sex in the freer social
environment left after the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Molly’s cyborgian attitude is too vague and her nature too indeterminate; as
it happens with other cyberpunk female characters, it is impossible to decide
whether she is hyperfeminist or hyperfeminine. Cavallaro highlights this
ambiguity: “Cyberpunk’s approach to gender roles is highly ambiguous, for
it appears both to perpetuate and to subvert stereotypical representations of
masculinity and femininity (121). Springer comes to a similar conclusion
when she states that “because of the ambiguities and contradictions of [their]
representation…cyberpunk’s figure of the angry women can neither be hailed
as feminist paragon nor repudiated as a mere sex object; she incorporates
aspects of both but finally embodies neither” (139). If Saturn 3 had presented
a (still undeveloped) cyborg that was a clear threat to patriarchy and The
Terminator had attacked the machocyborg to defend a more progressive
vision of female roles, Neuromancer’s version of the cyborg, Molly Millions,
is neither the post-gendered cyborg nor a representation of the machocyborg.
In this sense, Molly continues the cyborg tradition of ambiguity,
indeterminacy, and variability. This indeterminacy also affects the
representation of cyborgs as male bodies: Robocop is not only the
actualization of what Susan Jeffords described as “hard” male bodies, but
also an updated version of the father role.
Armored Body and Softened Mind: Robocop (1987)

Robocop’s hypermasculine, armored body has become an icon in
American culture. In this sense, everything that has been said about the other
main machocyborg in this chapter, The Terminator, can now be applied to
the steel cyborg cop as well. However, the main aim of the following
discussion is not to delve into Robocop’s machocyborg qualities, which are
obvious enough, but to look into the somewhat hidden connotations of
Robocop’s hybrid (cyborgian) nature.
It is necessary to begin by highlighting the fact that Robocop is the first
cyborg with a history. Unlike Hector, the Terminator or Molly Millions,
Robocop begins the film’s story as police officer Murphy. Also, contrarily to
Arnold’s Schwarzenegger’s physique, Peter Weller’s body is neither
spectacular nor exaggeratedly muscular. In fact, as he is introduced in the
movie, Murphy (Peter Weller) is just an ordinary guy who has a family and
who likes to play with his son. Furthermore, his memories survive the
process by which he is turned into a cyborg, in spite of the technicians’ effort
to eliminate them. All details about his character indicate that Murphy’s pose
is far from the machocyborg he will become. He appears in the film as the
new arrival to one particularly violent police precinct in Chicago, where he is
assigned a new partner, Lewis (Nancy Allen), who also does not live up to
the traditional female role, symbolizing instead the warrior woman. Soon
after they start working together, Murphy confesses he makes his gun turn
following the cowboy style to please his eleven-year-old son, who thinks his
father is like a kind of superhero. Nevertheless, nothing could be further from
the truth. In one of his first actions, Murphy is killed in what can be
described as a gang rape, for his body is penetrated by several bullets, a
premonition of the full technological penetration he is going to suffer. In a
way, Murphy’s mind and body are “feminized,” as he does not live up to the
traditional masculine role. Like Reese in The Terminator, he is lovable, a
good family man, but he will need to armor his masculinity, to become a
machocyborg, in order to fulfill his duty.
This will take place when Murphy becomes Robocop. His new body is
made out of steel and shaped like a muscular type; in short, a visual
representation of Fuchs’s machocyborg. Once he becomes the
hypermasculine cyborg, all his weaknesses disappear. He becomes the new
hero, the “new guy in town.” Nevertheless, Murphy’s hidden memories and
personality keep on emerging, first as dreams, and then as clear daydreaming
scenes. The armored body hides a softened version of masculinity, as he
remembers his family and the technological, aggressive machocyborg slowly
becomes modified by Murphy’s personality. In order not to become a violent,
militaristic killing machine like the Terminator, the machocyborg needs a
revised version of traditional masculinity. In other words, masculinity in the
1980s seemed to be learning to create a new postfeminist male model. This
evolution is similar to the Terminator’s. In Terminator 2, the cyborg redeems
itself and becomes a nice daddy to John Connor. Sarah, who, as we learn in
the story, has been collecting men, trying to find the best father for John,
finally realizes the Terminator’s worth as a father: “Watching John with the
machine, it was suddenly so clear…Of all the would-be fathers that came and
went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one who measured
up.”
Likewise, Robocop implies a change in the machocyborg’s
characteristics. If the post-gendered cyborg had become a threat for
patriarchy, as it happens in Saturn 3 and in The Terminator, the
machocyborg responded with a softer version of traditional masculinity, one
that had incorporated or at least responded to feminist vindications, like
Robocop. Similarly, the advent of less rigid visions of masculinity (Robocop,
and the second Terminator) brought about the arrival of more subversive,
hybrid, and ambiguous cyborgs, such as the rival of Schwarzenegger’s
cyborg is Terminator 2, T-1000. This new creature presents qualities like

softness, wetness, and penetrability, all of which Mark Dery associates with
the feminine (291), and whose unstable, multiple identity is marked by its
ability to acquire different appearances.7 In this sense, Kathy Acker’s Abhor
in Empire of the Senseless may well be the most radical response to the
softened version of the machocyborg and the 1980s closest representation of
Haraway’s subversive cyborg.
Cyborg Body and Cyborg Writing: Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless
(1988)
In her description of the subversive cyborg, Haraway argues that writing
is the cyborgs’ technology and politics. As she puts it, “Writing is pre-
eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth
century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against
perfect communication, against the dogma that translates all meaning
perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism” (“Manifesto” 95). The
cyborgian use of language is therefore based on the same aesthetic and
ideological principles found in postmodern writing, which privilege non-
literal or metaphorical over literal meanings, unstructured over closed
narratives, marginal over central discourses, and ambiguity over
communicative precision. As Haraway explains, this kind of writing that
focuses on the ambiguous and indeterminate serves to undermine the bases of
Western traditional oppositional thought, including the very opposition
between self and other, which is the origin of identity. Therefore cyborg
identity, which due to its hybrid nature is a challenge to the traditional
separation between self and other, has to be constructed in an imprecise,
ambiguous, metaphorical, unstructured language. This is what we find in
Abhor, Kathy Acker’s vision of a subversive cyborg in Empire of the
Senseless (1988).
Empire of the Senseless is a complex novel with an unstructured
narrative. The two main characters are two cyborgs, one male, Thivai, and
one female, Abhor, whose name suggests repulsion for the female body.
Thivai could well stand for a revised version of the machocyborg, while
Abhor is definitely a subversive, postgendered, postracial, postmodern
cyborg. However, the separation between them is not complete, as Thivai
tries to appropriate Abhor’s speech. In the novel, Abhor speaks through
Thivai, but never the other way around. Abhor and Thivai are united in an
undefined relationship that involves love and sex, and that serves to
denounce patriarchal domination and aggression.
The construction of male and patriarchal violent nature starts at the
beginning of the novel. As Thivai explains, “As long as I can remember, I
have wanted to be a pirate…I have wanted to slaughter other humans and to
watch the emerging of their blood” (20). Male aggressive instincts are
connected to what is seen as a perverse sexuality in the novel, male sexuality,
as Thivai states: “War, you mirror of our sexuality” (26). This will have far-
reaching consequences. Thivai thinks Abhor is one of his possessions and
treats her accordingly. He calls her “my cunt” (177), affirming that “women
are the same as loot” (189). His cyborg state, however, allows him to have
some insight into his maleness and to realize its negative connotations. He
realizes that “[t]he male half of me will rape the female half of me” (176),
and has some other insights into his own condition. Instead of taking his
masculinity and identity for granted, Thivai grasps that “I, whoever I was,
was going to be a construct” (33). Furthermore, he soon recognizes his
obsolescence as a machocyborg: “It is true that our racist, sexist, classist
mores have to change or we will all kill all of us” (154).
In opposition to this negative view of the machocyborg, Abhor’s
cyborgian nature is radically subversive. Although she tries to define herself,
in the first page of the novel, Thivai appropriates her speech and describes
her as follows: “This is what Abhor, who’s my partner, part robot, and part
black; told me was her childhood” (3). Abhor’s history is one of sexual
abuse, first by his father and then by Thivai himself. In this chapter of the
story, the reader witnesses Abhor’s rape by her father: “After he put the
phone receiver down on the table he put his cock up me…Part of me wanted
him and part of me wanted to kill him” (12). As we can see in this quotation,
Abhor’s identity is never a unified entity, but is divided in parts. Another
sign of her lack of single identity is the fact that her memories are not
structured into a coherent, whole personal history. As she puts it, “I can’t
distinguish between my memories and my memories of dreams, waking
actions, and what I’ve read and been told. For they’re all memories” (53).
She is aware and even proud of her hybrid cyborg condition, acknowledging
that “I’m a mutant” (109). Abhor associates her cyborg condition with the
state of those marginalized by Western culture, as Haraway does in her
“Manifesto for Cyborgs,” and she consequently concludes that all people
who are powerless are somehow feminized: “most humans are now women”
(109).
Nevertheless, the novel’s most radical moment is when Abhor learns
how to write and decides to compose a letter addressed to men. In the context
of the novel and in the context of cyborgian ontology, writing has to be
understood as a subversive act that could liberate us from the “prisons of
meaning” (Acker 134). So, Abhor is well aware of the connotations of her
decision to write this letter, in which she uses language to undermine the
basis of patriarchal ideology. Abhor argues that “you think that women aren’t
human and men are” (209). Furthermore, Abhor affirms that men are in
control of the world, so “[t]he whole world is men’s bloody fantasies” (210),
and that they somehow work together to keep not only women but all those
who fall into the category of otherness under control. “This is what I’m
saying: you’re always deciding what reality is and collaborating about these
decisions” (210). This letter is the time when Abhor is more articulate
because, as it corresponds to cyborg writing, the novel itself has no clear
beginning, no end at all, and it is even difficult to summarize it into a plot.
Acker incorporates the principles of the cyborg’s hybrid nature and of the
cyborg writing to enhance the subversive power of the book.
In this sense, Empire of the Senseless is probably the most radically
subversive representation of cyborgs in the 1980s. After undermining the
story of the machocyborg through Thivai’s aggressive racist and sexist
attitudes, Acker presents a female cyborg who is also the racial Other and
who adopts what Haraway thinks is the most rebellious cyborg act, that is,
writing. However, she does so following cyborg fiction’s tendency to present
the contradictory visions of masculinity and femininity in the 1980s as an
armed conflict among cyborgs. Thivai is a pirate and a terrorist, so he uses
war as a tool to maintain patriarchal control, just as the Terminator and
Robocop use powerful weapons to fight against the “angry feminist” stance
of characters like Sarah Connor and Molly Millions. Cyborg fiction’s
conflicts are therefore the metaphorical representation of the contradictory
new visions of masculinity and femininity that were competing for visibility
in the 1980s, after American society had started to incorporate feminist
vindications. Cyborgs can be understood as cultural icons where the
modifications of the male and female body become manifest, as in the
hypermasculine⎯re-arm(or)ed traditional masculinity⎯and hyperfeminist⎯
image of feminists as warrior women⎯body images seen above. More often

than not, these new male and female bodies end up engaging in actual armed
conflict, thus symbolizing the conflicting images of the male and female
body projected by patriarchal and feminist ideologies.
Coda: The Cyborg Battle Rages On

The previous discussion of the history of cyborg fiction should be
considered as part of a longer and older struggle between the traditional
image of male and female bodies presented by Western ideology and their
new construction since the end the nineteenth century. However, as Patricia
Melzer suggests, cultural meaning is a dialectical process (107), which, we
could add, can manifest itself as a historical succession of competing
meanings. This is what this chapter has tried to show. The 1980s was the
time of the popularization of the idea of the cyborg, which stuck in the
American mind with the image of the Terminator in the body of Arnold
Schwarzenegger. This image, however, was only one small skirmish in the
long cyborg wars. The cultural meaning of the cyborg and its influence on
the notion of the body in American culture has to be studied and understood
in the longer period of cyborg existence either as a fictional creature or as a
scientific reality. Becoming a cyborg entails modifying the body, and that is
the main reason why the presence of cyborgs immediately provides an
insight into the existing notions of both the male and the female ideal body,
and the behavior associated with it. These notions are subject to constant
modification, which reveals their constructed nature. Nevertheless, the
changes can be better perceived through a historical/dialectical approach, as
this chapter has tried to illustrate.
The cyborg wars, however, continue to be fought in the American cyborg
science fiction literature and film. Some references have been made to the
evolution of the Terminator, for instance, which in the second movie is
presented as a rehabilitated masculine body free form the most negative
connotations of the machocyborg. A similar division into two sides therefore
persists in the 1990s, where, as Foster (11-30) reminds us, cyborgs can be
perceived again as a threat to patriarchal, individualistic capitalism, as it
happens in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) (Balinisteanu), or as a chance to
finally break down gender stereotypes, as it happens in Pat Cadigan’s novel
Synners (1991). Always modifying itself, the cyborg is a malleable, flexible,
and ultimately ambiguous fictional creature that will inevitably continue to

appear whenever the cultural representation of the body is in a process of
change.
Notes
1
It is generally agreed that the term and the concept of the “cyborg” was coined and
became known after the publication of Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline’ scientific essay
“Cyborgs and Space” in Astronautics (1960).
2
See also Benford and Malartre, who use the terms “supermale” and superfemale” for this
kind of conservative cyborgs (109). Balsamo establishes a division between the “utopian”
and the “dominant” cyborg (“Reading” 155). In this chapter, we will mainly refer to
“subversive” cyborgs when we mean Haraway’s new description of the creature, and
“machocyborg” when we talk about its conservative vision.
3
See Sharp (522) and Melzer (7).
4
Andy Clark has a neuroscience study which uses the notion of the cyborg to explain the
evolution of the human mind. Although not strictly a work on literary or cultural studies,
some of the ideas contained within have been very useful for this paper. Besides, the
existence of such a book reinforces the idea that the cyborg is not only a creature of
fiction, but has relevance in other fields like science and in culture at large.
5
Other critics have also suggested that the popularization of cyborg novels and films in the
1980s responds to a moment of cultural crisis, as some critics have suggested. For Jennifer
González, for instance, cyborgs appear in moments of change (61), while for Scott
McCracken, it was the crisis in socialism (which coincided with Reaganism until the final
collapse of the Communist Bloc in 1989) that prompted the appearance of the cyborg
(288).
6
The appearance of the armored, hypermasculine body of the cyborg in films like
Terminator recalls Susan Jeffords’s description of the re-construction of a reinforced
masculine body in the films of the Reagan era.
7
See also Bukatman (303-307) and Springer (112).
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CHAPTER 6
Action and Reaction: The Villain’s Body and Its
Role in Shaping the Heroic Body in Hollywood
Action Films of the 1990s
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci
Looking for an Enemy

Bodies adapt to the lifestyle of their owners to the point that they can be said
to be literally shaped by the conditions of the habitat in which they live, as
well as by the enemies they fight and preys they hunt. If this is true in a
natural context, it is a principle still perfectly valid when applied to 1990s
U.S. action cinema. As I shall demonstrate through my analysis of several of
the most successful action films in the decade, the particular configuration of
the heroic body constitutes a direct response to the type of threat it is facing.
The transitional character of a decade moving from the Cold War to the War
on Terror requires a progressive metamorphosis of the conventional villain in
action films, which, in turn, calls for a dramatic change in the physical
portrayal of the heroic body. Since I intend to trace the development of
hegemonic political and socio-cultural discourses in Hollywood cinema, I
shall narrow my field of study to representations of white mainstream heroes
and villains, as the few racialized main characters in 1990s action films
constitute either interesting subversions of the mainstream, or a
reinforcement of polarised constructions of masculinity (Martín; Willis).
When I say ‘racialized,’ however, I do not refer exclusively to black and
Asian characters, but also to the arising category of “ultra-white” characters,
those whom Holmlund describes as exceeding normative definitions of
whiteness (Impossible Bodies 91-107). Villains and heroes are then analyzed
here as representatives of Hollywood “by-default” categories of the “Self.”
This does not mean that Hollywood attempts to depict sameness completely
forego the coexistence and superposition of the various defining dimensions
of subjective identity. On the contrary, this chapter is precisely devoted to the
process of genderization of action villains and heroes as reflected in their
physical configuration. Unfortunately, though, a parallel analysis of the
mechanisms through which Hollywood constructs the aforementioned “by-

default” category in opposition to racialized or queer “Others” would exceed
the formal delimitations of the present work.
In action films from the early 1990⎯that is, before 1994, the year Clear
and Present Danger and Speed were presenting ageing or supple action
bodies⎯, heroic and villainous bodies alike do not seem to have undergone
any change. The world around them has, though. The Berlin Wall has fallen,
the Soviet giant has collapsed, and the U.S.A. stands tall among the ruins of a
past era. Likewise, the Rambos, Conans, and John McClanes that populated
the American collective psyche during the 1980s are now standing alone and
bewildered, fists still up, among the fallen bodies of defeated enemies. Their
hyper-musculated, sweaty chests are still heaving from the effort of relieving
American identity of the shame of an ignominious defeat in Vietnam and of
fighting the dark forces beyond the Iron Curtain. With the rising of that
curtain, the simple, black-and-white world of the previous four decades is
now disturbingly coated in gray patches. Suddenly, telling the good guys
from the bad guys becomes problematic. During the first half of the 1990s,
American cinematic heroes seem not to know whom to fight anymore. And
yet fight they must, for justified, defensive violence is quintessential to the
action hero. In a decade in which action films are indisputably the single
most popular genre (Holmlund American Cinema 15), finding⎯or, if
necessary, creating⎯convincing enemies becomes one of the major
preoccupations of Hollywood scriptwriters. This enterprise turns out to be
particularly challenging if we consider how extreme the process of
commodification of cultural production/products has become. One of the
main reasons for the emergence of action films as the most marketed and
marketable of cinematic genres in the 1990s is to be found in the
conventional emphasis on the visual⎯landscapes, chases, fights; in short,
deeds and their chronospatial settings⎯in action films. The unarticulated
physicality of much of action narratives makes this type of films particularly
apt for international retail, since they do not get “lost in translation” as easily
as other genres. In the 1990s, Hollywood has become a multinational
business and Hollywood films are now an international commodity.
Furthermore, there can be virtually no such thing as an “independent”
cinema, as long as those companies who had been deemed so in the 1970s
and 1980s are being bought by conglomerate empires controlling not only
film production, release and distribution, but also domestic and international
Action and Reaction 105
home video circulation and gadget marketing (Holmlund American Cinema

1-23; Harrison 26-34; Davies and Wells 2-12). This obviously dovetails into
the idea of Postcolonial cultural imperialism, at the same time it fits
beautifully into the then emerging conceptualization of a ‘global world.’
Globalization thus exceeds the economic sphere and certainly constitutes one
of the main phenomena at the turn of the millennium. It can, in fact, be said
to be “superseding Postmodernism as the common cultural paradigm”
(Harrison 27).
Another common phenomenon from the 1990s is the constant oscillation
between radicalized ideological positions and relativistic stances, the latter
ultimately appearing to be sheer indifference towards ideological
constructions (Davies and Wells 1-12). If George H. W. Bush had filled up
the ideological and political hole left by the disintegration of the Soviet bloc
with a “modernized,” “surgical” type of warfare and a campaign against a
new enemy, Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, his son will declare an
ideological “War on Terror” against Taleban dictatorships and Osama Bin
Laden’s terrorist leadership. Conversely, Bill Clinton’s “lack of adherence to
ideological positions” is further smearing an already blurred political arena,
although such lack of ideological commitment admittedly “made him the
ideal president for a post-Cold War situation in which the political
assumptions of old no longer applied” (Harrison 5). Linda Mizejewski opens
her study of the 1990s renaissance of the off-white gangster with insightful
considerations about the moral ambivalence which, at the beginning of the
1990s, spreads from the political to the cultural landscape and is dutifully
represented by the mainstream film industry (24-25). In U.S. cinemas,
spectators are confronted with terrorists with strong ethical principles (The
Rock; Patriot Games; Executive Decision), while members of the U.S.
security forces, either military or civilian, betray their country for money or
deranged personal reasons (Die Hard 2; Under Siege). Even well-known
villains turn out to be trustworthy defenders of the good guys (Terminator 2:
Judgement Day). Similarly, U.S. spectators of the events going on the
political stage see a president of former “Public Enemy n.1,” the U.S.S.R., be
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, while a former U.S. protégée, Manuel
Antonio Noriega, whose military dictatorship has been engineered and
financially sustained by the C.I.A., is now being publicly called a gangster by
president George H. W. Bush and forced to leave Panama.
The main consequence of such a confusing realignment of political

powers and strategic international forces is a return to popular distrust of the
Government. Since there is no longer need for a strong central power to
coordinate defensive action and protect the U.S. from a common foreign
enemy, suspicion of political corruption and financial fraud spreads like fire
(Davies). Hollywood productions of the period, with their alleged portrayal
of popular culture, echo such suspicions on a magnified scale. If, during the
Clinton era, the president’s struggle to focus “on the inside,” that is, to
concentrate on internal affairs and economic growth rather than on foreign
politics and conflicts (Clinton), will ignite a renewed cinematic interested in
the “enemy within,” the right-wing conservatism of George H. W. Bush’s
mandate has already paved the way to such a self-reflective approach to
American politics by restating the importance of individual citizens against
the redundancy of invasive collective superstructures (Berlant qtd. in
Holmlund American Cinema 160). All this is clearly reflected in a series of
changes in the choice of enemies to pit against the action hero, among which
the three most noticeable are also the most relevant from the point of view of
my analysis: the depolitization of the bad guys, their deviant individuality,
and their subsequent physical deflation. The hero is no longer fighting
against some personified historical ideology⎯Nazism, as was the case with
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), or Communism, as in Rocky IV
(1985). The enemy has been depoliticized in the sense that he no longer
serves a political cause, nor, in most of the cases, sports any ideological
convictions. His are merely common crimes rooted in common human sins:
greed, rage, and lust. This new approach seems coherent with a tendency to
prioritize the personal over the political which climaxed with the Monica
Lewinski affair. On the one hand, the exposure of Clinton’s sexual life on a
national scale and the public’s interest in his personal life distract from much
more important issues. On the other, his being presented by his advisors as a
sinner, as well as the fact that he counted on his wife’s forgiveness, did
assuage a little the most condemning attacks, but it also reinforced the
assumption that individual morality and integrity at all levels of personal life
are the only things that matter. According to this view, the worth of
governmental institutions equals that of their individual members.
Consequently, it is not difficult to establish a link between Clinton’s
impeachment and the renewal of the theme of individual corruption in U.S.
cinema, and most particularly, in action films.
Relative Bodies: (A)Symmetry in the Configuration of the Villain-Hero

Dichotomy
One of the most obvious changes taking place in action films throughout
the 1990s is the fact that the 1980s titanic portrayal of the hero’s antagonist is
subject to a continuous deflation of his gigantism. Terminator 2: Judgement
Day (1991) can be said to be a perfect example of this last point, while it also
constitutes an exception to the aforementioned individualization of the hero’s
foes. But then, as I have already mentioned, action films released from 1989
to 1993 are still at an early stage of this transitional period, so that many of
the visual and narrative conventions of the previous decade are still
deployed, albeit in a different function. No one can be described as a better
selfless embodiment of corporate/superstructural institutions than the T1000
(Robert Patrick). Relentlessly pursuing the fulfilment of his mission,
Patrick’s futuristic cyborg is singlemindedly obeying orders with such
emotionless zeal that he is actually presented as not even a member of the
superstructure he belongs to, but as a mere tool thereof. This is partly a direct
consequence of the fact that the causality of the plot, developed in the
original 1984 film The Terminator (henceforth, T1), could not be modified so
as to be adapted to the 1990s model of action film narrative. The motivation
for the plot must stay the same in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (henceforth,
T2), just as the fictional future must be still represented as a nuclear ending to
the Cold War. So, in the dystopian world dominated by Skynet, the Others,
the Communists represented as robotic minions, alienated by their total
surrender to a dehumanizing ideal, are first pictured featuring the same body
type as Russian Comrade Draco (Dolph Lundgren) in Rocky IV. In T1, the
sense of otherness oozing out of the T800 (Schwarzenegger) is reinforced,
from an ethnic point of view, by his decidedly foreign accent and, from the
point of view of social class, by his punk apparel. Conversely, in the Post-
Communist world of T2, the chunky bulkiness and hypertrophied brutality of
the gigantic 1980s heroic body⎯the ‘old’ T800⎯are constructed as
reassuringly recognizable in their transgressive dimensions and, thus, as
paradoxically familiar and positive in contrast with the liquid adaptability of
the new post-cybernetic body, constructed as negative precisely for its
uncanny ability to pass unnoticed. Made out of a “mimetic poly-alloy,” the
body of the T1000 is first and foremost noticeable for his chameleonic ability
to copy the exact appearance of anything and anyone it touches, which neatly
showcases the idea of the indistinct, unrecognizable enemy mentioned above.

Significantly, however, its “original” or by-default body is male, average in
height, although extremely fit in a trim, slender way. His landing in the past
completely naked is obviously helping to establish a contrast between the
villainous and heroic bodies, but it is also a narrative choice that enables
further developments to revolve around his first set of clothes. Robert
Patrick’s character cunningly disguises himself as a policeman not simply to
become as inconspicuous as Schwarzenegger’s “bad ass” biker clothes are
eye-catching, or to benefit from people’s instinctive trust of someone who
should be there “to serve and protect,” but mostly to equate a real official
institution such as the police with the fictional institution of Skynet. Distrust
of all institutions, present or future, real or fictional, becomes then
synonymous with survival, while the uncanny, unheimlich, as Freud would
say, vision of a uniformed policeman mercilessly killing women, children,
and dogs is sublimated into pure horror. Thus, even in T2 there can be said to
exist an underlying narrative theme that refers to the “enemy within” trope.
Besides mimesis, disguise, and the treacherousness of an enemy
unrecognizable and thus invisible, the metamorphosis of the action villain
throughout the 1990s begins with the emergence of another key aspect of the
new antagonistic body: its swiftness. In Speed, the steadiness of the
eponymous velocity is a feature belonging exclusively to the villain through
the mechanical contraption he controls⎯namely, the bus with which he
attempts his second terrorist act of extortion. Speed itself, though, is now also
one of the key aspects of the heroic body. This is but a consequence of the
fact that, as it has already been argued, the new enemies now possess,
vicariously or otherwise, agile, dexterous bodies to which the hero must
necessarily adapt. Geoff King, in his exhaustive description of the
constitutive elements of the spectacular in action films, highlights the fast
pace of the action sequences and the speed with which objects move towards
the camera as central to provide the sensual pleasures⎯the rush and the
thrill⎯the audience is expecting out of the genre (91-116). More central to
my analysis, the application of the “speed formula” to the representation of
the action body results in a somatic dimension which is still as spectacular as
it used to be a decade before, but which has now shifted the object of the
“lingering stare” of the audience (Tasker 6) from the contours, textures, and
volumes of the body itself to its capacity for speed. Schwarzenegger’s
rendition of slow-but-sure robotic movements in T1 confers the “bad” T800 a
distinctive zombie-like pace, which will turn out to be its Achilles’ heel, the
only apparent advantage of its human enemies being their ability to run,
duck, and dodge faster than it does. In T2, however, the attribute of speed
belongs to the uncannily transmorphous and apparently unbeatable T1000.
Some of the most anguish-ridden scenes in the film are those in which an
unstoppable Robert Patrick runs after one of the various vehicles on which
the T800 and the Connors are trying to flee. The astonishing speed of the
T1000’s pursuit is not nearly as horrifying as the inhuman steadiness of its
race, the rigidness of the technically perfect movements combining with the
mechanical quality of his arms and legs pumping away like pistons. The very
slowness of Schwarzenegger’s movements as a T800 is one of the main
elements that constructs him as monstrous in T1⎯even conventionally so, if
we think of the “Frankensteinian” proportions of his body and pace of his
walk⎯, and as reassuringly familiar to the spectator and thus less threatening
than the treacherous shape-shifting new model in T2.
The logic of the “body swap” between hero and villain at work in T2 can
be also seen in another film from the early 1990s. In Die Hard 2: Die Harder
(1990), Colonel Stuart’s muscular body also represents a clear inversion of
the bodybuilder’s iconic role as the action hero of the 1980s. The villain’s
muscular, highly trained body is displayed in a scene almost a minute long,
which luxuriates in the sculptural details of his completely naked body.
Against a TV screen broadcasting a news report on the recent extradition of a
Central American general to the U.S.A., Stuart’s hands suddenly occupy the
centre of the shot. The rapidity of the movement is emphasized by a sudden
crescendo in the music reaching an abrupt stop, which, combined with the
extreme tension noticeable in the extended fingers, already suggests a mortal
blow. This interpretation is confirmed by the drawn-out movement of the
camera following a slowly unfolding arm in what we soon learn to be a kata
from an Asian martial art. The intricacy of the muscular fibres is studied in
detail, while the suffused natural light intensifies the impression of having
transformed a voluptuous exercise in narcissism into an act of voyeurism.
Noticeably, in Die Hard 2: Die Harder (henceforth, DH2), the good guy no
longer shows his body. Bruce Willis, whose character John McClane became
notoriously associated with his shoeless, shirtless look à la Rambo in Die
Hard (1988; henceforth DH1), now hardly exposes any flesh at all. Only at
the very end of the film, and after performing numerous feats, his outfit has
become dishevelled enough to give the audience a peep of his hairy chest and
of the iconic white “wifebeater” from the previous film. On the contrary, in
DH2 it is the antagonistic body that is fully displayed in what can be
ambivalently interpreted as the contained violence of a slow martial art
routine or the exhibitionism of a bodybuilder at a competition.1 Action films
are the only genre in which the male gendered body is conventionally
objectified as spectacle more than the female body is. This usually opens the
door to an ambiguous interpretation of the 1980s excessive action body as
feminized by the eager stare of the (mostly) male audience, which, in the
homophobic context of 1980s Hollywood, was obviously projecting some
subtle negative connotations on the “musculinity” of the action hero (Church
Gibson; Holmlund Impossible Bodies 15-30; Tasker 109-131). When faced,
then, with the fact that in an early 1990s film only the bad guy reveals his
body to the said ambivalent gaze, I conclude that this exercise must be
invested, at least partly, of a negative meaning. One reading would then
consist in dismissing the over-muscular dimension of an excessive,
spectacular masculinity as unnecessary to succeed in performing heroic
exploits. Pushing this idea further, we might even say that John McClane’s
constant making fun of and cracking sarcastic jokes at the hyper-masculine
villains reinforces the idea that the juxtaposition of the naked villainous body
and the clothed heroic body is indicative of a caricaturization of 1980s
hypertrophied bodies.
From the initial villain-hero physical disparity in the early 1990s, we
observe the progressive achievement of a balance between villainous and
heroic bodies. If, as we shall see, such equilibrium climaxes in 1999
productions like The Matrix, Fight Club and Star Wars: Episode I⎯The
Phantom Menace, by 1995 it can already be acknowledged in the
equivalence of the hero’s and the antagonist’s bodies in Heat. In a film which
mainly revolves around the idea of good and bad forces being equal in power
and lifestyle, the villain’s body is equivalent to the hero’s in height, weight,
age, as well as in the powerful, elongated and proportionate muscles. These
we are only flashed briefly. Since both characters seem to be constructed as
gentlemen through the careful selection of their suits and mannerisms, there
is no apparent reason, except to strengthen the notion of their physical
similarity, why the script should call for Al Pacino’s and Robert De Niro’s
characters to expose their naked bodies. And yet they do, respectively, in two
highly sexualized scenes in which they reassert their virility through coital
performance. When they do so, the camera lingers on their equally shapely
biceps, strong shoulders, and muscular backs. Notwithstanding what could be
seen as a disruption of narrative coherence, the exhibition of both the
villain’s and the hero’s bodies during sexual performance exorcizes the
ghosts of feminization of action figures clad in a new suited-up and
respectable appearance. These two scenes contemporarily stress the fact that,
despite the changes in the configuration of action characters, both the villain
and the hero are still undoubtedly “masculine” in both their heterosexuality
and in their active physical domination of the female body during the coitus.
In other words, they are both still constructed as unmistakably action-driven
in their appearance as much as in their attitude and performance. What I find
most interesting in such a construction, though, is the fact that the
representation of the villain is here going beyond not only the asymmetrical
configuration of the villain-hero binomial of the early 1990s, but even of a
symmetrical configuration, for, as I have already pointed, Pacino’s and De
Niro’s characters are equivalent in everything to such an extent that the one
cannot be said to be morally better than the other. The spectator is induced to
believe that the only difference between the two is the role each plays in the
one thing that defines their lives: the chase. Other than in this respect, the
boundaries between the villainous and the heroic are as blurred in their
bodies as they are in any other area of their respective lives. There is no
villain, there is no hero. Or, rather, good and bad coexist in each individual
identity, so that both the villain and the hero are re-humanized through a
process of de-stereotyping of both their physical representation and their
attitudes and actions.
The Depolitization of the Villain’s Body

A significant diminution of body size constitutes, however, only one of
the three main mechanisms through which the enemy is being re-humanized.
The other two correspond to the fact that connections with collective
structures and communities are progressively being severed, whilst the
enemy is being endowed with ordinary human passions. This threefold
process, and especially the loss of muscle mass, is a consequence of the
enemy’s loss of political stature and international significance. In this, action
film villains seem to have been influenced directly by the drastic changes
taking place in U.S. foreign policy from 1992 to 2000. Clinton’s approach to
international affairs notoriously emphasized “global cooperation and

humanitarian intervention” over military action (Harrison 11). Halfway
between pre-WWI non-intervention policies and the post-WWI proliferation
of U.S. interventions in international conflicts, the Clinton era opens up a
“third way,” which implied a parenthesis between the neo-conservative
mandate of George H. W. Bush and his son’s ideological crusade against
anyone disputing U.S. global leadership⎯what Harrison correctly describes
as “the messianic political fantasy of the Pax Americana” (11). In this
transitional period, then, even if foreign, the antagonist just stands for
himself, representing nothing but his own vices and baseness, which leads us
to believe that 1990s action films are being consistently emptied of historical
and socio-cultural specificity, and aim, instead, at representing universal
themes and plots. Such a universalist approach would beautifully dovetail
into Hollywood’s increasing appetite for global marketing, while glossing
over the trickiness of time/space locations on socio-cultural maps. Then, by
overlooking or minimizing discourses of difference, these universalist
aspirations are in fact reducing action films to a simplistic interpretation of
historical, political, and social settings as interchangeable backdrops with
ornamental functions.
It seems that the rise of the individual as interpreter of both the
protagonist and antagonist roles is stripping action films of any actual
representation of human uniqueness. In criminal waters, big fish and small
fish alike are always found out to be either plain thieves or avengers of some
murdered relative, and are thus as anonymous and inconsequential as they
are virtually interchangeable. Even what would seem to be a significant
exception, that is, the conspicuous number of antagonists working in federal
institutions, is but another instance of a tendency towards the atomization of
collective structures through an emphasis on the corruption of their
individual members. American distrust of Federal Government is here
articulated around the idea that there is no such thing as a successful
collective superstructure for three main reasons. Firstly, the moral faultiness
of individuals spreads throughout the proverbial barrel in such a way that it is
impossible to predict who is blameless and who is guilty. Secondly, the
existence of corrupted individuals within a social superstructure prevents the
latter from functioning as it should. Finally, precisely due to the emphasis on
the individual members of collective superstructures, these cease to be
collective and, thus, to possess the substantiality that is the prerequisite for
their very existence. In other words, the bad guys have now assimilated the
quintessential individualism of action heroes, to the point that 1990s action
films, rather than being sustained by the familiar loner-versus-
corporation/institution plot, are now being constructed around single-handed
duels between a singular hero and a singular opponent.2
The second instalment of the Die Hard saga constitutes an excellent
example of what I have dubbed the process of depolitization of the bad guys.
What becomes obvious from the very beginning is how the events triggering
the plot bear a striking likeness to the Noriega affair. The Commander in
Chief of the imaginary Central American Republic of Val Verde, General
Esperanza, is accused of replacing U.S. funds to finance his ascent to power
by going into a thriving drug business, which mainly caters to the U.S.
market. When the plot begins, he is being extradited to the U.S.A. to be
prosecuted. Savvy action fans already suspect that the villain’s mission will
consist in destroying what looks like a triumph of the U.S.A. over foreign
corruption and the more subtle, though no less deadly, form of war that is
drug smuggling. In hindsight, the same knowledgeable fans realize that
when, in the very first scene of the film, John McClane exclaims that they are
in “Washington D.C.: the heart of democracy,” the script is already hinting at
the fact that the central act of villainy is going to pose a direct threat to
democracy itself, and subsequently, to the very core of what it means to be
American. Minutes later, John McClane is growing increasingly convinced
that a rescue team will execute a convoluted plan to intercept Esperanza
before the U.S. authorities lay hands on him. So far, politics seem to be
inextricably interwoven in the plot. Furthermore, when we learn that the
rescue team is composed of highly trained ex-U.S. soldiers, spectators start
assuming that the film will be ridden with political intrigues, double spying,
and other narrative tropes typical of pre-1989 action films⎯see, of course,
the James Bond saga. Such expectations are never met, though. In one last
narrative twist, the army unit that has apparently been sent to help McClane
to save the day turns out to be a partner in crime of Esperanza and his
“official” rescue team. All claims to the existence of political motives for
saving the general are suddenly abandoned. The only things the bad guys are
after are the large sums of money and the comfortable life under the
Caribbean sun that Esperanza has promised them. Likewise, in DH1, the
villains impersonate terrorists to trick the FBI into following their standard
operating procedure and blacking out the building where the alleged
terrorists are, thus opening an electronic safe in which millions of dollars are
stored. In The Last Boy Scout (1991), we have a corrupt senator, in
Demolition Man (1993), a corrupt mayor, and in Total Recall (1990), the
corrupt CEO of “the Agency.” In Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), the antagonist is a
corrupt South African ambassador, whereas in Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), as
well as in Speed, he is a deviant ex-policeman, and in Lethal Weapon 4
(1998), a deviant member of the Chinese mafia. In The Matrix (1999), agent
Smith, a seeming representative of the superstructural institution known as
the Matrix, is actually attempting to fulfil an escape plan designed to “be
free.” Behind every social conflict there is a singular, corrupt individual
acting on the most ordinary of motives: selfishness and vengeance. This, on
the one hand, exonerates the institutions and superstructures involved in the
conflict, laying all the blame on the crazy/corrupt loner, while, on the other,
undermines the credibility of those same hegemonic systems of social control
by exposing the cancerous cells rotting their core and underbelly.
The ending of action films constitutes thus a return to a traditional social
order imposed top-down by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbies. However, it
also clearly portrays the victory of the individual over the system in the
struggle for self-protection and survival. This apparently subversive reading
is actually in perfect agreement with conservative American values that date
back to the first English settlers’ quest for independence from governmental
interference. In the 1990s, conservatism is growing paradoxically stronger
under a Democratic president. While the number of Democrats disappointed
in Clinton’s compromising on social reforms keeps growing, Francis
Fukuyama’s “New Men” emerge as a force to be reckoned with (Harrison 9-
10). The other significant conclusion which can be extrapolated from the
choice of villains in 1990s action films is that there are only two main
possible scenarios. The first is the classic “enemy within” theme, according
to which the villain is a corrupt member of a pillar of the country’s socio-
political and economic system. Fight Club is perhaps the most extreme
example of this kind of plot, for the villain turns out being a product of the
hero’s schizophrenic personality. The second is the “infiltrated enemy,”
mostly represented by Chinese and Latino gangs, with the interesting
subtheme of “ultra-white” mafias in Lethal Weapon 2, Die Hard 1 and 3, and
Blade. At any rate, from the point of view of body representation, there are
only three possible profiles of villainous bodies in either scenario: the over-
masculine, pumped-up bodybuilder reminiscent of 1980s representations of

“musculinity,” the maimed/weak “brain,” and the average-built, average-
sized, moderately fit henchman, who will eventually develop into the digital
body of twenty-first-century villains. The hyper-musculated “pro” is a figure
resorted to on very few occasions, contrary to what happened in the 1980s,
when villains⎯or at least, their bodyguards⎯were worthy of the excesses of
the heroic body. 1990s action films are largely ridden with the last two
categories of antagonistic bodies, thus creating a setting against which the
excessive bodies of actors of the likes of Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or
Wesley Snipes end up looking unnecessarily vigorous and inappropriately
bulky. The new action characters require slender, supple bodies, which are
mostly vehicles for the sharp minds of the new villains and heroes.
The Plastic Body

If in T1 the conflict between machines and humans after “Judgement’s
Day” is remarkably similar to an inverted Vietnam war, fought in the same
fashion but with upgraded weapons, the hero’s nemesis in T2 constitutes a
clear example of what warfare looks like during and after the First Gulf War.
The enemy is now shape-shifting, chameleonic and thus virtually
undistinguishable, while war is a quick affair carried out from a distance
through missiles and high technology attacks of surgical precision. Night-
vision goggles provide easily marketable black and green images that offer
an aseptic portrait of an equally aseptic, rational kind of war advertised as
fast and efficient. The physical aspect of war, with its blood, its mutilations
and its scattered body limbs, has been surgically removed from the TV
screen during news reports with the same precision with which all traces of
imperfection or unbalance have been removed from the polymorphous
plasticity of the T1000. The evolution of warfare and technology, and its
influence on the militarized new action man, can be clearly perceived in the
abundance of 1990s action films set in a sci-fi, high-tech or simply futuristic
contexts. In particular, the merging of action film conventions with sci-fi
settings and props entails a progressive distancing from other traditional
action narratives, such as western and cop films, so en vogue during,
respectively, the 1970s and the 1980s. Just as Riggs and Murtaugh are
portrayed as two ageing detectives heading towards a future of family
responsibilities in Lethal Weapon 3 and 4, “buddy films” are passing the
baton on to other versions of the action genre during the 1990s.3 The primary
site where this tendency becomes visible is, again, the action body. Flesh, as
well as the excess thereof, is at the core of the 1980s ideal of the human
physical dimension. Flesh and the space it occupies, its animalistic
mechanics, the substances it exudes when under the constant assaults the
action genre poses to the heroic body, all seem to exhaust the physical
dimension of heroism in the 1980s. Besides being dubbed an “excessive
body,” it should also be called a “suffering body,” for it is not only in its
capacity to exert brute force outwardly that the body proves its heroism, but
also through its ability to withstand and resist all sort of external attacks to its
integrity. Ten years later, the stress is no longer on the ambivalence of the
organic body embodying both the ordinary vulnerability and the extra-
ordinary agency of the action character, but on the mimetic overalls,
intelligent fabrics, technical footwear and assorted gadgets that cover up the
villain’s and hero’s bodies to the point that even the actual skin, flesh and
bones underneath all those layers of scientific progress are starting to look
artificial. In time, this tendency will culminate in the “plastic bodies” I will
describe later on. It starts, however, with the manifold technological layers
that turn human bodies into inverted replicas of the T800: organic on the
inside, artificial on the outside.
In Universal Soldier: The Return (1999; henceforth, US2), still very
much a “traditional” instance of the genre, the upgraded Unisol project is
now counting on the undead soldiers’ superhuman strength as much as it is
on the “level 4 body-armour uniforms” that make them “almost bullet proof.”
Towards the end of the decade, there seems to be a renewed interest in
militarizing the villain in action films. Even if not soldiers in a strict sense,
the uniformity, submissiveness to authority and sheer number of Tyler
Durden’s acolytes in Fight Club, or of the “agents” of the Matrix, construct
them as an army on a war footing. This can be read as a criticism on a return
to a gendered construction of war as the epitome of masculinity on a
collective level. Nevertheless, at a time when the Republican majority in the
Congress is questioning the numerous cuts in the military budget carried out
by the Clinton administration, direct references to the fact that “the big
spending of the Cold War era is over,” as well as the regret with which they
are uttered in US2, are a cultural sign of the impending arrival of a new era in
which the bloody, gory side of war is seen as more honourable, even as
appealing. The narrative and graphic allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey and
T2 in the way central computer SETH can lip-read, interpret, and oppose
human military action can also be perceived as a longing for a return to a
more “human” type of warfare, that is, one in which human bodies clash in
one-on-one attacks, and not the aseptic, virtualized kind that George H. W.
Bush had American audiences view on their TV screens in unreal black and
green images captured through infrared cameras. “The soldier has always
been the back bone of the military,” longingly states General Radford
(Daniel von Bargen) to a shocked Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme),
who rebukes, “Yeah, it would be a shame to stop sending young Americans
to die in the battlefield.” In spite of Deveraux’s sarcasm, the moral of the
film seems to be definitely advocating a regression to bloody warfare.
The use of special clothes that denote a robotic, artificial origin is not
specific of futuristic action films. In Speed, the military-looking special
uniform donned by Keanu Reeves is already foreshadowing the flexibility of
his plastic skin-tight clothes in The Matrix, which, in turn, are going to
provide a platform from which to spring towards a complete plasticization of
the action body. The same can be said of the signature use of rubber masks as
an artificial second skin in Mission Impossible. The process of transitioning
from the jerkily-moving, hard-bodied, gigantic 1980s villains to the virtual
bodies of agent Smith and Neo begins with the way early 1990s actors like
Robert Patrick can incorporate unimpeded speed and seamless continuity to
their movements. Interestingly, though, the middle phase of this transition is
staged through the particular way both the villainous and the heroic bodies
look. They are “plastic” not only in the porelessness of doll-like skin, but
also in their ductility, in their ability to be transformed and reshaped to fit the
surroundings, either the spatial environment or the social milieu the heroic
body has to blend in. An example of a transitional body⎯halfway, that is,
from the bodybuilding excess of flesh to the swiftness and versatility of the
“Neo type”⎯would be Jean-Claude Van Damme’s in Universal Soldier
(1992). The fact that Van Damme’s body is extremely muscular but shorter
than the rest of the Unisols is already indicative of his transitional
configuration. What is particularly relevant, though, is how both 1990s
applications of the idea of plasticity⎯overt artificial perfection and
malleability⎯can be seen in action in his physique. Genetically modified
after having being killed during the Vietnam War, Private Luc Deveraux’s
body has been engineered to become the perfect soldier. Of course, the three
principal requisites to qualify for such a title are physical endurance,

strength, and a mindless ability to execute orders right away,
unquestioningly. His impossibly smooth skin, which we are offered as
spectacle in several scenes, looks as if it had been coated in paint, the sort of
body air-brushing technique first used on the cyborg body of Pris (Daryl
Hannah) in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), and then on two other
undead bodies, those of Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) and Helen Sharp
(Goldie Hawn) in Robert Zemeckis’ black comedy Death Becomes Her, also
from 1992. From the battered, forsaken Vietnam soldier, with his unshaven
face bearing heavy signs of fatigue and dark circles under the eyes, scientific
manipulation of the human body is able to produce a perfectly even-toned
countenance and a plastic skin which can regenerate itself with the same
easiness of a soft stress-ball recovering its shape after having been poked.
The artificial texture of the Unisol’s skin, whose glossy appearance is more
reminiscent of Barbie’s boyfriend Ken than of the oiled bodies of 1980s
bodybuilders, is evidenced in the cleanness with which it can be cut open, a
precise incision revealing two perfectly straight, almost bloodless flaps of
flesh, easily comparable to the plastic back hatch of a battery-powered toy.
This, of course, also matches the aseptic precision with which the T800’s
scalp is cut open by Sarah Connor in T2, in opposition to the graphic
gruesomeness of the T800 extracting its own eyeball in T1.
The Virtual Body

In The Matrix, the particular texture of the computer-dominated world,
with its glossy and deeply saturated sombre colours, also makes it look as if,
rather than out of fabric, skin, brick and mortar, wood or metal, everything
were made out of plastic coated in paint. This is obviously a consequence of
the comic-book look the directors consciously bestowed on the whole film’s
aesthetics. But it is also establishing a link between the ‘plastic’ heroes and
villains of the second half of the 1990s and another, dramatically new action
hero. A hero for whom, as we shall see, action begins and ends in the mind.
It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that an actor like Reeves, with his mixed
Chinese, Hawaiian and Caucasian heritage, would have been chosen to
represent this new interpretation of the action hero. On the one hand, in his
character we can still trace elements clearly belonging to the “plastic hero.”
His wearing black sunglasses and a sleek hairstyle contributes to give him
the too-perfect-look of an action man toy figure. His parted, half curtained,
pitch-black hair looks almost digitally painted as it effortlessly follows the
flow of each movement despite being too short to look anything but
masculine. In short, he looks artificially put together to match a specific
constructed image. On the other hand, his supple, lean body is distinctively
reminiscent of martial art icon Bruce Lee, which identifies him with the
mythical Eastern warrior who fights with his arms and legs as much as he
does with his highly trained, disciplined, focused, sharp mind. This quasi-
mystical aura materializes, too, in the carefully styled uniform of the new
hero. Neo’s black-on-black aesthetics emphasizes the merging of the good
and the bad into one single powerful icon. The pitch black, structured, floor-
length coat designed to billow ominously⎯Neo’s most characteristic
garment⎯will undergo a transformation over time, which will eventually
result in its resembling a religious robe. This, together with Keanu Reeves’
ascetic slimness, suggests unequivocally that his path is taking him towards a
religious/mystic approach to politics, which, two years before the beginning
of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, is not devoid of interest.
Going back to my original thesis according to which the antagonistic
body shapes the heroic one, the fact that Deveraux is actually a deviant
Unisol contributes to the strengthening of the notion of an existing continuity
between the villain’s and the hero’s physical dimensions. Also, Neo’s virtual
body has been literally built by the computer programme known as the
Matrix, whereas its flesh-and-blood counterpart is still organic and dependant
on the laws of physics. For most of the film, Neo cannot defeat agent Smith
because the former’s strength and skills are equivalent to the latter’s. In fact,
only by “becoming” Smith will Neo eventually triumph. It is in this sense,
then, that Heat was anticipating the identical configuration of villains and
heroes in the action films from the late 1990s. In the first episode of the Star
Wars saga, even if the villainous body is articulated mainly through the
daemon-looking Darth Maul and the devilishly insidious Palatine, the child
protagonist is unavoidably tainted with reminiscences of the 1970s satanic
child Damien (The Omen, 1976). Because of the very nature of the prequel
film, dramatic irony overshadows Anakin’s childlike innocence and heroism
with cataphoric signs of his villainous future. Thus, in the first of the Star
Wars prequels, we have all three of the stereotypical villains of the 1990s:
the muscular “pro,” the “brain,” and the flexible, ductile body of a child
constructed as both a future hero and a future villain. In The Matrix, Neo’s
triumph over agent Smith, as well as on the whole dystopian representation
of a capitalist, corporate reality, takes place only when the “Chosen One”
first hacks the software responsible for creating the illusion of reality, thus
appropriating the system for the rebel cause, and then hijacks agent Smith’s
virtual body at the end of the final fight, thus becoming one with the enemy
and performing the most invasive act of aggression possible: robbing the
opponent of his body and then destroying it from the inside out. If the enemy
is virtual and not tangible anymore, if reality is a medium not a context, then
the heroic body becomes suddenly powerless, while the mind arises as the
true heroic weapon against ill-intentioned institutions. Indeed, the narrow
black tie, stifling black two-piece suit, black sunglasses, earpiece and
slicked-back, side-parted hairstyle construct the agents of the Matrix as
representatives of a capitalized Institution at first identified as the F.B.I., but
which later becomes synonymous with the largest institution of them all, one
that literally controls not just the economy, politics, and military secret
forces, but reality itself.
Technological advances are probably to be credited for casting one of the
most transcendental influences on the action genre. Computer-designed
images and special effects allow action sequences to reach an unprecedented
level of spectacular complexity, but it is the creation of the World Wide Web
in 1993 that informs the distancing of the spectacular from the real and its
progressive heading towards the virtual. Some might argue that the
foundation of Google by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 might have had
a greater cultural and social impact than any other event in the whole decade.
It constituted the beginning of the second phase of the “Age of Information”
that had already been launched with the advent of computers: an era in which
information is not just stored, but shared to a degree never before
encountered in the history of humanity. To this event we must necessarily
pair the Human Genome Project and its influence on the action body from
the second half of the 1990s onwards. Thanks to it, it is now possible to
reduce the human body to data, to an encoded amount of information
inspiring images of digitalized bodies, the likes of which are screened in
columns of green glyphs in The Matrix. Neo’s first victory over the Matrix is
symbolized by his eventual acquisition of the ability to “read” the software-
produced images as data, as information in its purest form. The “Chosen
One,” whose representation as a messianic saviour will become more and
more obvious in each of the successive sequels, begins his holy mission, like
the Biblical Adam, by gaining access to forbidden knowledge. In fact, the
heroic mind substituting the heroic body is not synonymous with the
intellectual mind. Far from it, it represents the mystical mental control over
the body that has been archetypically associated with the most effective
warriors ever depicted in popular Western cultures: the practitioners of Asian
martial arts. Through the training of the mind, fictional Shaolin monks and
karatekas tune their bodies until they become deadlier than the sharpest
weapon. In the triumph of the mystical mind over the fragile body, so limited
in its dependence on external sources of fuel, the fin-de-siècle spectator sees
a triumph of the metaphysical over the physical, of the boundless potential of
which Neo talks at the end of the film over the restrictiveness of material
reality. With his (N)eo-virtual body, the “Chosen One” now possesses a new
virtual self: he is, in essence, more “meta-real” than real. We can then
conclude that the 1990s fascination with “the plastic body” has outgrown the
1980s obsession with the “suffering body,” only to be in turn replaced by an
end-of-the-millennium craving for a virtualization of the self from body to
mind. The virtual body depicted in hyper-real images of fight and chase in
The Matrix is thus one and the same thing with the mystical mind in a digital
world where the spiritual is reduced to ancestral magic, to the primal dream
of a “world where everything is possible,” as Neo puts it.
Notes
1
See Holmlund (Impossible Bodies 15-30).
2
The only outstanding exception to this model is the coupling of the hero with an equally
heroic “buddy” and the subsequent triangulation of the central characters (Tasker 35-53).
3
It is, of course, possible to spot the occasional exception. For example, in the third
installment of the Die Hard saga, Die with a Vengeance (1995), McClane has suddenly
been constructed as an older version of the suicidal, sociopathic and hysterical Riggs of
the first Lethal Weapon. This, however, is but a mere backwards whirl in an otherwise
steady tendency.
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She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a
barely audible click, ten double edged, four centimeter scalped blades slid from their
housing beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew. (37)
Molly’s upgraded body allows her to work as a bodyguard of Neuromancer’s

main character, the cyberspace cowboy Case. She is faster, stronger, and
more deadly than him. Molly clearly defends her implants and uses them
against men so as to remind them that she is not the passive female ideal.
When told that “[i]n Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
modifications,” she actively affirms herself: “It’s my show, Jack” (110).
Besides, she has a negative attitude to men who abuse women; in general,
she does not like to feel inferior to them.
This self-sufficiency and aggressive attitude towards men allows us to
see Molly as an example of the post-gendered, subversive cyborg. Molly’s
pose may correspond to the empowerment that technology allows women.
Molly takes the active, physical, risky part of the action in the novel. As the
novel progresses, Case and Molly become attached to each other and have an
affair, but it is Molly who begins and ends it with a message that discards
any romantic involvement, as if Case had just been another job in the
bodyguard business:
HEY IT’S OKAY BUT IT’S TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE
BILL ALREADY. IT’S THE WAY I’M WlRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS
OKAY? XXX MOLLY. (313)
However, for all her subversive, hyperfeminist characteristics, Molly

Millions has not become the epitome of Haraway’s post-gendered cyborg.
The main reason for this is that the same features that position her as a
warrior woman can in fact be attributed to a change in male attitudes. Molly
could well be the updated version of 1980s male tastes. In fact, she could be
the very object of masculine desire for sporadic sex in the freer social
environment left after the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Molly’s cyborgian attitude is too vague and her nature too indeterminate; as
it happens with other cyberpunk female characters, it is impossible to decide
whether she is hyperfeminist or hyperfeminine. Cavallaro highlights this
ambiguity: “Cyberpunk’s approach to gender roles is highly ambiguous, for
it appears both to perpetuate and to subvert stereotypical representations of
masculinity and femininity (121). Springer comes to a similar conclusion
when she states that “because of the ambiguities and contradictions of [their]
representation…cyberpunk’s figure of the angry women can neither be hailed
as feminist paragon nor repudiated as a mere sex object; she incorporates
aspects of both but finally embodies neither” (139). If Saturn 3 had presented
a (still undeveloped) cyborg that was a clear threat to patriarchy and The
Terminator had attacked the machocyborg to defend a more progressive
vision of female roles, Neuromancer’s version of the cyborg, Molly Millions,
is neither the post-gendered cyborg nor a representation of the machocyborg.
In this sense, Molly continues the cyborg tradition of ambiguity,
indeterminacy, and variability. This indeterminacy also affects the
representation of cyborgs as male bodies: Robocop is not only the
actualization of what Susan Jeffords described as “hard” male bodies, but
also an updated version of the father role.
Armored Body and Softened Mind: Robocop (1987)

Robocop’s hypermasculine, armored body has become an icon in
American culture. In this sense, everything that has been said about the other
main machocyborg in this chapter, The Terminator, can now be applied to
the steel cyborg cop as well. However, the main aim of the following
discussion is not to delve into Robocop’s machocyborg qualities, which are
obvious enough, but to look into the somewhat hidden connotations of
Robocop’s hybrid (cyborgian) nature.
It is necessary to begin by highlighting the fact that Robocop is the first
cyborg with a history. Unlike Hector, the Terminator or Molly Millions,
Robocop begins the film’s story as police officer Murphy. Also, contrarily to
Arnold’s Schwarzenegger’s physique, Peter Weller’s body is neither
spectacular nor exaggeratedly muscular. In fact, as he is introduced in the
movie, Murphy (Peter Weller) is just an ordinary guy who has a family and
who likes to play with his son. Furthermore, his memories survive the
process by which he is turned into a cyborg, in spite of the technicians’ effort
to eliminate them. All details about his character indicate that Murphy’s pose
is far from the machocyborg he will become. He appears in the film as the
new arrival to one particularly violent police precinct in Chicago, where he is
assigned a new partner, Lewis (Nancy Allen), who also does not live up to
the traditional female role, symbolizing instead the warrior woman. Soon
after they start working together, Murphy confesses he makes his gun turn
CHAPTER 7
Leonidas’s New Body: The Failed Hyper-
Masculinization of the Hero in Frank Miller and
Lynn Varley’s Graphic Novel 300 (1998) and Its
2006 Film Adaptation
Sara Martín
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Introduction: Nostalgia for the Patriarchal Hero

The historical figure of King Leonidas of Sparta is still remembered today
for his formidable resistance against the massive invading Persian force led
by Emperor Xerxes I. The battle of Thermopylae, which was crucial for the
defence of the diverse polis and kingdoms we now call collectively Ancient
Greece, took place on a narrow pass by the Aegean sea during three days in
August 480 BC. Leonidas’s insufficient forces, comprising just the three
hundred soldiers of his personal guard and a few thousand sundry combatants
from other areas of Greece, were defeated. This reverse, which also resulted
in Leonidas’s death and the desecration of his body as ordered by Xerxes,
was, nonetheless, the first step in the military union of all the Greeks, which
would eventually stop the Persian advance in the battle of Salamis, just a
month later. This brought ultimately honor to Leonidas’s defeat.
As a sacrificial hero, Leonidas is thus a model of masculinity divergent
from that of the typical victorious hero. The claim could even be staked that
this Spartan king is one of the very few heroic figures in open contradiction
with the essence itself of the hero as winner, and an instance of how
patriarchal heroism is flexible enough to include those vanquished but still
honorable. Paradoxically, his defeat inspired a long-lasting militarist cult,
often quite incongruous. Thus, Sparta and his king count, among their most
disreputable admirers, Adolf Hitler, who used to regard his German
homeland as a new Sparta endangered by Judeo-Marxist hordes, in his view
as Asian as the Persians. For his followers Hitler is, of course, yet another
sacrificial hero like Leonidas, though in his hunger for conquest he followed,
rather, in Xerxes’s footsteps.
The historical Leonidas and his impact on other real-life figures is not,
however, as relevant here as the fantastic representation of his military deeds
in the popular graphic novel 300 (1998) by American comic-book artist
Frank Miller and colorist Lynn Varley, and in the cult Hollywood film
adaptation by Zack Snyder (2006). This film, conceived as a faithful
extension of the graphic novel and its noir aesthetics, generated considerable
controversy for its exaggerated, hyper-masculine and hyper-muscular
presentation of the Spartan combatants. Snyder’s film also deeply offended
the Iranians who consider themselves descendants of the ancient Persians
with its farfetched, ahistorical portrait of Xerxes and his troops.1 Read more
apolitically by Western audiences, despite coinciding with the Bush
administration’s post-9/11 invasion of Iraq, started in 2003, the evident
homophobia in the representation of the Persian Emperor as a kind of
ambiguously dark-skinned, tribal drag queen has at any rate affected most
reviews and critical discussions of this film, often rejected as a hardly
disguised homoerotic fantasy.
Far less popular than its successor, the source text that 300 rewrites is the
1962 film produced and directed by Rudolph Maté from a screenplay by
George St. George, The 300 Spartans. A typical example of the “sword-and-
sandal” sub-genre of epic cinema, Maté’s passable work participates of the
luminous Mediterranean aesthetics typical of its kind. Maté presents a
moderate portrait of Leonidas framed by the parameters of Ancient Greece’s
idealized masculinity, which united the warrior and the sophisticated
politician, albeit sanitized for the 1960s as firmly heterosexual. The film is
placed half-way between high-budget Hollywood A series productions such
as Ben-Hur (1959), and the B series Italian sagas about mythical heroes
Hercules (1957-1965) and Maciste (1960-1965). In the same way, the
restrained screen presence of the impassive Richard Egan as Leonidas is half-
way between the masochistic exhibitionism of Ben-Hur’s star Charlton
Heston, and the spectacle provided by body-building film stars such as Steve
Reeves, a former Mister Universe and an habitual of Italian sword-and-
sandal epics.
Fifty years after its release, The 300 Spartans stands the test of time with
a certain decorum, provided above all by the manly Leonidas and his sly
political ally, an elderly Themistocles. The cheap, clumsy battle scenes in
Maté’s film cannot compete with Snyder’s spectacular blood-bath but even
that shortcoming highlights the main problem of the more recent retelling of
Leonidas’s New Body 127
Thermopylae: it is hard to understand why Frank Miller eschewed the serene

and dignified masculinity of Maté’s Leonidas, which he himself admired as a
child, for this unbelievably athletic, blood-thirsty neo-barbarian “hero.”
Regarding Snyder’s version, the obvious question is why Miller and Varley’s
already garish Spartans have been given such unlikely bodies. As reviewer
Roger Ebert (2008) quips, the spectator may believe star Gerard Butler’s
claim that he did go through harrowing gym training to play Leonidas, but
“not 300, 200 or even 100 extras. As a result, every single time I regarded the
Spartans in a group, I realized I was seeing artistic renderings, not human
beings. Well, maybe that was the idea.”
This double dehumanization of the hero⎯as berserk neo-barbarian in the
graphic novel and as a digital cartoon in the film⎯and the passage from the
balanced heroic male body of 1962 Leonidas to the frenzied body of his 2006
equivalent, are conditioned by the politicized identification of idealized
patriarchal masculinity with muscularity since the 1980s. Susan Jeffords
made the crucial distinction between the 1970s soft body of the Carter era
and the Reaganite hyper-muscled male body in her seminal volume Hard
Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1984). Yvonne Tasker,
on her side, contributed almost a decade later the term ‘musculinity,’ the
main focus of her book Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action
Cinema (1993). Both Jeffords and Tasker see the hyper-muscular heroes
played in 1980s and early 1990s action films by actors such as Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone as symbols of a fascistic, imperialist
America. In closer gender terms, Tasker argues that ‘musculinity’ and even
masculinity can be attained by both men and women, in which she somehow
anticipates Judith Halberstam’s still controversial Female Masculinity
(1998). Tasker notes, however, that whereas for women body-building can be
implicitly or explicitly feminist, for men it is part of a patriarchal discourse
which places self-control at the core of idealized masculinity:
The visual spectacle of the male body that is central to muscular movies puts into
play the two contradictory terms of restraint and excess. Whilst the hero and the
various villains of the genre tend to share an excessive physical strength, the hero is
also defined by his restraint in putting his strength into the test. And it is the body of
the male hero which provides the space in which a tension between restraint and
excess is articulated. (9; original emphasis)
Following Tasker, whereas in the body of the 1962 Leonidas restraint and
excess are well balanced, as the historical Cold-War background would
demand, the lack of balance in the partly digitalized body of the new 2006
Leonidas signals the excesses of George W. Bush’s “hard body” post-
Reaganite military policies. For these, “showing muscle” is all that counts.
Noting, however, that the main lead is played by a “Brit” (Butler is actually
Scottish), British reviewer Peter Bradsaw (2008) concludes that “surely no
one in their right mind in the US could find in Frank Miller’s homoerotic
battle fantasy of Thermopylae an incitement to war against Iran. Apart from
anything else, the idea of America having the Spartans’ underdog status is
not plausible.” Naively enough, Bradshaw misses the fact that right-wing
U.S. politicians have waged war on Iran’s neighbor Iraq (formerly, part of
the Persian Empire), and elsewhere, after cynically presenting the U.S. as a
nation at risk of being destroyed by the ‘enemy.’
In strict gender terms, 21st-century Hollywood action films cannot afford,
however, to be so blatantly patriarchal. This is why faced with popular
“musculine” heroines like the ones played by Angelina Jolie since first
playing computer-game Lara Croft for the film screen, pre-feminist
traditional masculinity has taken refuge in the new wave of epic
films⎯historical, pseudo-historical, mythical or downright fantasy⎯starting
with Gladiator (2000, Ridley Scott). Politically correct, moderate
“musculinity,” as represented for instance by Tom Cruise, is celebrated in
high-budget action films with a contemporary setting, whereas cruder
patriarchal models are cheered in cheaper action films and, indeed, in the
new epics. In them, the “lads” in the audience are offered a gratifying fantasy
that condones their own (occasional?) politically incorrect behavior, playing
up to their belief that there was once an ideal past in which “musculinity”
was a respected status symbol in a patriarchy that even women supported.
The problem with Snyder’s 300 is that it shows how fast the re-newed
“musculine” hero has degenerated from the dignified Maximus played by
Russell Crowe in Gladiator to Gerard Butler’s (almost) parodic Leonidas. It
is tempting to see this change as a consequence of 9/11 in the sense that
whereas during the Cold War the enemy blocs respected each other as
formidable, valuable foes, Osama Bin Laden’s fanatical brand of terrorism
has been read as an undignified form of combat that calls for equally
undignified, “dirty” heroes. However, the few changes introduced in
Snyder’s post-9/11 reading of Miller’s pre-9/11 graphic novel suggest that
this loss of dignity may respond to other causes, even perhaps to the end of
the Cold War and, hence, to the lack of a clear demarcation between heroes
and villains. Whatever the (political) case may be, Miller’s and Snyder’s
heroic fantasy is so inane and at the same time so self-assured that it can only
be unwittingly parodic. This is why, in a way, its dismal spoof, Meet the
Spartans (2008, Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer), or the sub-genre’s general
spoof, Epic Movie (2007, also Friedberg & Seltzer), are unnecessary, at least
for a big segment of the audience. Post-modern or even post-postmodern
laughter breaks ultimately the delicate balance between restraint and excess;
this is, though, an uneasy laughter, for it cannot really mask the deeply-set
nostalgia for the patriarchal hero from which the old and the new Leonidas
emerge.
The 300 Spartans: The Civilized Body of Disciplined Masculinity

As The 300 Spartans was released in the middle of the Cold War, it is
tempting to read the clash between the democratic West represented by the
Greek military coalition and the tyrannical, enslaving Oriental regime of the
Persian Empire as an allegory of the confrontation between (heroic)
capitalism and (villainous) communism. A man’s off-screen voice opens the
film pompously announcing that “this is the story of a turning point in
History, of a blazing day when 300 Greek warriors fought here to hold with
their lives their freedom and ours.” The same pedantic voice closes the film
as we watch images of the diverse Greek monuments in remembrance of
Thermopylae, concluding for our benefit that Leonidas’s moral victory was
“a stirring example to free people throughout the world of what a few brave
men can accomplish once they refuse to submit to tyranny.” Stressing this
discourse, an intertitle presents Xerxes as chief of an “enormous slave
empire” that threatens to destroy “the only stronghold of freedom still
remaining in the then known world.” This tendentious statement very
conveniently forgets that Ancient Greek economy was based on slavery and
that capitalism is indeed based on legally sanctioned slavery, with no need
for the actual ownership of human bodies (Bales).
Leonidas and Xerxes actually embody different positions not quite in
relation to the political power at stake at a particular historical moment,
whether this is the 5th century BC or the 20th AD, but in connection with
patriarchal power in general, positions that by no means challenge it. The
mythology of patriarchal heroism quite often disguises the simple truth that,
from an anti-patriarchal point of view, the villain’s aspiration to total
supremacy is as dangerous as the hero’s defence of the patriarchal status quo:
both are examples of the habitual imposition of patriarchy by force, with the
villain actually providing the perfect excuse for the hero to act unfettered in
defence of patriarchy. Thus, in Maté’s film the villain Xerxes⎯played by
David Farrar, the typical English actor of elegant accent and not less elegant
body language, though not quite manly⎯intends to fulfil ten years later his
father’s dream of “One world, one master” after King Darius’s defeat at the
battle of Marathon. The hero Leonidas, of course, wants to stop him on
behalf of a democratic individualism based on personal freedom that never
existed in Ancient Greece and that hardly exists under (post-)modern
American neo-liberal capitalism. Quite possibly, the contrast between
Farrar’s English blandness and the good looks of Californian matinee-idol
Richard Egan as Leonidas⎯perhaps even between their accents⎯also
emphasizes the failure of the former British Empire to carry the torch for
Western patriarchy. Leaving aside whether this contrast was intended or not,
Leonidas opposes to Xerxes’s paterno-dictatorial model a no-less patriarchal
model of fraternal masculinism. The all-male Spartan warrior elite shared
power quite equally, to the extent that Sparta had two kings; yet the reason
for this equality was not extending full citizenship to all, but making the
Spartan patriarchal system of power less vulnerable to the fate of a single
man. Leonidas’s value as a man, as he acknowledges, is that he is
replaceable, hence easy to sacrifice for the common fraternal good.
The contrast between the unipersonal patriarchal hegemony that the
villain ambitions and the hegemonic fraternity defended by the hero is
highlighted by Enrique Gil-Calvo when he points out that “whereas the hero
identifies with his rival as his alter ego, as he is one of his peers, he identifies
even more closely with his friends, who are his brothers in arms. Actually,
the hero is characterized by his capacity to offer friendship, one of his most
distinctive traits” (155; my own translation). This trait, a priori a positive
one, since the equality of fraternity seems to contradict the patriarchal
penchant for hierarchy, is, nonetheless, deeply mistrusted by feminist
political scientist Carole Pateman. She criticizes the social contract that
finally adapted the political system invented by the Greeks to late sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Europe, helping to replace the absolute paternalistic
power of the king with a hegemonic bourgeois male fraternity, only
marginally less dangerous for women, children, and subordinate men.

Extrapolating this to Maté’s film, we can assert that by idealizing Spartan
fraternity and demonizing Persian hierarchy, The 300 Spartans masks, like
other countless modern Western stories about heroes and villains, the
despotism of fraternal patriarchal regimes. This is by no means extraordinary
for the early 1960s when the film was made, a time when the second feminist
wave was still to come (Betty Friedan’s foundational The Feminine Mystique
appeared in 1963) and when the Vietnam war had not eroded yet the figure
of the patriarchal warrior as brother-in-arms, so essential to the construction
of American masculinity.
On the screen the quarrel between hero and villain is translated onto their
bodies and is ultimately won by Leonidas’s disciplined body. His moderately
muscled, closely controlled body indicates that even in military repose, as in
the scenes in the Spartan parliament, Leonidas is a full-blooded warrior and,
as such, a man of honor. Wearing, unlike Snyder’s scantily clad Leonidas, a
helmet decorated with a horse-hair crest, a short tunic with metal breastplate
and leather skirt, and shin-covering greaves, little of Leonidas’s body is seen:
just the forearms and the thighs. Inexpressive Richard Egan does not need to
do much, except contribute to the role a fine bearing, which connotes self-
possession and a total confidence in the good workings of his patriarchal
world. He is, in short, the incarnation of restraint, as Yvonne Tasker would
put it. In contrast, the villain Xerxes is all excess, at least in his colorful attire
and his passion for power, since his flesh remains concealed. Farrar’s unseen
body⎯covered by flowing tunics of feminizing bright colors that no Spartan
man would be seen in, and shielded away from the cut-and-thrust of the
battlefield⎯shows that this sedentary tyrant has no right to the honorable title
of warrior, that is to say, of man, no matter how victorious his army may be.
This is why, even though his army kills Leonidas, he cannot really defeat
him.
Miller’s and Snyder’s versions focus on youthful bodies, ignoring thus a
crucial aspect in the characterization of Maté’s Leonidas⎯his
intergenerational patriarchal alliance with the cunning Athenian politician
Themistocles, played by Sir Ralph Richardson, then aged 60. Even though
Leonidas’s age at the time of his fight against Xerxes cannot be established
with security, as his date of birth is unknown, he is supposed to have been
around 50 (Xerxes was 39). Miller respects this estimate in the dialogues of
his graphic novel though not in the illustrations, which show a considerably
younger man. In Snyder’s film, the youthful face of Gerard Butler (then 37)
is aged by the dark photography, perhaps in an attempt to have Leonidas look
more mature. Egan, aged 41 when he played the Spartan king, seems
ironically younger than Butler by effect of the Mediterranean brightness of
Maté’s film, an effect used to position him as “young” rebel in the Spartan
patriarchal power scheme, and also to bemoan his truncated career as a
promising military leader of all Greece under Athenian sponsorship.
The 300 Spartans does indeed trap Leonidas in a triangular
intergenerational conflict. As king, Leonidas must respect the anti-Athenian
isolationism of his elders in the Spartan Council, but as a man of honor he
must fulfil the promise made to Themistocles to lead all the Greeks in battle.
Sharing this dilemma with his concerned wife Gorgo, Leonidas criticizes
elderly Councillor Xenaton because the pain for the loss of his two sons in a
previous war with Athens is impairing his political judgment. Making a
virtue of his lack of empathy, Leonidas decides to back Themistocles, thus
opposing the ageing, unrealistic Spartan patriarchs. The contrast between the
unmovable Leonidas armed for war and the decrepit Xenaton reinforces the
younger man’s rebellion, whereas the harmony between his dynamic body
language and the neat aged body of the intellectual Themistocles⎯also very
British but quite different from the decadent Xerxes of Farrar⎯justifies his
defence of the new pan-Hellenic configuration of power. Leonidas’s heroism
is, nonetheless, still that of the disciplined body, as he rejects a discipline he
considers obsolete to embrace one with a future, somehow signalling the
eventual decadence of Sparta but by no means that of the heroic militaristic
patriarchal model.
Regarding sexuality, whereas Miller’s and Snyder’s versions have a
manifest homoerotic component, Maté’s film uses heterosexual desire to
undermine Xerxes’s contradictory, feminized masculinity and to reinforce
Leonidas’s sense of discipline. Unlike Snyder, who must stress Leonidas’s
heterosexuality with a vigorous erotic scene with Gorgo in order to dispel the
suspicion that the king might like his men better, Maté punishes Xerxes for
his weakness for his historical Greek ally, dowager queen Artemisia of
Halicarnassus. As his troops fight, Xerxes’s lust dominates him, which the
pragmatic Artemisia uses to manipulate him for her own political ends.
Leonidas, in contrast, discusses with Gorgo his concerns but takes his own
decisions, making a point of his independence from her opinions. There are
no sex scenes in Maté’s film, as they would have been unthinkable in a 1962
film, and this, paradoxically, helps to maintain a bodily distance between

Leonidas and Gorgo that contributes to his characterization as a self-
controlled man.
This peculiar contest between the barbarian decadent body of the Persian
Emperor and the disciplined body of the Spartan king is won by Leonidas.
His self-control makes both “masculinity” and excessive violence
unnecessary, which results in a heroic patriarchal model that still seems
dignified today. This might well be a side effect of the censorship codes that
prevented film scenes from being too openly sexual or violent, rather than an
awareness of gender issues on the side of the filmmakers. If that is the case,
the contrast between the presentation of the male bodies in The 300 Spartans
and in 300 shows us that the current fashion for uncensored on-screen hyper-
realism that we celebrate today as a mechanism of liberation in the
representation of the body (except for the naked male body) has its downside.
Showing openly what the patriarchal hero does in his bed may stress his
normative heterosexuality, but showing what he does on the battlefield in all
its gory details can only undermine his idealized masculinity.
300, Graphic Novel and Film: Neo-Barbarian, Digitalized ‘Musculinity’

Frank Miller has explained in diverse interviews how when he saw
Maté’s film, aged 6,
My whole sense of what a hero was, was changed. A hero was no longer the guy
who got the badge or got cheered like Harry Potter at the end of every story. A hero
was somebody who did something because it was right and whose gains might
happen far beyond his death and mainly who is willing to die uncredited and
forgotten.2
Fascinated by Leonidas’s sacrifice, Miller used the noir aesthetics of his

popular comic series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Sin City
(1991-2) to design 300 (colored by his wife at the time, Lynn Varley) as an
incongruous mixture, arguably typically post-modern. He gave Herodotus’
account of Thermopylae, also used by Maté, a murky atmosphere closer to
the Nordic sagas⎯or The Lord of the Rings⎯than to the Greek epics. The
action in 300 is tense, the dialogue terse; Leonidas is laconic and emphatic
like the detectives in the noir American detective fiction that Miller admires,
though he lacks their nonchalance and indeed their snide humor (Butler
brings back some of that to the film). Listening to similar dialogue based on
Herodotus in Maté’s version and Snyder’s adaptation (borrowed from Miller

mostly) is enough to see that Miller’s Leonidas is too caught-up in his own
brutal behavior for his occasional irony to be welcome.
Miller’s violent Leonidas fits partly, as I have suggested, the perception
that because the honorable enemy of the Cold War has become a
dishonorable villain-terrorist, he only deserves a brutish hero. He also
responds to a neo-conservative complaint that the post-Vietnam rejection of
the soldier and the growth of feminism have badly eroded American
masculinity. This complaint was famously voiced in pseudo-mythical terms
by Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), a controversial manifesto in favor to a
return to the “inner” man. Bly actually blames the combined impact of post-
WWII corporate capitalism and feminism on masculinity for the ensuing loss
of (patriarchal) dignity. Focusing on the warrior as a central figure in his
view of the male gender, Bly laments that American man has lost the ability
to process his dark side (the ugly revelations brought on by Vietnam and
other imperialistic wars) and admire his bright side, that is to say, his
heroism. Bly bemoans in his narrative “of the decline from warrior to soldier
to murderer” that “[t]he disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanized
war, disdained and abandoned by the high-tech culture, is fading in American
men. The fading of the warrior contributes to the collapse of civilized
society” (156). Miller’s Leonidas seems to redress the situation by bringing
back the warrior, complete with his dark side, without apologies, sensing
perhaps that he will be certainly welcome by the many men who never felt
sorry for his faults.
In a way, my claim that the 1962 Leonidas is more dignified than the
current version might seem to echo Bly’s nostalgia for the patriarchal
warrior-hero. I am actually making this claim because I am concerned that
the brutality of the newer version participates of a worrying trend: the growth
of an in-your-face patriarchal “new laddism” that constitutes a far worse
gender backlash than the one Susan Faludi described for the 1980s.3 In
contrast, Bly identifies civilization with patriarchal militarism and is simply
unable to see that there are alternatives to this type of masculinity, which,
anyway, has not always been the same, despite its unabashed continuity. In
his wide-ranging volume From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the
Changing Nature of Masculinity (2003), Leo Braudy criticizes in depth the
traditional correspondence between man and warrior, pointing out the
specific nature of each warring culture. “Both Athenians and Spartans,” he
explains, “agreed that participation in war was not only a continuing

obligation for every male citizen but also a public stage on which masculine
virtue could be stimulated, fostered, developed, and emulated” (30). Since
Athenians thought that “virtue” restricted to warfare could not guarantee
peaceful stability, other values were incorporated. Miller and Snyder make a
point of showing their Spartan soldiers playing music and listening
enraptured to their bard, but this is done in such a superficial way that
audiences may feel tempted to mock these other values. In comparison,
Braudy further explains, the Nordic war ethic was based on the pure display
of violence, embodied at its extreme by the berserkers of Old Norse
literature, a Viking tribe “whose behavior on the battlefield was so crazed
and extreme that even their own side was appalled;” the berserker, “either
raving or coldly methodical in his warrior frenzy, is the quintessential man of
violence for whom language has no meaning” (38). Like Braudy, we wonder
“whether their extreme version of military masculinity⎯unadulterated force
and violence⎯may be abnormal, inflexible, and deformed, more appropriate
for beasts than for men, even when they happen to be on your side” (39).
And, we may wonder as well whether Miller’s and Snyder’s recreation of the
Spartans as berserkers is terminal, in the sense that it expresses, particularly
in Leonidas’s gory death, an intuition that soon the Other will overcome the
American warrior. He may be now at the peak of his military might but he
might be soon making a last desperate stance before other cultures. Sadly,
these are not less patriarchal, as Braudy himself explains in relation to
twenty-first-century fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, which is why it is
urgent to reject all kinds of (masculinist) violence.
This, regrettably, is not at all what Miller and Snyder intend. Yet,
although Snyder’s film is very faithful to the graphic novel, his adding voice
and movement to the images destabilizes remarkably the patriarchal
discourse offered by Miller. This affects particularly three aspects: the hyper-
realistic representation of the muscled body, the inadvertently camp
characterization of the villainous Xerxes, and the depolitizicing of the hero in
the film’s sub-plot connected with queen Gorgo.
The five chapters of the graphic novel 300⎯Honor, Duty, Glory,
Combat, Victory⎯recapture for the contemporary reader the traditional
militarist ideal. Miller seemingly believes this is all the clothing that his
Spartan male bodies need, except for a red cloak, which, although actually
worn in combat by Greek soldiers, strongly recalls in novel and film the
classic superhero’s cape. The six-pack abs of Miller’s male bodies are not as
spectacular as those of Snyder’s films, and, actually, in the battle scenes he
seems more interested in showing masses of bodies than individuals, perhaps
following in the films that radically changed the representation of the
battlefield, such as Henry V (1989, Kenneth Brannagh) or Braveheart (1995,
Mel Gibson). Although Miller admires military historian Victor David
Hanson,4 300 is by no means a historical film but a bloody fantasy about the
Spartans’ battlefield efficiency. Fascinated by the ancient combat methods
that Hanson describes in his academic work, Miller, and particularly Snyder,
show in graphic detail the catastrophic effects of swords, spears, and arrows
on the frail (male) human body, armored or not. Whereas Maté’s Persian
extras can be seen holding the spears that the clumsy Spartan extras throw at
them, Miller and Snyder offer an orgy of mutilated bodies. This backfires
somehow in the scene when the Persian commander is appalled by the sight
of the wall of dead bodies the Spartans have piled up, for we share his horror
at these ferocious killing machines.
Reviewer James Berardinelli (2007) takes things more lightly and places
this “cornucopia of flesh” in the context of Frank Fazetta’s illustrations for
the Conan the Barbarian books by Robert Howard, or the Battle of Helms
Deep in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers. For him, Snyder’s film is “a
masterpiece of images, style, and testosterone. An ode to masculinity and
machismo, it captivates the eye and gets the blood pumping. It is heroic
spectacle at its finest.” What he never considers, nor do Miller’s and
Snyder’s “devotees,” is that, tongue-in-cheek or not, when a work is praised
for being an ode to “machismo” with no consequences, the sad truth
disclosed is that Western culture is still brazenly patriarchal. The spectacular,
violent male bodies of 300 might be less worrying for those of us with anti-
patriarchal sensibilities if they were anecdotic rather than symptomatic.
Some thought it just a good joke when actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former
Mister Universe, announced that he would run for Governor of California, a
post he held between 2003 and 2011, and that had been previously held by
fellow Republican and actor Ronald Reagan. I am nor arguing that playing
Conan made Schwarzenegger Governor but that his ‘musculinity,’ one of the
most literal embodiments of patriarchal Republican politics in recent
decades, helped him gain actual political power. On-screen spectacle, in
short, should never be taken at its surface value.
As Victor J. Seidler explains, “the postmodern gym culture” that

produces the “masculine” body is based in the last instance on the Christian
idea of the mortification of the flesh, linked to a masochistic view of
masculinity. In the gym, “the male body has to be constantly disciplined
against the threat of ‘fat.’ There is a disdain for the flabby body that reveals a
lack of morality in the form of self-control” (7). Susan Bordo, on her side,
adds that the hard body cult has specific Puritan connotations that the
moderate Ancient Greeks would hardly approve of. “Bigorexia,” the disorder
by which a man believes that his muscles are not developed enough,
whatever “enough” may mean here, affects, according to Bordo, 90% of
educated American men of college-degree level, a situation that she describes
as the sad result of a culture “that doesn’t know when to stop” (221). Also, of
a culture that values the body much above the mind, even in men.
I have, at any rate, reservations about the moral reading of the current
gym culture. As a typical American product responding to this “moral” cult
of the male hard body, 300 is both contradictory and deceitful. To begin
with, lumping together the ferocious tactics of the hand-to-hand combat of 25
centuries ago with the contemporary (allegedly) gym-trained bodies of the
actors results in the unnerving impression that the actual aesthetic passion for
the well-defined muscle hardly masks a secret desire for its violent use. On
the other hand, the suspicion that the actors’ bodies have been digitally
modified undermines heroic masculinity by implicitly suggesting that for a
man to see himself as a hero all he needs is to use Photoshop on an image of
his body, rather than mortify his flesh at the gym. The trade-mark slow-
motion battle scenes of the film, imitating the graphic novel’s static frames,
thus become a crucial destabilizing element, as they call our attention to this
dubious digital (post-)postmodern aesthetic rather than to the male
characters’ painfully honed bodies and fighting skills, as they are supposed to
do. In the third place, even assuming that Butler did go through a truly
Spartan training for 300 as he claims (O’Connell), the romantic film PS I
Love You that he made just one year later shows how ephemeral the effects
of the gym are, judging by the image of his softened abs. If we add to all
these uncertainties the obvious digitalization of Xerxes’s body to increase his
size in relation to Leonidas, we may even read 300 as a film about how
Reaganite hard-body politics have become in our post-9/11 world just a
fallacy, pure bravado. This disclosure casts, of course, a shadow over
American man’s ability to play a credible heroic role in Bush’s immoral

America.
Leonidas’s hyper-masculinization, in short, gives the hero nothing but a
hyper-realistic capacity to maim and kill. In the context of generalized
barbarism that we are asked to accept as heroic, Leonidas appears to be a true
barbarian, even beyond and above Xerxes. This is stressed by his last act:
mutilating Xerxes’s beautiful face.5 His disfigurement is an evident sign of
the hardly controlled homophobia of Miller’s text, even though, ironically (or
precisely because of that), many reviewers see his work as a “homoerotic
battle fantasy of Thermopylae” (Bradshaw). Miller’s Spartan fraternity may
seem homoerotic but it is by no means homosexual. The film stresses this not
just by spectacularly queering Xerxes but also by having Leonidas “joke”
that the Athenians and not the Spartans are the ones interested in sex between
men, which was certainly not the historical case. Today, when finally
President Obama has put an end to the discriminatory “Don’t ask, don’t tell”
policy of the U.S. military (on September 20, 2011),6 it is impossible to guess
when the time will be ripe for a representation of Leonidas, or any warrior,
that includes homosexual acts or identities.7
Miller’s and Snyder’s homophobic discourse confuses, besides, gender
and sexuality, a confusion that also further erodes Leonidas’s (heterosexual)
heroism. Maté’s Xerxes, as I have noted, wears colorful, feminizing clothing
but is not gay; on the contrary, he is stereotyped as the ridiculous mature man
(Farrar was 54) lusting after a much younger woman, a splendid-looking
Artemisia played by Anne Wakefield, 31 at the time.8 Snyder’s Xerxes,
played by handsome Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, also 31, is not involved
in any erotic scene but his extravagant facial make-up is used to signal
implicitly his queer sexual preferences. Despite this, labelling Xerxes as gay
is perhaps even too simple, since Leonidas himself is portrayed as a gay icon
in 300. The 1962 Leonidas dies quite inconspicuously, pierced by an
anonymous sword in the heat of the battle; to prevent further Persian losses,
Xerxes orders that the surviving Spartans, circling his dead body, be slain by
archers. In contrast, Miller and subsequently Snyder have Leonidas die as
conspicuously as possible, his body pierced by dozens of Persian arrows
pinning him onto the floor. No one aware of the gay iconography connected
with the former Roman soldier Saint Sebastian can misread that image.9
No doubt, the most openly homophobic scene is the one in which, alone
with Leonidas, Xerxes suggests that he kneels before him; as a reward for
this humiliation, Xerxes offers to appoint Leonidas generalissimo of all

Greece. The double entendre is transparent and so is the invitation to laugh at
Xerxes when Leonidas replies that his knee will not bend, as his leg is
cramped after killing so many Persians. Xerxes’s iconography, however,
complicates the balance of power in this misencounter. Miller, and even
more so Snyder, insists on presenting Xerxes as a formidable body,
wonderfully proportioned, and much bigger than Leonidas (hence the need to
digitalize Santoro’s image). His deep voice, also digitalized, seductive yet
commanding, may be queer but not at all disempowered. The abundant
jewellery piled onto his almost naked body suggests that Xerxes is the head
of a barbarian tribal patriarchy and by no means a marginal non-hegemonic
figure. The confused characterization of Xerxes as African black in the
graphic novel and as generically non-white in the film (Montoro’s tanned
white skin is covered in glossy dark gold make up) also fails to undermine
his power. There is a manifest intention of ridiculing Xerxes as a hysterical
gay villain based on his absurd bodily décor with its drag-queen echoes, but
his nonetheless hyper-masculine body generates an out-of-control camp
subtext that diminishes Leonidas’s presentation as a (heterosexual) hero.
Susan Sontag states that “the essence of Camp is its love of the
unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” and its capacity to transform “the
serious into the frivolous.” Sontag distinguishes between camp created “to
dethrone the serious” from what ends up being classed as camp because,
despite presenting itself as serious, it just seems “too much.” Camp has been
connected with homosexuality because, as Sontag adds, the avant-garde elite
capable of appreciating camp’s theatricality has always been mainly
homosexual. The “drag queen” phenomenon, which extends beyond
homosexuality as not all drag queens are gay, would be an example of this
theatricality since it pays tribute to camp’s “relish for the exaggeration of
sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.” Xerxes’s presentation in
300, following Sontag, would be an example of naïve camp, as camp
dominates both graphic novel and the film even though neither Miller nor
Snyder intended it. I would not claim the author and the filmmaker set out to
produce a serious rendering of the battle of Thermopylae; they must have
been aware at least of how some elements might turn out to be unwittingly
parodic or campy, particularly their improbable Persian Emperor. It could
even be argued that, intriguingly, this lack of control over the text has
generated two cults: a straight(forward) celebration of machismo and a queer
celebration of camp by those who enjoy, in Sontag’s words, camp’s “mixture

of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”
This lack or loss of control over the homophobia shared by graphic novel
and film adaptation further undercuts their patriarchal sexist discourse. The
hero is hyper-masculinized, as I have been arguing, partly to stress his
heterosexuality, yet this cannot prevent spectators from queering Leonidas
and his men, since hyper-masculinity need not mean hyper-heterosexuality
(as Xerxes shows). Perplexed by this conundrum, the film screen writers⎯in
particular Snyder’s collaborator, Kurt Johnstad⎯decided to give queen
Gorgo, who only appeared on one page of the original graphic novel, a more
prominent role. Even though quite often female characters are introduced in
epics like 300 to alleviate the boredom that women spectators might feel (we
might call that the girlfriend’s syndrome), Johnstad declared that his Gorgo
sub-plot had been developed to give “battle-weary” spectators a break from
so much carnage (Smith 29). Miller welcomed the sub-plot, candidly
admitting that it was inserted “to avoid having the whole thing seem too gay”
(Smith 29). They miscalculated, though, by making Gorgo too formidable for
any man to control, and Leonidas too dependent on her political acumen.
Johnstad explains that he wished to provide Leonidas with a motivation
to go to war, beginning with the assumption that “no man could leave his
wife unless he knew that she was as strong as he⎯that she is a warrior as
much as he” (Smith 29). Unwittingly, Johnstad dilutes in this way the
traditional patriarchal premise by which a man will always wage war to
protect his defenceless women and children from invaders. Thus, when
Xerxes threatens Leonidas with the terrible fate awaiting Spartan women and
children, the king replies, “Clearly, you don’t know our women. I might as
well have marched them up here, judging by what I’ve seen.” This, as can be
seen, is a homophobic rather than a feminist statement, but the point is that
Leonidas is fighting for a particular woman strong enough to defend herself,
though by no means a citizen like him (neither a warrior). As a woman,
Gorgo cannot address the Spartan Council to plead for more troops to be sent
in Leonidas’s aid. Given her disempowerment, she empowers herself through
offering corrupt politician Theron sex in exchange for the chance to speak to
the Council. Her patriotic and patriarchal discourse is convincing enough but
comes too late to save Leonidas;10 frustrated, when Theron denounces her as
an adulteress, she stabs him to death before the Councillors, apparently
avoiding punishment as no Spartan woman could have done.
Maté mocks Xerxes’s dependence on the wily queen Artemisia, yet by

giving Gorgo the core of the film’s feeble political discourse, Johnstad also
weakens the hero Leonidas. It is even tempting to see the king as just a
killing machine at the service of a neo-barbarian war ethic on which Gorgo
believes far more passionately than Leonidas himself. Neither graphic novel
nor film show women in combat (they all possess athletic bodies, though).
Yet, the scene in which Gorgo sends off Leonidas to war as Spartan women
did, bidding her man return either with his shield or gloriously dead on it,
suggests⎯seeing Butler’s anxious expression⎯that Leonidas fears Gorgo’s
judgment much more than he fears Xerxes. This image discloses how, far
from being passive defenceless objects, women of all times have actively
contributed to the making of the patriarchal hero. It also begs the question of
whether the hero’s current hyper-masculinization, far from being a sign of
masculinist self-confidence, actually responds to anxieties about women’s
collective power to judge men negatively, whether within or outside
feminism.
Conclusions: Unmasking the Patriarchal Hero

300, in short, weakens Leonidas’s heroism with its blatant brutality and
homophobia, depoliticizing the hero and making him oddly dependent on his
even more patriarchal wife. We should not forget, however, that whereas the
disciplined body of Richard Egan’s Leonidas in The 300 Spartans has been
all but forgotten, the digitally retouched body of Gerard Butler in 300 has
become a very popular icon for a growing, alarming neo-barbarian laddish
cult, in and outside the USA. Miller himself felt inspired by the serene
dignity of Egan’s sacrificial hero to write 300, but what is more worrying is
who will be inspired by 300 and what for. Even anti-patriarchal persons like
myself can appreciate some of the values that the 1962 Leonidas transmitted,
whereas, unless one is openly masculinist, it is hard to find any positive traits
in the new Leonidas. Hopefully, this is a sign of Miller’s and Snyder’s failure
to recreate him for our times, though it could be just the opposite if the
audience targeted feels invited to abandon all pretence at political
correctness.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we should thank Miller for showing inadvertently
a fundamental truth: patriarchal heroism glorifies sheer brutality. Maté’s film
might even be, in anti-patriarchal terms, far more dangerous, since it presents
the hero as a noble, decent man that every spectator, male or female, falls for.
Possibly nostalgic for that lost ideal, film reviewer Roger Ebert (2008)
bitterly complains in his review of 300 that
In old movies, ancient Greeks were usually sort of noble. Now they have become
lager louts. They celebrate a fascist ideal. They assume a bloodthirsty audience, or
one suffering from attention deficit (how many disembowelings do you have to see
to get the idea?). They have no grace and wisdom in their speech. Nor dignity in
their bearing: They strut with arrogant pride. They are a nasty bunch.
Ebert fails to see, of course, that Leonidas’s new body refers back to more
recent barbaric “masculine” heroes and not to the old epics. It also
participates of the new “laddism” generated by popular TV shows like
MTV’s Jackass, whose social impact we still understand very poorly. In any
case, 300 cannot be wished away, nor can it be ignored as a sample of
rampant masculinism and machismo. This is why it is necessary more than
ever to insist on the incongruities and absurdities of its discourse on men’s
bodies and conduct.
It would be great to see again one day on the page or on the screen so
many beautiful male bodies, but without our visual pleasure being disturbed
by so much patriarchal violence and homophobia.11 Likewise, hopefully one
day the militarist patriarchal hero will stop being the dominant masculine
ideal in favor of the gentle, egalitarian models we need so urgently today. It
is sad to see how, despite the passage of almost five decades since the release
of The 300 Spartans, 300, both graphic novel and film, are, in anti-
patriarchal terms, a step backwards.
Notes
1
See, particularly, Ahreeman X’s review (2007) of the film 300 at Iran Politics Club, a
non-academic association and website he himself founded “to protect and serve the
Persian Culture.”
2
In The Frank Miller Tapes, a 14-minute documentary by Project Lab accompanying the
special edition in DVD of 300 (2007).
3
Rosalind Gill has been exploring “new laddism” for years now. Her analysis of the
“unheroic hero” of lad lit suggests that although apparently the antithesis of the warrior
hero I am deconstructing here, he is part of a similar trend based on the “knowingness of
lad productions.” This “is premised on a familiarity with the terms of ethical and political
critique, but detached from any engagement. In a sense, it might be said to constitute a
‘post-political’ universe in which there are no meaningful moral or ethical frameworks,”
particularly in relation to the demands of anti-patriarchal feminism.
4
Hanson, also a hero of Snyder’s, looks quite uncomfortable in two short documentaries,
The 300⎯Fact or Fiction? and Who Were the Spartans? (also included in the DVD
special edition of the film), in which he is given the impossible mission of defending the
historical validity of 300. He seems particularly crushed by the presence in the film of a
blatantly ahistorical gigantic rhinoceros employed by the Persians.
5
Actually, according to Herodotus (Histories, Book VII, 7.238), on seeing Leonidas’s dead
body, Xerxes “ordered that the head should be struck off, and the trunk fastened to a
cross.” For Herodotus, this is proof “that King Xerxes was more angry with Leonidas,
while he was still in life, than with any other mortal. Certes, he would not else have used
his body so shamefully. For the Persians are wont to honour those who show themselves
valiant in fight more highly than any nation that I know.”
6
President Obama finally expressed in an ABC interview (May 9, 2012) his explicit support
of gay and lesbian marriage –“I think same-sex couples should be able to get married”⎯
within the context of his re-election pre-campaign (See http:// www.whitehouse.gov/ blog/
2012/ 05/ 09/president-obama-supports-same-sex-marriage)
7
In Oliver Stone’s film Alexander (2004), the hero, played by Colin Farrell, is presented as
bisexual rather than homosexual. He may be openly engaged in a relationship with his life-
time lover Hephaistion, but Stone turns his political marriage to Persian princess Roxana
(Rosario Dawson) into an occasion to display Alexander’s heterosexual eroticism.
8
Artemisia and Xerxes were born possibly just a year apart: she in 520 BC, he in 519. This
remarkable woman, as Herodotus explains, was a valued ally for Xerxes, not necessarily
his lover. Oddly enough, she’s not considered a traitor in Herodotus’ version of
Thermopylae.
9
See, for example, Cartagena-Calderón.
10
Gorgo’s vibrant speech is available at American Rhetoric: Movie Speeches as an example
of “best” political speech (at http:// www.americanrhetoric.com/ MovieSpeeches/
moviespeech300queengorgo.html, accessed January 2012).
11
Although few films display as many beautiful male bodies as 300, all the heterosexual
female spectators I have discussed the film with claim that they find its excessive violence
incompatible with erotic visual pleasure.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Miller, Frank & Lynn Varley. 300. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1998.
The 300 Spartans, 1962. Colour, 114’, USA, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.
Director: Rudolph Maté. Screenplay: George St. George, based on a story by Gian Paolo
Callegari, Remigio del Grosso, Giovanni d'Eramo and Ugo Liberatore. DVD: Twentieth
Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006.
300. 2006. Colour, 117’, USA, Warner Bros. Director: Zack Snyder. Screenplay: Zack
Snyder, Kurt Johnstad. DVD: Special edition. Warner Home Video, 2007.
References
Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1999.
Berardinelli, James (March 2007) “300,” Reel Views, http://www.reelviews.
net/php_review_template.php?identifier=26 (Accessed January 2012).
Bly, Robert. Iron John: A Book about Men. Shaftesbury, Rockport, Brisbane, Queensland:
Element, 1990.
baton on to other versions of the action genre during the 1990s.3 The primary
site where this tendency becomes visible is, again, the action body. Flesh, as
well as the excess thereof, is at the core of the 1980s ideal of the human
physical dimension. Flesh and the space it occupies, its animalistic
mechanics, the substances it exudes when under the constant assaults the
action genre poses to the heroic body, all seem to exhaust the physical
dimension of heroism in the 1980s. Besides being dubbed an “excessive
body,” it should also be called a “suffering body,” for it is not only in its
capacity to exert brute force outwardly that the body proves its heroism, but
also through its ability to withstand and resist all sort of external attacks to its
integrity. Ten years later, the stress is no longer on the ambivalence of the
organic body embodying both the ordinary vulnerability and the extra-
ordinary agency of the action character, but on the mimetic overalls,
intelligent fabrics, technical footwear and assorted gadgets that cover up the
villain’s and hero’s bodies to the point that even the actual skin, flesh and
bones underneath all those layers of scientific progress are starting to look
artificial. In time, this tendency will culminate in the “plastic bodies” I will
describe later on. It starts, however, with the manifold technological layers
that turn human bodies into inverted replicas of the T800: organic on the
inside, artificial on the outside.
In Universal Soldier: The Return (1999; henceforth, US2), still very
much a “traditional” instance of the genre, the upgraded Unisol project is
now counting on the undead soldiers’ superhuman strength as much as it is
on the “level 4 body-armour uniforms” that make them “almost bullet proof.”
Towards the end of the decade, there seems to be a renewed interest in
militarizing the villain in action films. Even if not soldiers in a strict sense,
the uniformity, submissiveness to authority and sheer number of Tyler
Durden’s acolytes in Fight Club, or of the “agents” of the Matrix, construct
them as an army on a war footing. This can be read as a criticism on a return
to a gendered construction of war as the epitome of masculinity on a
collective level. Nevertheless, at a time when the Republican majority in the
Congress is questioning the numerous cuts in the military budget carried out
by the Clinton administration, direct references to the fact that “the big
spending of the Cold War era is over,” as well as the regret with which they
are uttered in US2, are a cultural sign of the impending arrival of a new era in
which the bloody, gory side of war is seen as more honourable, even as
appealing. The narrative and graphic allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey and
T2 in the way central computer SETH can lip-read, interpret, and oppose
human military action can also be perceived as a longing for a return to a
more “human” type of warfare, that is, one in which human bodies clash in
one-on-one attacks, and not the aseptic, virtualized kind that George H. W.
Bush had American audiences view on their TV screens in unreal black and
green images captured through infrared cameras. “The soldier has always
been the back bone of the military,” longingly states General Radford
(Daniel von Bargen) to a shocked Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme),
who rebukes, “Yeah, it would be a shame to stop sending young Americans
to die in the battlefield.” In spite of Deveraux’s sarcasm, the moral of the
film seems to be definitely advocating a regression to bloody warfare.
The use of special clothes that denote a robotic, artificial origin is not
specific of futuristic action films. In Speed, the military-looking special
uniform donned by Keanu Reeves is already foreshadowing the flexibility of
his plastic skin-tight clothes in The Matrix, which, in turn, are going to
provide a platform from which to spring towards a complete plasticization of
the action body. The same can be said of the signature use of rubber masks as
an artificial second skin in Mission Impossible. The process of transitioning
from the jerkily-moving, hard-bodied, gigantic 1980s villains to the virtual
bodies of agent Smith and Neo begins with the way early 1990s actors like
Robert Patrick can incorporate unimpeded speed and seamless continuity to
their movements. Interestingly, though, the middle phase of this transition is
staged through the particular way both the villainous and the heroic bodies
look. They are “plastic” not only in the porelessness of doll-like skin, but
also in their ductility, in their ability to be transformed and reshaped to fit the
surroundings, either the spatial environment or the social milieu the heroic
body has to blend in. An example of a transitional body⎯halfway, that is,
from the bodybuilding excess of flesh to the swiftness and versatility of the
“Neo type”⎯would be Jean-Claude Van Damme’s in Universal Soldier
(1992). The fact that Van Damme’s body is extremely muscular but shorter
than the rest of the Unisols is already indicative of his transitional
configuration. What is particularly relevant, though, is how both 1990s
applications of the idea of plasticity⎯overt artificial perfection and
malleability⎯can be seen in action in his physique. Genetically modified
after having being killed during the Vietnam War, Private Luc Deveraux’s
body has been engineered to become the perfect soldier. Of course, the three
principal requisites to qualify for such a title are physical endurance,

strength, and a mindless ability to execute orders right away,
unquestioningly. His impossibly smooth skin, which we are offered as
spectacle in several scenes, looks as if it had been coated in paint, the sort of
body air-brushing technique first used on the cyborg body of Pris (Daryl
Hannah) in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), and then on two other
undead bodies, those of Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) and Helen Sharp
(Goldie Hawn) in Robert Zemeckis’ black comedy Death Becomes Her, also
from 1992. From the battered, forsaken Vietnam soldier, with his unshaven
face bearing heavy signs of fatigue and dark circles under the eyes, scientific
manipulation of the human body is able to produce a perfectly even-toned
countenance and a plastic skin which can regenerate itself with the same
easiness of a soft stress-ball recovering its shape after having been poked.
The artificial texture of the Unisol’s skin, whose glossy appearance is more
reminiscent of Barbie’s boyfriend Ken than of the oiled bodies of 1980s
bodybuilders, is evidenced in the cleanness with which it can be cut open, a
precise incision revealing two perfectly straight, almost bloodless flaps of
flesh, easily comparable to the plastic back hatch of a battery-powered toy.
This, of course, also matches the aseptic precision with which the T800’s
scalp is cut open by Sarah Connor in T2, in opposition to the graphic
gruesomeness of the T800 extracting its own eyeball in T1.
The Virtual Body

In The Matrix, the particular texture of the computer-dominated world,
with its glossy and deeply saturated sombre colours, also makes it look as if,
rather than out of fabric, skin, brick and mortar, wood or metal, everything
were made out of plastic coated in paint. This is obviously a consequence of
the comic-book look the directors consciously bestowed on the whole film’s
aesthetics. But it is also establishing a link between the ‘plastic’ heroes and
villains of the second half of the 1990s and another, dramatically new action
hero. A hero for whom, as we shall see, action begins and ends in the mind.
It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that an actor like Reeves, with his mixed
Chinese, Hawaiian and Caucasian heritage, would have been chosen to
represent this new interpretation of the action hero. On the one hand, in his
character we can still trace elements clearly belonging to the “plastic hero.”
His wearing black sunglasses and a sleek hairstyle contributes to give him
the too-perfect-look of an action man toy figure. His parted, half curtained,
pitch-black hair looks almost digitally painted as it effortlessly follows the
flow of each movement despite being too short to look anything but
masculine. In short, he looks artificially put together to match a specific
constructed image. On the other hand, his supple, lean body is distinctively
reminiscent of martial art icon Bruce Lee, which identifies him with the
mythical Eastern warrior who fights with his arms and legs as much as he
does with his highly trained, disciplined, focused, sharp mind. This quasi-
mystical aura materializes, too, in the carefully styled uniform of the new
hero. Neo’s black-on-black aesthetics emphasizes the merging of the good
and the bad into one single powerful icon. The pitch black, structured, floor-
length coat designed to billow ominously⎯Neo’s most characteristic
garment⎯will undergo a transformation over time, which will eventually
result in its resembling a religious robe. This, together with Keanu Reeves’
ascetic slimness, suggests unequivocally that his path is taking him towards a
religious/mystic approach to politics, which, two years before the beginning
of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, is not devoid of interest.
Going back to my original thesis according to which the antagonistic
body shapes the heroic one, the fact that Deveraux is actually a deviant
Unisol contributes to the strengthening of the notion of an existing continuity
between the villain’s and the hero’s physical dimensions. Also, Neo’s virtual
body has been literally built by the computer programme known as the
Matrix, whereas its flesh-and-blood counterpart is still organic and dependant
on the laws of physics. For most of the film, Neo cannot defeat agent Smith
because the former’s strength and skills are equivalent to the latter’s. In fact,
only by “becoming” Smith will Neo eventually triumph. It is in this sense,
then, that Heat was anticipating the identical configuration of villains and
heroes in the action films from the late 1990s. In the first episode of the Star
Wars saga, even if the villainous body is articulated mainly through the
daemon-looking Darth Maul and the devilishly insidious Palatine, the child
protagonist is unavoidably tainted with reminiscences of the 1970s satanic
child Damien (The Omen, 1976). Because of the very nature of the prequel
film, dramatic irony overshadows Anakin’s childlike innocence and heroism
with cataphoric signs of his villainous future. Thus, in the first of the Star
Wars prequels, we have all three of the stereotypical villains of the 1990s:
the muscular “pro,” the “brain,” and the flexible, ductile body of a child
constructed as both a future hero and a future villain. In The Matrix, Neo’s
triumph over agent Smith, as well as on the whole dystopian representation
of a capitalist, corporate reality, takes place only when the “Chosen One”
first hacks the software responsible for creating the illusion of reality, thus
appropriating the system for the rebel cause, and then hijacks agent Smith’s
virtual body at the end of the final fight, thus becoming one with the enemy
and performing the most invasive act of aggression possible: robbing the
opponent of his body and then destroying it from the inside out. If the enemy
is virtual and not tangible anymore, if reality is a medium not a context, then
the heroic body becomes suddenly powerless, while the mind arises as the
true heroic weapon against ill-intentioned institutions. Indeed, the narrow
black tie, stifling black two-piece suit, black sunglasses, earpiece and
slicked-back, side-parted hairstyle construct the agents of the Matrix as
representatives of a capitalized Institution at first identified as the F.B.I., but
which later becomes synonymous with the largest institution of them all, one
that literally controls not just the economy, politics, and military secret
forces, but reality itself.
Technological advances are probably to be credited for casting one of the
most transcendental influences on the action genre. Computer-designed
images and special effects allow action sequences to reach an unprecedented
level of spectacular complexity, but it is the creation of the World Wide Web
in 1993 that informs the distancing of the spectacular from the real and its
progressive heading towards the virtual. Some might argue that the
foundation of Google by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 might have had
a greater cultural and social impact than any other event in the whole decade.
It constituted the beginning of the second phase of the “Age of Information”
that had already been launched with the advent of computers: an era in which
information is not just stored, but shared to a degree never before
encountered in the history of humanity. To this event we must necessarily
pair the Human Genome Project and its influence on the action body from
the second half of the 1990s onwards. Thanks to it, it is now possible to
reduce the human body to data, to an encoded amount of information
inspiring images of digitalized bodies, the likes of which are screened in
columns of green glyphs in The Matrix. Neo’s first victory over the Matrix is
symbolized by his eventual acquisition of the ability to “read” the software-
produced images as data, as information in its purest form. The “Chosen
One,” whose representation as a messianic saviour will become more and
more obvious in each of the successive sequels, begins his holy mission, like
the Biblical Adam, by gaining access to forbidden knowledge. In fact, the
heroic mind substituting the heroic body is not synonymous with the
intellectual mind. Far from it, it represents the mystical mental control over
the body that has been archetypically associated with the most effective
warriors ever depicted in popular Western cultures: the practitioners of Asian
martial arts. Through the training of the mind, fictional Shaolin monks and
karatekas tune their bodies until they become deadlier than the sharpest
weapon. In the triumph of the mystical mind over the fragile body, so limited
in its dependence on external sources of fuel, the fin-de-siècle spectator sees
a triumph of the metaphysical over the physical, of the boundless potential of
which Neo talks at the end of the film over the restrictiveness of material
reality. With his (N)eo-virtual body, the “Chosen One” now possesses a new
virtual self: he is, in essence, more “meta-real” than real. We can then
conclude that the 1990s fascination with “the plastic body” has outgrown the
1980s obsession with the “suffering body,” only to be in turn replaced by an
end-of-the-millennium craving for a virtualization of the self from body to
mind. The virtual body depicted in hyper-real images of fight and chase in
The Matrix is thus one and the same thing with the mystical mind in a digital
world where the spiritual is reduced to ancestral magic, to the primal dream
of a “world where everything is possible,” as Neo puts it.
Notes
1
See Holmlund (Impossible Bodies 15-30).
2
The only outstanding exception to this model is the coupling of the hero with an equally
heroic “buddy” and the subsequent triangulation of the central characters (Tasker 35-53).
3
It is, of course, possible to spot the occasional exception. For example, in the third
installment of the Die Hard saga, Die with a Vengeance (1995), McClane has suddenly
been constructed as an older version of the suicidal, sociopathic and hysterical Riggs of
the first Lethal Weapon. This, however, is but a mere backwards whirl in an otherwise
steady tendency.
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Voicing the Father’s Body 151
consisting of a single word: “tears.” In the final stanza the strawberries

acquire another layer of meaning; the delicacy of the fruit is associated with
tears from which they flourish⎯and therefore with the inner fragility of the
father’s body.
It should also be noted how Mirikitani very subtly undermines a
stereotypical image of Asian men by using the image of the iron eyes as
shields and that of silence and nothingness. Eyes like iron and a face that
express nothing are related to the stereotype of Asians as
inscrutable⎯unreadable, according to Western standards (as reflected,
supposedly, in slant eyes)⎯and, consequently, not trustworthy. Mirikitani
overturns the negative stereotype by revealing how a body’s unreadability is
the result of extreme pain, which renders language, oral or bodily, an
unfeasible communicative tool.7
The poem’s layout should also be emphasized. The three indented
stanzas (2, 6 and 8) create a visual sense of distortion⎯in the manner that
essentialist discourses on race, ethnicity and gender distort the Other’s body.
Indented stanzas 2 and 6 describe the effects of such discourses inscribed on
the male racialized body on those with whom the body interacts on various
levels: firstly, the father’s children who steal the strawberries and the white
children who eat the rich fruit. The poem, however, ends with an indented
stanza describing the effects of discrimination on the addressee, the poet’s
father. Thus, Mirikitani highlights the effects of racism by making them
visible through language in the name of her father and his generation, made
speechless as a consequence of traumatic experience.
Another effect of the racialization of bodies is the “transfer of
oppression” (Dower: 46) as exemplified in “Rabbit Hunting,” included in the
volume Love Works (2001):
After the war

we had to start over.
Get a gun
learn to listen to footsteps outside
train our dogs
keep them leashed to make them mean.
We don’t want trouble

but can’t bear
any more losses.
They cleaned out our barn

ravaged our house
during the war
while we were locked in barbed wire cages
laid waste the apple orchard
withered the fields that grew kale, cabbage and tomatoes.
“Not again,” was all he said.
He hunts rabbits
and when he traps one, very young,
she stops and trembles.
He was born in Denver,

his parents locked up in Tule Lake Camp.
He served in the U.S. Army
as a messcook and Japanese language translator.
They called him a yellow jap
and made him taste the food before they’d eat.
Makes him so mad, these rabbits

that stop in fear
trembling.
He shoots off their heads. (57-8)
The oppression suffered in the hands of fellow citizens and the state itself via
the U.S. army is transferred to a weak, fragile creature: a female rabbit. The
identification with a trembling animal works as the other side of the coin by
which Asians, and in particular Japanese Americans, during the war and
immediate postwar years were represented: their bodies were animalized and,
consequently, dehumanized. Dower considers that
A characteristic feature of…anti-Japanese sentiment was the resort to nonhuman or

subhuman representation, in which the Japanese were perceived as animals, reptiles,
or insects (monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice and rats, vipers and rattlesnakes,
cockroaches, vermi –or, more indirectly “the Japanese herd” and the like). The
variety of such metaphors was so great that they sometimes seemed casual and
almost original. On the contrary, they were well routinized as idioms of everyday
discourse, and immensely consequential in their ultimate functions: At “us” and
“them to the point where it was perceived to be virtually unabridgeable.” (81-2)
These images were embedded on the Japanese-American body, a discourse

which facilitated their incarceration in concentration camps⎯unlike what
happened to those of German or Italian ascendency. As Dower explains:
That this distinction between the enemy in Asia and the enemy in Europe derives
less from the events of the war than from deep-seated racial bias was reflected in the
opening months of 1942, when the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese-
Americans in masse, while taking no comparable action against residents of German
or Italian origin. Indeed, U.S. citizens of Japanese extraction were treated with
greater suspicion and severity than German or Italian aliens⎯despite the fact that
the German-American Bund (with an estimated membership of twenty thousand)
had agitated on behalf of Hitler in the United States prior to the outbreak of war, and
despite the fact that there never was, at Pearl Harbor or later, any evidence of
organized subversion among the Japanese community. (79)
In “Rabbit Hunting,” the dehumanization of the Other’s body is revealed in

the imagery of being “locked in barbed wire cages” (line 3) and particularly
in stanza six, where it is stated that, despite being born in Denver and having
served in the U.S. army, the rabbit hunter, whom the reader presumes to be
the poet’s father, was nonetheless treated as nonhuman when made by other
soldiers “to taste the food before they’d eat” (l. 25).
However, as in the previous poem, Mirikitani deftly reveals how
violence inflicted on the Other’s body also dehumanizes those who exercise
it. The narrator’s family feels that it needs to protect itself with arms and
dogs trained to be mean⎯as if the outside world were a wilderness. Lack of
humanity is emphasized by the way those from outside their intimate circle
commit violent acts of destruction such as ravaging their home (l. 11) whilst
they had been incarcerated⎯and letting waste their orchard and fields. The
hunter’s identification with the rabbits expresses, once more, his
emasculation⎯the powerlessness and inability to fulfill appropriately his
role of protector of his dependents. Interestingly, during the war he is a
messcook (a traditionally feminine-task)8 and a translator⎯a decoder of
language into another which is used by mainstream society to dehumanize
and, thus, marginalize him.
Mirikitani’s poetry also shows great tenderness for the first generation,
the issei, as in the following poem “Kamikaze on a Clothesline,” also
published in Love Works:
Chicago is the coldest place on earth

in January.
You are five years old.

A big girl. You know to knock on Mr. Utsui’s door
when you come home from school.
He lives alone in a small apartment

down the hall from you and your mother,
now that his wife has died.
His only son was killed during
the war.
Mr. Utsui does not talk much,

smells like an old man,
and you don’t like him
having to unlock the bathroom door
that is shared by all the third floor tenants because
neighborhood black and white kids
run up and down the stairs to use it.
You were dragged down

three flights by a big white kid who called you jap
and slant eyes.
One of the blacks rescued you
and hit that big white kid in his face.
Mama scolded you for

messing around with them who are not your kind,
and not going straight to Mr. Utsui’s place.
One day, you come home from school

and it is snowing very hard
a Chicago blizzard.
Mr. Utsui isn’t home and you wait
in the hallway for a long time.
You look for him

in the back yard and they
are fighting.
You are scared but can’t move
frozen by the violence
between whites and blacks,
explosions of snow
spray against their bodies
as they throw fistfulls
of rock packed snowballs
through the air. The whites are winning
and chase the blacks out of the yard
and suddenly the white bully
sees you and yells to his gang,
a jap. Let’s hang the jap
See if she can fly like a kamikaze.
You try to run but they catch you,

pull off your coat
tie your sweater sleeves around you

and hang you from the clothesline
dangling like a trussed chicken.
The boys rush to each side of the clothesline

and reel you back and forth
making airplane noises in their throats.
kamikaze
kamikaze
you so crazy
you so slanty
you can’t see
so you crash and die, kamikaze.
You slide back and forth on the line

screaming and crying as the white boys laugh.
You think you will die

shivering from the cold
face numb from tears turning to ice
when you hear a loud

ooooiiii. Get away.
The boys look up and see Mr. Utsui

swinging a samurai sword around his head
as they scatter into the snow.
He unties you from the clothesline, and carries you to
his warm room, feeds you miso soup and tea
and apologizes for not being home.
He was kept waiting at the doctor’s office.
Later you ask your mother

why white boys
call you kamikaze and try to kill you,
and she tells you

Mr. Utsui lost his son
fighting in the U.S. Army, while he and his wife
were locked up in a prison camp in Arkansas.
You were in the same camp.
And when Mr. Utsui got the letter that
his son had died, he took his treasured samurai sword
and ran to the barbed wire fence
as if to cut it to pieces.
She says she thought for sure the guards
would shoot him
but they didn’t.
They just laughed and called him

crazy like the kamikaze, crashing their planes
on suicide missions.
But he isn’t the kamikaze, you say,

No, not the enemy, she says.
Black children
white children in a snow filled yard
shooting each other with snow balls,
American Japanese in prison camps
not the enemy.

you are not the enemy. (59-63)
Clearly autobiographical, although the poem does not have as its protagonist
the narrator’s father, it certainly does center on a father-like figure: Mr.
Utsui. Despite its many layers of meaning, especially regarding interracial
relationships, it is most pertinent to concentrate on Mr. Utsui’s bodily
representation. What is highlighted in the first place is the character’s
emasculation as a result of old age and loneliness. His immediate family,
wife and son, are dead so that his life at this stage seems to be a mere waiting
for death. This is reflected by the simply mentioning that he “smells like an
old man, / and you don’t like him” (ll. 12-13), smell being clearly associated
with bodily decay and waste.9 Mr. Utsui can now only act as a kind of
surrogate father for the narrator as a five-year-old, taking care of her after
school.
The poem concentrates on a particular incident when the child cannot
find Mr. Utsui. The child, in her search, sees how white and black children
fight each other and, once she is detected, the white children’s attention is
diverted from the blacks to her as the “new” enemy which they associate
with a kamikaze. Interestingly, the kamikaze, in turn, is associated with
madness projected onto a racialized body (as made patent by the “slant eyes”
in stanza 11). For the allied forces, the Japanese Special Attack Forces
(Tokkōtai), better known as kamikaze, was a clear evidence of the inherent,
fanatical insanity of the Japanese in their blind loyalty to authority (Dower
22). In the war years this imagery was connected to that of the samurai code
(bushidō), which, certainly in Western eyes, was strongly based on the
concepts of duty, honor and loyalty to the point of willing to die for one’s
lord (Hurst). It should be noted, as G. Cameron Hurst III argues in “Death,
Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal” (1990), that actually the
conventional image of the Japanese warrior willing to commit “suicide
readily, either to atone for a crime, to follow his lord in death, or to accept
responsibility for some error” (520) derives from anachronistic accounts of
the samurai ideals, such as Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure from the Edo
(Tokugawa) period (1600-1868). He also mentions that other writers, such as
Yamaga Sokō (1622-1685),
and other Confucian samurai moralists agreed with Tsunemoto that the samurai
owed unflinching loyalty to his lord, but recklessly throwing away one’s life and
contemplating ritual suicide to follow the lord in death were considered totally in
opposition to the values of the “Way” which they talked about incessantly. (524)
Moreover, Hurst underlines that ritual suicide by seppuku (that is,

disembowelment) “was essentially a form of punishment under Tokugawa
law. A daimyō suspected of disloyalty to the shogun could be forced to
commit suicide, for example, as could a lesser samurai for breaking the law.
It was far more likely to be a sentence imposed upon one rather than a willful
act to demonstrate one’s nobility, honor, or loyalty, although they were of
course such instances” (522).
Once again, in “Kamikaze on a Clothesline” Mirikitani dexterously turns
upside down the stereotypical image of the kamizake/samurai in the
representation of its central character. The old man appears with his samurai
sword as if a hero from a traditional Japanese folktale. Thus, he manages to
fulfill the role of a father figure, providing protection, comfort and food to a
five-year-old (stanzas 14 and 15). Moreover, the presumed madness
connected with the kamikaze/samurai stereotype is undermined as from
stanza 17 to the end of the piece: when Mr. Utsui learns about his son’s death
fighting on behalf of the United States while he was incarcerated, he takes
his samurai sword and tears to pieces the barbed wire. At this point,
Mirikitani reveals the stark contrast between the guards reading of Mr.
Utsui’s outer body (“They just laughed and called him / crazy like the
kamikaze”) and its interior, the old man’s emotional devastation.
It should also be noted the subtlety with which the poet describes the
perpetuation of discourses that read the Other’s body: Mr. Utsui is identified
with the enemy⎯the kamikaze⎯by the guards, in the same manner that the
white children also identify the five-year-old “American Japanese” (l. 98)
child with suicidal Japanese pilots.10 Racializing and dehumanizing the
Other’s body has effects on different aspects of life, from the political level,
resulting in the incarceration of U.S. citizens, to the domestic, as represented
by tormenting a child by hanging her in a clothesline.
Mirikitani, however, gains agency through her poetry since it is an act, to
use Lisa Lowe’s terminology, of “resistance, memory and survival, as well as
the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and
disidentification” (9). Mirikitani’s writing clearly fulfills these goals,
demonstrating how “the Asian American body is a historical product, and the
condensation of culture and history in the Asian American body makes it a
critical place to conduct an inquiry into the formation of Asian America”
(Nguyen 17).
Notes
1
The FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had submitted a report in February 1942 in which he
stated that “the proposed mass evacuation of the Japanese” advocated by the high
authorities of the War Department “could not be justified for security reasons” (qtd. in
Takaki 386).
2
As Michi Nishiura Weglyn explains in her seminal work Years of Infamy: The Untold
Story of America’s Concentration Camps, first published in 1976, Tule Lake eventually
became a “resegregation center.” “Its maximum-security paraphernalia included a half-
dozen tanks patrolling its outer parameter and a guard contingent all campaign-equipped
troops at full battalion strength” (156). Once internment had been completed, internees
were to answer and sign the loyalty questionnaire as a means, according to the official
discourse, of identifying subversive elements within the Japanese American community.
In fact, the questionnaire had two main goals: to establish who could be resettled outside
the restricted military areas (e.g. the U.S. West coast) from which Japanese and Japanese
Americans had been forced to evacuate, and to register nisei (second generation
individuals)⎯American born and thus citizens⎯for draft. Questions 27 and 28 were the
most controversial:
Question 27: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States
on combat duty, wherever ordered?”
Question 28: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of
America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by
foreign domestic forces, and foreswear any form of allegiance or obedience to
the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or
organization?”
A number of those who answered “no” to both questions did so as a means of protest since
as interned U.S. citizens their constitutional rights had been breached by the state itself.
These became known as the “no-no boys” and were sent to Tule Lake, together with those
others who had applied for repatriation or expatriation. That is, the center was identified
with those “evacuees believed to be disloyal” (Weglyn 157). However, and as explained
above, in the (literary) imaginary of the Japanese American community, Tule Lake
became a symbol of resistance.
3
This is clearly manifested in “We, the Dangerous,” also published in the volume Awake in
the River:
I swore
it would not devour me
I swore
it would not humble me
I swore
it would not break me.
And they commanded we dwell in the desert

Our children be spawn of barbed wire and barracks
We, closer to the earth,

squat, short thighed,
knowing the dust better.
And they would have us make the garden

Rake the grass to soothe their feet
We, akin to the jungle,

plotting with the snake,
tails shedding in civilized America.
And they would have us skin their fish

Deft hands like blades / sliding back flesh / bloodless
We, who awake in the river

Ocean’s child
Whale eater.
And they would have us strange scented women,

Round shouldered / strong and yellow / like the moon
to pull the thread to the cloth
to loosen their backs massaged in myth
We, who fill the secret bed,

the sweat shops
the launderies.
And they would have us dress in napalm,

Skin shred to clothe the earth,
Bodies filling pock marked fields.
Dead fish bloating our harbors.
We, the dangerous,

Dwelling in the ocean.
Akin to the jungle.
Close to the earth.
Hiroshima
Vietnam
Tule Lake.
And yet we were not devoured.

And yet we were not humbled.
And yet we are not broken.
In this poem, Mirikitani clearly establishes connections between personal history and that
of communities undergoing similar experiences of discrimination as a result of being
denied those rights ascribed to citizenship rather than nationality. This is reflected by
moving from the singular personal pronoun in the first line—“I swore it would not devour
me”— to the plural along the poem: “We, closer to the earth,” “We, akin to the jungle,”
“We, who awake in the river,” “We, who fill the secret bed,”, etc. It ends in a three-line
stanza, emphasizing the affiliation of various peoples as a result of the socio-political and
cultural construction of the “Other” Asian / Asian American, thus providing an image of
resilience and, ultimately, resistance reinforced by the use of the present tense in the last
line:
And yet we were not devoured.

And yet we were not humbled
And yet we are not broken.
Mirikitani’s poetry goes beyond decrying the injustices committed to the Japanese
American community: she deftly foregrounds the ideological apparatuses sustaining the
discriminatory practices against minority groups at large. The result of drawing lines
between the abject and the subject according to the ethno-racial paradigm has practical
consequences. Dehumanizing and brutalizing the racial Other’s body is a process which,
ironically, reveals the fear of mainstream America. The process here is by belittling the
supposed enemy—once incarcerated—who “spawn” their children in the internment
camps. This Other, however, is “akin to the jungle,” dexterous in using the knife, although
apparently servile and submissive as a China Doll or a Geisha girl, his/her labor a key
factor for providing pleasure and comfort to large sections of the U.S population. The
Oriental Other is, at the most, in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s terms, the “Ambivalent
American,” both an insider and outsider who at any moment can become the enemy at
home. Thereof, Hiroshima, Vietnam, or Tule Lake.
4
Christina Klein in Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961
explains succinctly how Asian Americanness was racialized and, consequently, un-
Americanized via immigration and naturalization laws:
Congress passed the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, restricted Japanese
immigration in 1907 with the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement, and created
the Asiatic Barred Zone, which prohibited immigration from South Asian and
the Pacific Islands, in 1917. The 1924 National Origins act sealed off virtually
all immigration from Asia, while the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 closed the
last loophole that had allowed immigration from the Philippines, which was
still a U.S. colony. Restrictions on the naturalization of Asians already in the
U.S. followed a similar trajectory, beginning in 1870 with the Chinese and
culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1923 ruling that the “free white persons”
criterion for naturalization categorically excluded all Asians. Collectively, these
laws established the meaning of Asianness as foreign, as unassimilable, as
“alien.” (224)
It was not until the 1940s that legislative reform allowed Asian immigrants to naturalize.
However, it was not until 1952, with the McCarran-Walter Act that all Asian immigrants
were eligible for U.S. citizenship.
5
As Lisa Lowe explains, “The Alien Land Laws of 1913, 1920, and 1923 prohibited Asian
immigrants from owning land and other forms of property through the legal construction
of nonwhites as ‘aliens ineligible to citizenship’” (13).
6
Nguyen, drawing from Jinqi Ling’s argument, points out that “emasculation” and
“feminization” should not be used as synonymous⎯as tends to be the case in Asian
American criticism. Quoting Ling, “‘Emasculation’ more fully suggests the overall social
consequence of the displacement of Asian men’s subject position, whereas ‘feminization’
constitutes but one specific form of Asian men’s racial gendering in America” (qtd. in
Nguyen 314).
7
The threatening image of Asians as faceless is related to fears of hordes of Asians
invading the country, particularly via (predominantly Chinese) immigration in the West
coast, a fear enhanced by the rising power and influence of Japan in the Pacific basin at
the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. As John W. Dower explains, “the vision
of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not
from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous
sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color” (156).
8
This image, in turn, links up with those stereotypical representations of Asian men,
especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, performing tasks
associated with femininity. According to Robert G. Lee, “Between 1860 and 1882,
thousands of Chinese workers who had been dismissed as railroad builders and driven
from the mines and farms took up independent employment in service industries as
launderers, tailors, and restaurateurs, or worked for wages as domestics and cooks” (94).
This enhanced the imagery of Chinese and Asian in general as effeminate, reinforced by
the fact that Chinatowns were inhabited mostly by men (as a result of immigration laws
forbidding the entrance of Asian women via the 1870 Page Act).
9
The process of emasculation of issei men was enhanced in the concentration camps where,
as head of families, they no longer had control of the situation, any of them feeling
incapable of conveying any sense of dignity and of maintaining family ties. This was
clearly reflected in the fact that, as Ronald Takaki explains, “families no longer sat down
to eat together. The internees ate at long tables in large mess halls, and parents often sat at
separate tables from their children, especially the teenagers” (396).
10
Mirikitani changes the order of the words to denominate Americans of Japanese
ascendency by highlighting first of all their Americanness.
Bibliography
Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986.
Geok-lin Lim, Shirley. “The Ambivalent American: Asian American Literature on the Cusp.”
Reading the Literature of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. 1995. New York: Basic
Books, 2005.
Hurst III, G. Cameron. “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal.” Philosophy East and
West 40.4 (October 1990): 511-527.
Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961.
Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003.
Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. 1996. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1999.
Mirikitani, Janice. Awake in the River: Poetry and Prose. San Francisco: Isthmus, 1978.
———. Love Works. San Francisco: City Lights Foundation, 2001.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York
and London: Penguin, 1989.
Weglyn, Michi Nishiura. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration
Camps. 1976. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003.
CHAPTER 9
Contemporary Terrorist Bodies: The (De-)
Construction of Arab Masculinities in the United
States
Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias
Mrs. Garrison: Eric, that’s enough! Not all Muslim
people are terrorists!
Eric Cartman: No, but most of them are. And all it
takes is most of them.1
The Emmy Award-winning series South Park satirizes ethnic vilification in

the episode entitled “The Snuke,” which traces the history of the libeling of
peoples from other nations in relation to America’s foreign affairs. The
episode starts with the terrorist warning of a bomb placed inside Hillary
Clinton. The intolerant and xenophobic Eric Cartman immediately relates the
threat to the new Arab American kid in school, and makes the CIA follow
that lead. The CIA’s investigations, however, point towards Russian
terrorists, only to end up concluding that the group behind the attack were the
English, who wanted to reconquer the North American territory. With this
episode, South Park creators and writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone point to
the absurdity of America’s vilification of other nations, and highlight libeling
as a recurring trait of America’s history. Through the bigot Cartman, they
also emphasize the visibilization of those who look Arab, Muslim or Middle
Eastern as the ultimate Other to American identity in the 21st century.
As the episode suggests, the history of the United States has been
founded on racialized structures, on processes of discursive production of
racial identities. From the white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant colonization of
North-America in the 17th and 18th centuries, with its callous disregard
towards the natives, and the perpetuation of slavery throughout the 19th
century, the United States have historically established a systematic
devaluation of races other than white. Hierarchical racialized structures have
been embedded in American history since its very beginning. Steven Salaita
sees racism as stemming from the beginning of U.S. history and argues that
“We are better served looking at that racism as a continuum with roots in
settler colonialism” (157). Phenotypically different bodies have encountered

one another since the creation of the United States, and these ethnicized
minorities have been treated differently from the white mainstream majority
ever since. The present article shall explore the process of visibilization that
Arab American bodies have gone through in the United States, from
invisibility to hypervisibility, and the importance of 9/11 in this respect. The
historical vilification of Arabs in America will also be traced and contrasted
to the work done in post-9/11 filmic and written texts denouncing the
discrimination of Arabs in the U.S.
The Racialization of Arabs in the United States: From Invisibility to

Visibilization
Racial, geographical, phenotypic, religious, and even sartorial traits
conflate in the West’s view of Arab Americans, an ethnic group which is
erroneously equated with Muslim Americans or Middle Eastern Americans.
Despite the fusion of the words Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern in the
minds of the mainstream, that equation could not be further from the truth.
The Middle East refers to the specific geographical site, leaving out Muslims
and Arabs that do not live in that area, such as people from the Maghreb.
Muslim American is related to religion, that is, a faith that may be followed
by people from different geographical areas and different phenotypes.
Actually, in the case of the United States, most Muslims are not Arabs: only
one quarter is, while another quarter is African American, and another South
Asian.2 The term Arab, on the other hand, refers to the Arabic-speaking
peoples, people coming from the 21 countries that speak Arabic, located in
the Middle East and North Africa.3 All these distinct concepts are often used
interchangeably by mainstream discourses, so that images of Arabs, Middle
Easterners, and Muslims are commonly equated in the West. As Amira
Jarmakani puts it, there has been a “conflation and confusion of ethnic
(Arab), religious (Muslim), and geographic (Middle Eastern) markers that
construct Arabs/Muslims/Middle Easterners as a group in the United States”
(897). Throughout this chapter, I will be using mostly the terms Arab and
Arab American because, despite the disparity of origins, religions and skin
colors, Arab Americans have united since the 1970s as an established ethnic
minority in the United States in an attempt to fight against discrimination and
racism on the ground of their common language.4
Contemporary Terrorist Bodies 165
In the same way that the terms Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern have
commonly been considered identical categories, different bodily images also
conflate and traditionally come to the Western mind when thinking about
Arabs. On the one hand, Arab women are seen as either covered, submissive
daughters and wives, or as exotic belly dancers. On the other hand, Arab men
have been stereotyped as dark, hairy, and visually Muslim (with headscarfs,
known as ghutrah or kuffiyeh, or traditional dressing). As Jarmakani puts it:
Though some phenotypical characteristics, like dark skin or a long beard, certainly
play a role in racializing Arabs and Muslims in the United States, one must also take
“bodies” to include notions of bodies that understand their embodiment to be shaped
by racially marked, habitually worn sartorial items (like a hijab or turban) as well as
habitually performed movements (like salaat, the Muslim practice of praying five
times a day). (902-903)
Often, this imagery associated with Arab men’s bodies is hypermasculine

(linking darkness, facial hair, and Islam to violence, patriarchy and
fanaticism), which is in stark contrast to their emasculation in terms of
inferiority and inefficiency (seeing Arab men as barbarian and
dehumanized). As Michael Pickering has argued, depictions of the Arab
world are full of “corrupt and irrational despotism, fanatic religiosity, exotic
mysticism, teeming markets and dreamy harems, sexually predatory and
instable men” (148). Mohja Kahf appeals to these stereotypes of the Arab
male body in her poem “I Can Scent an Arab Man a Mile Away” (1992).
From its very title, Kahf’s irony is at play, referring to the supposed dirtiness
and, thus, inferiority, of Arab men. The poem continues alluding to the looks
traditionally associated with Arab masculinity, referring to “My stubbly-
chinned, / black-haired, tawny-skinned / Arab male kin” (29), so that
darkness, hairiness, and traditional clothes are emphasized. Taking these
stereotypes and restating them, Kahf finishes by asserting her love for Arab
men: “They may be / mustachio’d, macho, patriarchal, / sexist, egoistical,
parochial – / They may, as men may, / think themselves indomitable, / being
easily manipulable, / - but they’re mine, my / sleek and swarthy, hairy-
chested, / curly-headed lovers of the Prophet” (29). Mohja Kahf is using the
mainstream perception of Arab and Muslim men’s bodies as a way to contest
this very depiction. The last verse of the poem is remarkable in this respect as
well. Reminding us of the traditional image of the Arab man wearing a
headscarf, she finishes her poem with “(God, they look so sexy in those
checkered scarves)” (30).
These Western stereotypes about the East, inherited from European
Orientalist views of the Arab world, gained relevance in the United States in
the mid-20th century. Michael Pickering has coined the term U.S.
Orientalism to explore the particular attitude of the United States in relation
to North Africa and the Middle East. Pickering notes that U.S. Orientalism
developed with the rise of U.S. neo-colonialism in the Middle East, and
argues that stereotypes began to appear when the United States started to
have strategic interest in the Orient. When America’s foreign policies made
Arabs visible to the nation, they also started to become stereotyped. One of
the historical reasons for the emergence of U.S. Orientalism has been said to
be the inheritance of British colonial history in the Middle East, since
Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt were British colonies, a fact which ensued
conflicts such as the Suez crisis of 1956,5 or the Arab-Israeli conflict, with
the British imposition of the state of Israel in Palestinan territory.6
Hence, a racialization of Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern bodies was
ignited by mid-20th century conflicts, contributing to the negative image of
Arabs in the United States, and making them encompass the array of
characteristics mentioned above. This racial categorization of Arabs, Middle
Easterners, and Muslims pervades the Western mind and is at the root of the
racism against these groups, a racism based on phenotype, that is, based on
the view of Arabs as dark-skinned. However, in spite of this common
thought, the phenotypic variation of Arabs allows them to be placed in what
Louise Cainkar has termed “racial liminality” (48). Arabic speakers can be
related to a myriad of ethnicities, ranging from dark to white skin, allowing
some to actually pass as white.7 The stereotypical categorization of Arabs as
dark also contrasts with their official classification by the American
government. Officially, the United States Federal Government classifies
Arabs as white, providing the following definition: “White. A person having
origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North
Africa.”8 This official classification reinforces, on the one hand, the idea that
Arabs can be considered white, but, on the other, it invisibilizes Arabs as an
American minority that may need special help against racism. In other words,
in denying a racial status to people of Arab descent, the government also
hinders the possibility of their organizing as a group against discrimination,
besides making them ineligible for minority protection programs.
Furthermore, this classification entails a blatant paradox: being officially

considered white, Arabs have also traditionally been perceived as dark; so, as
Nadine Naber claims, “Arab Americans are racially white, but not quite”
(50). The issue of Arab ancestry or race in relation to the Census has been
prominent in Arab American scholarly debates. Arabs were not allowed to
acknowledge their ancestry in the Census until the year 2000.9 While the
ancestry question has finally been raised in the new millennium, this has not
solved the fact that, under race, Arabs still have to choose between “White”
or “Other. The racial invisibility that the government makes them undergo
contrasts, however, with their increasing visibility in society. As Keith
Feldman puts it, “Advocates for a revision of the US Census claimed that
Arab bodies had become politically invisible when classified as white, yet all
too visible in the national imaginary” (33). This concern has indeed been
voiced in Arab American literature by Laila Halaby in her poem “Browner
Shades of White,” which starts by making reference to the invisibility of
Arabs in the Census, and then continues referring to the actual minority
status of Arabs in the United States, in relation to both class and
stereotyping:
Under race/ethnic origin

I check white
I am not
a minority
on their checklists
and they erase me
with the red end
of a number
two pencil.
I go to school
quite poor
because I am white.
There is no
square to check
that I have no
camels in my backyard,
that my father does
not have eight wives
inside the tents
of his harem
or his palace
or the island
he bought
with his oil

money. (Kadi 204)
Halaby thus expounds on the racial liminality of Arabs in the United States,
first referring to their official invisibility in the Census, and then contrasting
it with a number of stereotypes about Arab men and women which place
them as backward, at the same time as it relates them to power or control
over petroleum resources. In the poem, as in contemporary America, the
abundance of stereotypes clashes with the difficulty of acknowledging Arabs
as a race.
Nonetheless, there is no question that Arabs have been racialized (that is,
seen as a race other than white) by Americans since the beginning of their
immigration to the United States. As Amira Jarmakani puts it, “race has
functioned as a submerged logic in the construction of Arab Americans in
particular since the first wave of immigration in the late 1800s” (901), that is,
from the first time Arabs landed on American shores. Indeed, the first wave
of Arab American immigration took place from the 1880s to the 1940s.10
Those first Arab immigrants came mostly from the Syrian province of the
Ottoman Empire, which contained what nowadays are Syria, Lebanon, Israel,
Palestine, Jordan, part of present Turkey, and part of present Iraq. The first
Arab immigrants to be recorded arrived in the United States in 1854,
although they did not gain a separate classification as Syrian until 1899.
However, to become American citizens, they had to become naturalized. The
problem was that since the beginning of their immigration and up until 1952,
U.S. Federal law provided naturalization to whites and blacks but not to in-
between races or skin colors (Tehranian 14). Thus, people of Arab descent
needed to claim whiteness as a way to become American citizens. The
naturalization trials were the means by which new immigrants were to
become citizens of the United States. The results of the trials that Arabs went
through at the beginning of the 20th century were mixed: Arabs were
sometimes considered white, but often not. As John Tehranian explains in his
book Whitewashed: America's Invisible Middle Eastern Minority, one of the
first reasons adduced for the naturalization of Arabs was their belonging to
the Caucasian race (20). The term “Caucasian” had been coined by Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach in his treatise On the Natural Variety of Mankind
(1775), where he defined it as referring to “the inhabitants of Europe, the
Middle East..., and North Africa” (Tehranian 20). Thus, Arabs would
inevitably pertain to this category. This was one allegedly scientific reason
given for their naturalization, but according to Tehranian, in those trials,
greater importance was given to assimilatory criteria than to scientific fact.
“Taken together,” Tehranian concludes, “the racial-prerequisite cases
highlight the centrality of performative criteria in the race-making process”
(39). A few examples from cases that denied or accepted the categorization
of whiteness to Arabs shall help illustrate this last point. For instance, in the
cases In re Najour (1909) and In re Ellis (1910), both applicants were
granted naturalization on the ground of whiteness. On the one hand, Najour
was considered Caucasian and, thus, white. On the other, Ellis was deemed
white because of his demonstrated assimilability into American society on
the grounds of “religious practices, educational attainment, marital patterns,
and wealth accumulation” (Tehranian 46). However, in other instances,
Arabs were denied naturalization. In cases such as Ex parte Dow (1914) or In
re Hassan (1924), common knowledge and concerns about assimilability
made them be considered other that white. Dow’s case was rejected with the
argument that Arabs could not be considered Caucasian because they had not
traditionally been considered white. Hassan’s case was denied on the grounds
of skin color, religion, and assimilability.11 As the judge said:
Apart from the dark skin of the Arabs, it is well known that they are a part of the
Mohammedan world and that a wide gulf separates their culture from that of the
predominately Christian peoples of Europe. It cannot be expected that as a class they
would readily intermarry with our population and be assimilated into our
civilization. (Tehranian 58)
Thus, the whiteness of Arabs in the U.S. at the beginning of their

immigration was accepted or denied basically because of projected
assimilability. The naturalization trials of the beginning of the 20th century
put to the fore the liminality and constructed nature of the concept of race
when referring to Arabs. According to Tehranian, “assimilationist policy
considerations dominated the jurisprudence of whiteness, leading courts to
dole out white status on the basis of how effectively Middle Easterners
‘performed’ whiteness” (61).12 Thus, Arabs’ attempts to pass as white from
the beginning of their immigration took the form of assimilation, particularly
in this first wave. At that time, Arabs were not seen as a danger. As Helen
Samhan puts it:
North American nativists of the early twentieth century did not perceive the
‘Syrians’ to be a significant threat compared to other immigrants because they were
small in number and dispersed, and because their involvement with peddling was
not particularly threatening to whites who resented the competition of immigrant
labour. (3)
In that first wave of immigration, “performing” whiteness was easier because

most of the immigrants were Christian. Based on religion, the performance of
normativity became more feasible.13 In other words, their religion also helped
them in their assimilation. Actually, they found it easier to be accepted as
white at the beginning of the 20th century than they have ever since, because
while in the first wave of immigration most Arabs were Christian,14 the
second wave brought a majority of Muslims. The second wave of
immigration did actually start after the Second World War, after Israel had
become a new state, and after the new Arab nations had started becoming
independent. Most of the immigrants at that time were looking for college
education in the United States, so they first migrated with student visas and
then stayed for work. Moreover, with the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965 Arab professionals were allowed to migrate legally to the United States.
The better education and better financial position of these immigrants helped
their upward mobility. However, their assimilation became more difficult
because of their religion. In the second wave, 60% of the Arab immigrants
were Muslim, in contrast with the 90% of Christians of the first wave.15 After
the second wave of immigration, the ethnic differences of this group became
more visible due to their religion (with its subsequent dress code and
customs), making Arabs become a visual Other, particularly since the second
half of the 20th century. As Amira Jarmakani puts it, there has been an
“increasing racialization of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans since at
least the 1965 Immigration Act” (897). Following the aforementioned logic
that relates assimilation with normativization, performance, and passing as
white, the visualization of difference due to religion made Arabs be
considered by the mainstream as racially different, that is, as a racial Other.
Arabs were racialized particularly since their second wave of immigration
because, above all, of the vilifying view of Islam in the West. As Nadine
Naber puts it, “Arab Americans become racially marked on the assumption
that all Arabs are Muslim and that Islam is a cruel, backward, uncivilized
religion” (52). Because of the visible influence of Muslim religion on the
newly arrived Arab corporealities, there has been a discursive reproduction
of these bodies as marked by race. As Tehranian explains, “As it has grown

less Christian, the Middle Eastern population in the United States is thought
of as less assimilable and, consequently, less white” (70).
(De-)Constructing Arab Masculinity in the Cinema

The media in general, and the film industry in particular, have helped to
(re)produce Arab bodies as racially marked, and thus have contributed to the
homogenization of Arabs under a fixed image. Edward Said already exposed
the stereotypes encountered in the media in his seminal Orientalism (1978).
As he put it,
In the films and television, the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty
dishonesty. He appears as an oversexed degenerate, capable, it is true, of cleverly
devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous, low. Slave trader, camel
driver, moneychanger, colorful scoundrel: these are some traditional Arab roles in
the cinema. (286-7)
These images can be summarized through a paradoxical contradiction: Arab

men have been represented in the cinema, as in real life, both as hyper-sexual
(that is, lecherous, but also violent, related to fanaticism), while at the same
time they have been emasculated and presented as inferior, particularly as
inefficient and/or barbarian. The Arab American scholar Jack Shaheen has
traced the reproduction of these images in the cinema historically. In his
book Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture (1997),
Shaheen explains that in the early 1890s images of Arab men killing one
another, that is, represented as violent, had already appeared. Then, in the
1920s the image of the sheikh emerged, and was followed from the 1930s to
the 1950s by caricatures or threatening portrayals. In the 1970s and 1980s,
depictions of the oil sheiks appeared as a consequence of the 1973 oil crisis.
This last fact is also highlighted by John C. Eisele in his article “The Wild
East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern,”
where he emphasizes the appearance of a “terrorist subgenre” in the 1970s.
The 20th century fed on all these images, leaving portrayals of Arab men as
violent, deceitful, inefficient, barbaric, and exotic, as can be seen in films
such as Jewel of the Nile (1985), Back to the Future (1985), True Lies
(1994), Executive Decision (1996), The Mummy (1999), Rules of
Engagement (2000), and even Disney films like Aladdin (1992), amongst
others.16
The 20th century was thus replete with negative images of Arabs or
Muslims that contrasted with an otherwise blatant invisibility. The beginning
of the 21st century was marked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, so
that one might have thought that the negative depiction of Arabs on film
would intensify at that point. Nevertheless, my contention is that this has not
been so. On the contrary, I believe that because of a fear of a vilification of
Arabs by the media, there has been an effort in the movie industry to
counteract this negative imagery, so that positive accounts of Arab and Arab
American masculinities have been abundant since September 11, 2001. As
Jack Shaheen posits in his book Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after
9/11, “Even though the majority of post-9/11 films do, in fact, vilify a
people, I am somewhat encouraged to report that since 9/11, silver screens
have displayed, at times, more complex, evenhanded Arab portraits than I
have seen in the past” (35). A comprehensive account of these portrayals
would be beyond the scope of this article, but I would like to share some of
the depictions that I have recently come across and find particularly
interesting in this respect.17 In what follows, then, I will be drawing on recent
films such as The Visitor (2007) and Nothing is Private (2007), which seem
to provide, as we shall see, a post-9/11 audience with a portrayal of men of
Arab origin that largely moves away from the traditional stereotypes.
In The Visitor (2007), for example, a middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon
college professor called Walter is unsettled by his encounter with a Syrian
immigrant, who enables him to regain happiness in his life. Walter, a
widower, lives and teaches in Connecticut, but owns a condominium in New
York City, which he hardly visits. Because of a conference, he has to go
there, and finds a couple made up of a Syrian man, Tarek, and a Senegalese
woman, Zainab, to whom the apartment has been illegally sublet. Walter’s
grey, sad and lonely life, clearly symbolized by his rigid body posture,
change after his encounter with Tarek. Moving away from rigidity
(encapsulated in the classical music and the piano that he is learning to play),
Walter learns from Tarek about world music, and learns to play the djembe.
Tarek and his music teach Walter how to relax his body, to relieve his
tensions. As a consequence, Walter moves away from his individuality
(epitomized by the lonely activity of piano playing), and learns the
importance of relating to other people (illustrated through the drum circles in
which he ends up playing). A man of Arab origin is the one who enables
Walter’s change, thus providing a totally alternative portrayal of Arab
manhood as open, relational, and non-hierarchical, an Arab manhood from

which the hegemonic, Western, individualistic man can learn. The Arab
body, in this case, is the one that enables a positive change in the mainstream
body. Furthermore, it must be noted that the body of Tarek in the film not
only moves away from traditional depictions of Arab men, as regards both
his attitude and the (positive) outcome of his interaction with a white man,
but his appearance also departs from stereotypical depictions: he is presented
as a clean-shaven and fit young man, not very dark, and with no sign of
religiousness, thus counteracting the pervasive imagery of Arab men as dark,
hairy, and covered with a headscarf. However, despite this apparent deviation
from a traditional view of Arab phenotype and religion, in the midst of post-
9/11 immigration scrutiny, Tarek ends up being deported. Thus, the film also
leaves the viewer with a denunciation of post-9/11 immigration policies.
The main male character in Nothing is Private (2007), on the other hand,
is not as positive as Tarek, but, at the end, undergoes a change which points
towards an alternative type of masculinity as well. The film is based on the
novel Towelhead (2005), written by Alicia Erian, and recounts the life of
Jasira, a young teenage Arab American girl, as she moves in with her
Lebanese father. Rifat is represented in the film as a not very dark man who
wears a moustache. The moustache has been a common element
stereotypically characterizing Arab men, so that Rifat’s moustache situates
him as a traditional Arab father embodying a strict moral code.18 However,
the fact that the moustache differs from the most traditional Islamic facial
hair (moustache and beard) places Rifat, a man that shows no signs of
religiosity, as sometimes deviating from Arab or Islamic ethics. This
masculinity, situated between Arab tradition and Western conceptions of
manhood, is a consequence of Rifat’s Arab American identity and the
Lebanese heritage that he needs to negotiate in the United States. For
instance, he places an American flag in his yard as the First Gulf War starts
in order to avoid retaliation from the neighbors. To assert his Americanness,
he uses the flag as a prop for his assimilation. The First Gulf War, in this
case, acts as a parallel to 9/11 and the subsequent war on Afghanistan,
although, rather than delving into the effects of the war in the characters, the
novel revolves around the construction of Rifat’s Arab American manhood.
At the beginning, he feels very uneasy towards the development of Jasira’s
sexuality and is, thus, very strict with her, enacting a kind of seemingly
traditional Arab masculinity. However, Rifat’s masculinity is very

ambivalent: he is very vigilant with his daughter (he doesn’t even allow her
to befriend boys), while, at the same time, he also disregards her and spends
nights at his girlfriend’s house, leaving Jasira at home all alone.19 It is on one
of those nights that the neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, molests Jasira, but asks her not
to tell anyone. After that, the situation between Jasira and Rifat becomes
unbearable, he hits her, and subsequently Jasira moves in with a neighboring
couple, Melina and Gil. In a visit to their house, Rifat finds out about Mr.
Vuoso’s abuse of his daughter, and this marks a turning point in the
relationship between father and daughter. Rifat’s relationship with his
daughter undergoes a radical change, just as his vulnerability is also made
evident. He becomes much more emotional and caring, and tries to establish
a higher degree of communication with Jasira. At the very end of the movie,
Melina is in labor, and as she has her baby, Rifat cries and hugs his daughter.
The film ends with this image, making the audience believe that the new
baby that is brought to life at the end of the film also points to a new life for
both Jasira and her father. A life that will, hopefully, entail a change in
Rifat’s understanding of masculinity, and a new relationship with his
daughter, less constricting, more nurturing, and based on dialogue and care.
These cinematic Arab male characters put forward, to a greater or lesser
extent, alternative portrayals of Arab manhood. They provide a 20th-century
audience accustomed to vilifying depictions of Arab men with new
alternative images. These new Arab masculinities move away from violence,
constriction, strict gender roles, and hierarchy, and point to more nurturing,
relational, peaceful, open and caring models of manhood.
Deconstructing the Arab Terrorist Archetype in post-9/11 Arab

American Literature
Movies such as The Visitor and Nothing is Private point, as has been seen, to
a change in the representation of the Arab body in contemporary cinema. An
effort has also been made in literature written by Arab American writers to
counteract the effects of 9/11 on the stereotyping of Arabs, questioning the
pervasive association of Arab bodies with terrorism.
Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Crescent (2004) revolves around the love story
between the protagonist, Sirine, a second-generation Iraqi American chef,
and a recently arrived Iraqi professor, Hanif (Han), the main male character.
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Thermopylae,” The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/117424/300
(Accessed January 2012).
Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New
York: Alfred Knopf, 2003.
Cartagena-Calderón, José. “Saint Sebastian and the Cult of the Flesh: The Making of a Queer
Saint in Early Modern Spain.” Queering Iberia: Iberian Masculinities at the Margins.
Ed. Josep M. Armengol. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 7-44.
Ebert, Roger (4 August 2008) “300: Going Back to Review One I Missed,” The Sunday Times,
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080804/REVIEWS/506949713/
1023 (Accessed January 2012).
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown,
1991.
Gil-Calvo, Enrique. Máscaras masculinas: Héroes, patriarcas y monstruos. Barcelona:
Anagrama, 2006.
Gill, Rosalind (September 2009) “Lad Lit as Mediated Intimacy: A Postfeminist Tale of
Female Power, Male Vulnerability and Toast.” Working Papers on the Web:
Monographic Issue on Chick Lit, edited by Sarah Gormley and Sara Mills. Volume 13,
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/chicklit/gill.html (Accessed January 2012)
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www.parstimes.com/ history/ herodotus/ persian_wars/ polymnia.html (Accessed
January 2012)
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
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(Accessed January 2012)
Pateman, Carole. “The Fraternal Social Contract.” The Masculinity Studies Reader. Eds.
Rachel Adams and David Savran. London: Blackwell, 2002. 119-134.
Seidler, Victor J. Transforming Masculinities: Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power, Sex and Love.
London: Routledge, 2006.
Smith, Jeremy. “300.” Creative Screenwriting 14.2 (March-April 2007): 28-29.
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theory/ Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html (Accessed January 2012).
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema, London and
New York: Routledge, 1993.
X, Areehman (March 9, 2007) “300 Spartans, The Real Story! A Historically Accurate
Review on 300, The Movie.” Iran Politics Club, http:// iranpoliticsclub.net/ history/ 300/
(Accessed January 2012).
was esoteric⎯art elevated above life⎯rarefied and inaccessible. I wanted to

redefine poetry as a means to connect with others, and to make poetry a bridge,
spanning communities, ethnicities, continents. For me, poetry should be accessible,
connecting our human experiences, steeped in the struggles that define us. Poetry
gives form to the power of the imagination and speaks as to the conscience of life…
Poetry is timeless, reaching through generations, across continents to my great-
ancestors buried in ashes in Hiroshima, and to my grandmother in an Amache Gate
Internment Camp. Poetry weeps in circles of famine in Rwanda and in circles of
Argentine mothers of the disappeared. (9-10)
Mirikitani’s poetry travels along time and space. Her work sings the past of
her family and community⎯a global community⎯pointing at the futility of
attempting to become a model citizen where racism is concerned, even for
Asian Americans who, traditionally and stereotypically, have been depicted
as the “model minority.” The model minority myth claims that successful
assimilation⎯and consequently, the practical benefits of citizenship⎯is
attainable if one complies with the principles and values of the Republic.
Ironically, Asian immigrants and Americans of Asian descent have been
accused of being “too diligent”⎯a trait ascribed to the ideal of the self-made
American (usually) male subject. The accusation underlines, on the one hand,
the ideological fallacy sustaining such a myth and, on the other, the fact that
Asian Americans are Americans precisely for adhering to American ideals.
Although the “model minority” stereotype emerged with strength in the
decade of the 1960s, its principles were very much linked to early Asian
immigration, particularly Japanese. The internment experience shattered the
belief that the same principles were to be applied to all citizens of the
Republic. Mirikitani expresses this in her early poetry, especially the one
dedicated to the women of her family. This early work does include poems
concerned with the psychological devastation of these experiences on men,
which is expressed through their bodies. As Viet Thanh Nguyen points out,
Asian American literature has shown a “deep concern with representing the
Asian American body” (iv) since their representations
collectively constitute the most consistent form of political consciousness in the

literature. They are commentaries upon the troubled place of Asian Americans in the
American body politics and upon the nature of an Asian American body politic as
well. For Asian American writers, a deep interest in representing the body, through a
variety of fashions and over a range of time and situations, is almost always evident
in the literature. This is not surprising given the way that dominant American
society has historically used derogatory, bodily centered representations of Asians
and Asian Americans in order to facilitate capitalist exploitation and foment racial
hatred. Asian American writers, as a result, have turned to the representation of the
body as a method for exploring and possible countering the consequences of such
exploitation and hatred. Their literature contains a history of representations of the
body that develops in relation to the changing status of the Asian American body
politic in the United States during the past century. As this status changes, so do the
representations of the body, resulting in the domination of particular kinds of bodies
in the literature at different historical moments. (6)
As Nguyen underlines, these representations establish parallelisms between

the micro (personal histories) and macro (socio-political) levels of the
writing, and Mirikitani’s poetry is no exception. “For My Father” is the first
poem from her 1978 collection Awake in the River: Poetry and Prose. Here
Mirikitani depicts her father, a Japanese American who, despite all his
efforts, loses everything because of “mistaken identity”⎯the result of
equating ethnicity with the Other as enemy of the Nation⎯and is forced to
start anew, this time, with no hope nor faith in his own country:
He came over the ocean

carrying Mt. Fuji
on his back/Tule Lake on his chest
hacked through the bush
of deserts
and made them grow
strawberries
we stole berries
from the stem
we could not afford them
for breakfast
his eyes held

nothing
as he whipped us
for stealing.
The desert had dried

his soul.
wordless
he sold
the rich,
full berries
to hakujines
whose children
pointed at our eyes
they ate fresh

strawberries
with cream.
Father,
I wanted to scream
at your silence.
Your strength
was a stranger
I could never touch.
iron
in your eyes
to shield
the pain
to shield desert-like wind
from patches
of strawberries
grown
from
tears.
Japanese ancestry (‘Mt. Fuji on his back’) is juxtaposed here with the
experience of incarceration (‘Tule Lake on his chest’)⎯Tule Lake being one
of the two internment camps in California, notorious for being the detention
center of “subversive elements,” that is, those Japanese Americans who
dared protest against their ill-treatment by their own government.2 Mount
Fuji, the Japanese icon per excellence, is carried on the man’s back, as a
burden, despite being born in U.S. soil. As a scarlet letter marked on his
chest, Tule Lake is the symbol and result of constructing culture, and
therefore Otherness, following the skin color criteria. According to the war
discourse of the time, Tule Lake was associated with disloyalty to the nation,
to the foreign, the alien and, consequently, the enemy. The man’s body is
marked from all sides, trapped by an anti/un-American embodiment.
However, Tule Lake is also a symbol of resistance⎯the internees being
those who questioned the fact that their loyalty, citizenship and
Americanness should not only be doubted, but violated. From this
perspective, Tule Lake breaks with the prototypical image of Asianness:
meek, obedient, authority-abiding people. This standing up for one’s rights
and outspokenness reveals their identity as Americans.
The fact that the poet’s father “hacked through the bush” (line 4) is a
reminder of the pictures of soldiers in World War II fighting and making
their way through the jungle in the Pacific scenario. It also recalls images of
the war in Vietnam so that Mirikitani is linking the consequences of the
politics of representation⎯in this case enhanced by war propaganda⎯upon
other Asian minorities. Her work, thus, manifests the following
contradiction: “the United States is endowed with a nonethnic ideology of the
nation” whereby the benefits of citizenship are to be provided to those
ascribing to the values and principles of the Republic, “irrespective of any
ascribed or asserted ancestral affiliations.” However, the United States “is
possessed by a predominantly ethnic history” (Hollinger 19, emphasis in
original).3
Whereas soldiers had to make their way through the jungle, incarcerated
Japanese American men had to make their way through the desert⎯where
most of the camps were located⎯making barren land fruitful for the benefit
of white America. (They also had to make their way through this scenery
after their release due to the impossibility, most of the times, of returning to
the West coast.) This is clearly indicated by the term “hakujines” (line 22);
“hakujin” in Japanese means “white person,” and the term coined here by
Mirikitani combines Japanese vocabulary with English grammar for forming
the plural (pointing thus at her family’s hybrid cultural background, as is the
case of the United States itself). The strawberries this father’s family cannot
afford represent the wealth and luxuries white/mainstream American society
obtains and enjoys via the labor exploitation and oppression of the abject⎯in
this case the Asian/Asian American Other. As Karen Shimakawa explains,
“the cultural or symbolic dominance of whiteness in the conceptualization of
‘U.S. citizen’ has been supported through the periodic, systematic exclusion
of nonwhites through immigration regulation and the differential allocation
of material and social privileges along racialized lines” (25; emphasis in
original).4
Here, the poem is underlying a key element regarding work and its
relation to manhood. Ronald Takaki points out that in the camps, most adults,
who had been small businessmen or worked their own land (in the case of the
first generation or issei, their American-born children would have been
registered as owners since, as aliens ineligible for naturalization, they had no
land property rights),5 now “found themselves working as wage earners for
the government, forced to abandon the virtues of self-reliance and
independence that had enabled them to survive in society” (396). The
situation after internment would not have been much different, bearing in
mind that they were forced to leave all their property behind and sell it within
a few days before evacuation. Being denied the possibilities of occupying the
traditional role of the family head and, thus, fulfilling his obligations as the
household’s breadwinner, the Japanese American male was clearly subjected
to emasculation,6 as revealed by the father’s behavior and body language.
The disempowering of Japanese American men is enhanced
by the ways in which freedom and materialism are conceptually entangled with the
same structure of racial discrimination and economic exploitation that targeted
Asian Americans…the freedom and materialism that white Americans took for
granted at midcentury is made possible to a great degree⎯or at least made more
valuable⎯by the freedom and material success denied to people of color. (Nguyen
62)
In “For My Father,” the body manages to express a sense of rage, loss, and
hopelessness via the use of certain stylistic aspects which characterize
Mirikitani’s poetry (as that of other female poets of her generation). The use
of free verse is usually given the political reading of breaking away from
conventional verse forms associated with canonical (i.e. mainstreamized)
writing. In this particular case, free verse contrasts with the sense of
oppression, exploitation, and the resulting poverty expressed in the poem.
The loose rhyme and irregular stanza forms underline the need to explore and
find alternative constructions for voicing experiences of the marginal and
abject in white America.
The irregular length of the lines, some of which consist of a single word
such as “nothing” and “wordless” (ll. 13; 18) do not merely highlight
material and emotional loss, but the extent to which language for the father’s
poet has ceased to be an adequate tool for expressing his psychological
devastation. The sense of nothingness throughout the poem and underlined
by these single-word lines contrasts with the “full berries” (l. 21) sold to
“hakujines:” the nothingness of some is the prerequisite for the fullness of
others. The feeling of worthlessness is related to a spiritual and emotional
harshness as reflected in the man’s facial expression: “his eyes held /
nothing” (ll. 12-13); “iron / in your eyes” (ll. 34-35). However, the iron-like
eyes work as a mask, a form of protection from further suffering emphasized
by the use of the expression “to shield,” used twice in the last stanza: “to
shield / the pain / to shield desert-like wind / from patches of strawberries”
(ll.36-40). This fact is evidently emphasized by the last line of the poem,
consisting of a single word: “tears.” In the final stanza the strawberries

acquire another layer of meaning; the delicacy of the fruit is associated with
tears from which they flourish⎯and therefore with the inner fragility of the
father’s body.
It should also be noted how Mirikitani very subtly undermines a
stereotypical image of Asian men by using the image of the iron eyes as
shields and that of silence and nothingness. Eyes like iron and a face that
express nothing are related to the stereotype of Asians as
inscrutable⎯unreadable, according to Western standards (as reflected,
supposedly, in slant eyes)⎯and, consequently, not trustworthy. Mirikitani
overturns the negative stereotype by revealing how a body’s unreadability is
the result of extreme pain, which renders language, oral or bodily, an
unfeasible communicative tool.7
The poem’s layout should also be emphasized. The three indented
stanzas (2, 6 and 8) create a visual sense of distortion⎯in the manner that
essentialist discourses on race, ethnicity and gender distort the Other’s body.
Indented stanzas 2 and 6 describe the effects of such discourses inscribed on
the male racialized body on those with whom the body interacts on various
levels: firstly, the father’s children who steal the strawberries and the white
children who eat the rich fruit. The poem, however, ends with an indented
stanza describing the effects of discrimination on the addressee, the poet’s
father. Thus, Mirikitani highlights the effects of racism by making them
visible through language in the name of her father and his generation, made
speechless as a consequence of traumatic experience.
Another effect of the racialization of bodies is the “transfer of
oppression” (Dower: 46) as exemplified in “Rabbit Hunting,” included in the
volume Love Works (2001):
After the war

we had to start over.
Get a gun
learn to listen to footsteps outside
train our dogs
keep them leashed to make them mean.
We don’t want trouble

but can’t bear
any more losses.
They cleaned out our barn

ravaged our house
during the war
while we were locked in barbed wire cages
laid waste the apple orchard
withered the fields that grew kale, cabbage and tomatoes.
“Not again,” was all he said.
He hunts rabbits
and when he traps one, very young,
she stops and trembles.
He was born in Denver,

his parents locked up in Tule Lake Camp.
He served in the U.S. Army
as a messcook and Japanese language translator.
They called him a yellow jap
and made him taste the food before they’d eat.
Makes him so mad, these rabbits

that stop in fear
trembling.
He shoots off their heads. (57-8)
The oppression suffered in the hands of fellow citizens and the state itself via
the U.S. army is transferred to a weak, fragile creature: a female rabbit. The
identification with a trembling animal works as the other side of the coin by
which Asians, and in particular Japanese Americans, during the war and
immediate postwar years were represented: their bodies were animalized and,
consequently, dehumanized. Dower considers that
A characteristic feature of…anti-Japanese sentiment was the resort to nonhuman or

subhuman representation, in which the Japanese were perceived as animals, reptiles,
or insects (monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice and rats, vipers and rattlesnakes,
cockroaches, vermi –or, more indirectly “the Japanese herd” and the like). The
variety of such metaphors was so great that they sometimes seemed casual and
almost original. On the contrary, they were well routinized as idioms of everyday
discourse, and immensely consequential in their ultimate functions: At “us” and
“them to the point where it was perceived to be virtually unabridgeable.” (81-2)
These images were embedded on the Japanese-American body, a discourse

which facilitated their incarceration in concentration camps⎯unlike what
happened to those of German or Italian ascendency. As Dower explains:
That this distinction between the enemy in Asia and the enemy in Europe derives
less from the events of the war than from deep-seated racial bias was reflected in the
opening months of 1942, when the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese-
Americans in masse, while taking no comparable action against residents of German
or Italian origin. Indeed, U.S. citizens of Japanese extraction were treated with
greater suspicion and severity than German or Italian aliens⎯despite the fact that
the German-American Bund (with an estimated membership of twenty thousand)
had agitated on behalf of Hitler in the United States prior to the outbreak of war, and
despite the fact that there never was, at Pearl Harbor or later, any evidence of
organized subversion among the Japanese community. (79)
In “Rabbit Hunting,” the dehumanization of the Other’s body is revealed in

the imagery of being “locked in barbed wire cages” (line 3) and particularly
in stanza six, where it is stated that, despite being born in Denver and having
served in the U.S. army, the rabbit hunter, whom the reader presumes to be
the poet’s father, was nonetheless treated as nonhuman when made by other
soldiers “to taste the food before they’d eat” (l. 25).
However, as in the previous poem, Mirikitani deftly reveals how
violence inflicted on the Other’s body also dehumanizes those who exercise
it. The narrator’s family feels that it needs to protect itself with arms and
dogs trained to be mean⎯as if the outside world were a wilderness. Lack of
humanity is emphasized by the way those from outside their intimate circle
commit violent acts of destruction such as ravaging their home (l. 11) whilst
they had been incarcerated⎯and letting waste their orchard and fields. The
hunter’s identification with the rabbits expresses, once more, his
emasculation⎯the powerlessness and inability to fulfill appropriately his
role of protector of his dependents. Interestingly, during the war he is a
messcook (a traditionally feminine-task)8 and a translator⎯a decoder of
language into another which is used by mainstream society to dehumanize
and, thus, marginalize him.
Mirikitani’s poetry also shows great tenderness for the first generation,
the issei, as in the following poem “Kamikaze on a Clothesline,” also
published in Love Works:
Chicago is the coldest place on earth

in January.
You are five years old.

A big girl. You know to knock on Mr. Utsui’s door
when you come home from school.
He lives alone in a small apartment

down the hall from you and your mother,
now that his wife has died.
His only son was killed during
the war.
Mr. Utsui does not talk much,

smells like an old man,
and you don’t like him
having to unlock the bathroom door
that is shared by all the third floor tenants because
neighborhood black and white kids
run up and down the stairs to use it.
You were dragged down

three flights by a big white kid who called you jap
and slant eyes.
One of the blacks rescued you
and hit that big white kid in his face.
Mama scolded you for

messing around with them who are not your kind,
and not going straight to Mr. Utsui’s place.
One day, you come home from school

and it is snowing very hard
a Chicago blizzard.
Mr. Utsui isn’t home and you wait
in the hallway for a long time.
You look for him

in the back yard and they
are fighting.
You are scared but can’t move
frozen by the violence
between whites and blacks,
explosions of snow
spray against their bodies
as they throw fistfulls
of rock packed snowballs
through the air. The whites are winning
and chase the blacks out of the yard
and suddenly the white bully
sees you and yells to his gang,
a jap. Let’s hang the jap
See if she can fly like a kamikaze.
You try to run but they catch you,

pull off your coat
tie your sweater sleeves around you

and hang you from the clothesline
dangling like a trussed chicken.
The boys rush to each side of the clothesline

and reel you back and forth
making airplane noises in their throats.
kamikaze
kamikaze
you so crazy
you so slanty
you can’t see
so you crash and die, kamikaze.
You slide back and forth on the line

screaming and crying as the white boys laugh.
You think you will die

shivering from the cold
face numb from tears turning to ice
when you hear a loud

ooooiiii. Get away.
The boys look up and see Mr. Utsui

swinging a samurai sword around his head
as they scatter into the snow.
He unties you from the clothesline, and carries you to
his warm room, feeds you miso soup and tea
and apologizes for not being home.
He was kept waiting at the doctor’s office.
Later you ask your mother

why white boys
call you kamikaze and try to kill you,
and she tells you

Mr. Utsui lost his son
fighting in the U.S. Army, while he and his wife
were locked up in a prison camp in Arkansas.
You were in the same camp.
And when Mr. Utsui got the letter that
his son had died, he took his treasured samurai sword
and ran to the barbed wire fence
as if to cut it to pieces.
She says she thought for sure the guards
would shoot him
but they didn’t.
They just laughed and called him

crazy like the kamikaze, crashing their planes
on suicide missions.
But he isn’t the kamikaze, you say,

No, not the enemy, she says.
Black children
white children in a snow filled yard
shooting each other with snow balls,
American Japanese in prison camps
not the enemy.

you are not the enemy. (59-63)
Clearly autobiographical, although the poem does not have as its protagonist
the narrator’s father, it certainly does center on a father-like figure: Mr.
Utsui. Despite its many layers of meaning, especially regarding interracial
relationships, it is most pertinent to concentrate on Mr. Utsui’s bodily
representation. What is highlighted in the first place is the character’s
emasculation as a result of old age and loneliness. His immediate family,
wife and son, are dead so that his life at this stage seems to be a mere waiting
for death. This is reflected by the simply mentioning that he “smells like an
old man, / and you don’t like him” (ll. 12-13), smell being clearly associated
with bodily decay and waste.9 Mr. Utsui can now only act as a kind of
surrogate father for the narrator as a five-year-old, taking care of her after
school.
The poem concentrates on a particular incident when the child cannot
find Mr. Utsui. The child, in her search, sees how white and black children
fight each other and, once she is detected, the white children’s attention is
diverted from the blacks to her as the “new” enemy which they associate
with a kamikaze. Interestingly, the kamikaze, in turn, is associated with
madness projected onto a racialized body (as made patent by the “slant eyes”
in stanza 11). For the allied forces, the Japanese Special Attack Forces
(Tokkōtai), better known as kamikaze, was a clear evidence of the inherent,
fanatical insanity of the Japanese in their blind loyalty to authority (Dower
22). In the war years this imagery was connected to that of the samurai code
(bushidō), which, certainly in Western eyes, was strongly based on the
concepts of duty, honor and loyalty to the point of willing to die for one’s
lord (Hurst). It should be noted, as G. Cameron Hurst III argues in “Death,
Contributors 187
Teresa Requena-Pelegrí lectures in U.S. literature and culture at the English

Department of the University of Barcelona. She has published several articles
on twentieth-century American drama, particularly the work of Gertrude
Stein and Adrienne Kennedy, as well as nineteenth-century American writers
such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman. Her current research focuses on the study of the intersection
between hegemonic and alternative masculinities in twentieth-century U.S.
literature. She is currently working on the different models of masculinity in
the fiction of Jonathan Franzen.
María Isabel Seguro teaches English literature at the English Department of

the University of Barcelona. She has researched and published several
articles and book chapters on Asian American literature, especially theatre,
and is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis, which centers on contemporary
Anglo-Irish drama.
Esther Zaplana completed her PhD at the International Centre for Music
Studies, Newcastle University, UK. Her research covers cultural, feminist
and theoretical approaches to aesthetic questions in musical performance,
with emphasis on the female voice and the relationship between the visual
and the auditory. She is interested in French feminism and the work of Luce
Irigaray, contributing a chapter on feminine musical performance and
Irigaray’s thinking in Luce Irigaray: Teaching (2008), edited by Luce
Irigaray herself. Her publications include work on gender and music
(Repercussions, 2004), ideal masculinity (Masculinity and Western Musical
Practice, 2009), and feminist literature (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2005).
MASCULINITY STUDIES
Literary and Cultural Representations
Josep M. Armengol and Àngels Carabí

General Editors
In line with the latest trends within masculinity scholarship, the books
appearing in the Masculinity Studies series deal with representations of
masculinities in culture, in general, and literature, in particular. The aim of
this series is twofold. On the one hand, it focuses on studies that question
traditionally normative representations of masculinities. On the other, it
seeks to highlight new alternative representations of manhood, looking for
more egalitarian models of manhood in and through literature and culture.
Besides literary representations, the series is open to studies of
masculinity in cinema, theatre, music, as well as all kinds of artistic and
visual representations.
For further information about the series and submitting manuscripts,

please contact:
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Literary and Cultural Representations

Josep M. Armengol and Àngels Carabí

Towards a History of the Male Body

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the

© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and

1 The Complete Body of Modernity in the 1920s: Negotiating

2 Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s American

3 Invisibilizing the Male Body: Exploring the Incorporeality of

4 Breaking the Mold: Male Rock Performance, Glam, and the

5 The Cyborg and the Representation of Masculinity and

6 Action and Reaction: The Villain’s Body and Its Role in

7 Leonidas’s New Body: The Failed Hyper-Masculinization

8 Voicing the Father’s Body in Janice Mirikitani’s Asian

9 Contemporary Terrorist Bodies: The (De-)Construction of

Bodies are and always have been shaped according to the

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the

© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

study explores representations of male bodies in U.S. culture, particularly

the middle-class, white-collar worker, who came to embody the “common

and “hypermasculine” representations of mainstream cinematic heroes, the

Seguro reads Mirikitani’s poetry as offering an insightful criticism of the

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), as well as to the birth of individualism in the

Constructing the Body of Hegemonic and Non-Hegemonic Masculinities

Connell takes up Gramsci’s theorization on hegemony and power in order to

not a purely white heterosexual configuration of practice but it is a hybrid

conceptualization of dialectical pragmatism and the appropriation of specific

Wholeness and the Hegemonic Male Body of the 1920s

underwent a process of reinterpretation. In it, old aristocratic stereotypes

Thus responding to what Mossse deems a specific need of modern society,

The establishment of the hegemonic model of masculinity based upon

Connell and Messerschmidt contend, “[m]asculinity is not a fixed entity

Bodies in Action: Negotiating Hegemonic and Non-Hegemonic

writer’s attitudes towards wounds and masculinity in order to conclude that

characters embodying (at least partly) hegemonic masculinity to inhabit a

The paragraph thus shows Jake’s awareness of Cohn’s hegemonic

Montoya put his hand on my shoulder...He smiled again. He always smiled as

his body as “incomplete,” he is also capable of strategically aligning himself

Connell, R. W. Gender and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

We must preserve not only the bodies of the

Depression and/as Emasculation

product of the rise of capitalism and industrialization in the early nineteenth

The “Remasculinization” of America

public sphere, redefining masculinity as the gendered expression of a certain

Diver of Tender Is the Night (1934) as “a communist-liberal-idealist, a

The dichotomy between working-class virility and leisure-class effeminacy

Literature, he concludes, should always draw on the materials of the

Based on a “hard/soft” binary, what Penner terms Gold’s “macho criticism”

seems to be understood as the very epitome of virility. His promise of

He must be a complete man and a common man…He is neither a eunuch nor a

Chandler’s description of the private eye hero as both a “complete” and

Hard versus Soft Bodies: Counterimages and Contradictions

problematizes stereotypical views of the Proletarian male body as

especially, of socioeconomic inequality caused his works to be deemed

unequivocally aesthetic sign of normative masculinity and a social class

Invisibilizing the Male Body in 1950s American Culture: The “Common

multiplicity of office jobs owing to the boom of corporations, demanded that

In the corporate world, men occupied a traditionally feminine position in relation to