This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. Today’s contributor, Rebecca Feasey, completed her PhD in the department in 2003.

I have previously written on the representation of masculinity and the male role in popular television programming and considered the ways in which a range of friends, fathers, heroes and martyrs might be considered in relation to the hegemonic ideal. While the pinnacle of hegemonic masculinity speaks of a powerful, forceful and self-sufficient figure, demonstrating economic advantage and physical prowess, men on screen were seen to negotiate this particular ideal while continuing to demonstrate male dominance over their female counterparts. I concluded this work by suggesting that contemporary men ostensibly challenge the rigid codes of hegemonic power in favor of maintaining their hierarchical status, and nowhere is this more evident than in the emergence and development of the MAMIL.

The MAMIL (an acronym for the Middle-Aged Man In Lycra, hereafter Mamil) is a term recently used to describe a 40-something man who rides an elite road bike for leisure and pleasure, and who is styled in expensive, form-fitting, unforgiving and carefully picked sporting clothes and accessories. Contemporary commentary informs us that Mamils “do not simply go on an hour-long run out. Rides regularly last three hours or more, while in the spring and summer they disappear for days to ride in ‘sportive’ events.”

What interests me here is not the UK’s Cycle to Work scheme (the government tax-exemption initiative introduced in 1999 to promote healthier journeys to work), the carbon-neutral footprint or even the sartorial efforts of the Mamils in question, bur rather, the use and abuse of Strava (and other available GPS systems) for this particular group. Strava, Swedish for “stride,” is a website and mobile app used to track athletic activity via GPS. It is proving incredibly popular with Mamils who can now pit themselves against friends, family and what are termed “followers,” irrespective of whether they are nipping to the local shops or doing the 874-mile “end-to-end” Land’s End to John o’ Groats–style challenge.

Much contemporary work in masculinity studies tells us that men never openly discuss the hegemonic hierarchy or speak frankly or candidly about their position within it. Instead, men rely on markers of power and legitimacy to speak on their behalf. Promotions, company cars, updated business cards, expense accounts and designer accessories speak of wealth, and although physical mastery is clearly visible it is seldom a source of comment. However, the whole point of Strava seems to be the establishment of a more calculated, deliberate and exposed hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity based on the distance, pace and frequency of a rider. The Telegraph’s Matthew Sparkes tells us that:

Strava has forever changed cycling, for better or worse. The website tracks you via GPS and publicly ranks your best time on ‘segments’ of road along with other users. Now even a short trip to the supermarket has an element of competition […] if Strava ceases to exist you could lose a treasure trove of bragging rights fond memories.

He continues:

Email signatures are normally functional affairs reserved for job titles, phone numbers and addresses. But wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow use yours to show off the fact that you hold the (KOM) King of the Mountain across the local Tesco car park?

Later still, he asserts:

What is Strava for if not competing mercilessly with friends and colleagues? […] [E]nter your “athlete number” […] and that of one or more other riders. It then searches through the archives and finds segments that you’ve all recorded times for, laying out the results out for all to see.

One long-time cyclist says that Strava encourages competitiveness rather than healthy riding because the Strava team send the rider messages every time one of their KOM sections has been beaten:

Uh oh! Alex Morgan just stole your KOM!
Hey CyclingTips,
You just lost your KOM on Mt Rael Climb to Alex Morgan by 1 second.
Better get out there and show them who’s boss!
Your friends at Strava

Sparkes recommends that Mamils take the day off, leaving the GPS at home to enjoy “a ride at your own pace with nobody peering over your shoulder.” His words might appear hollow, though, to those men committed to the banter and bravado that Strava encourages:

Being a MAMIL, like all mid-life crises means acting like little boys. As 11-year-olds do, they have their in-jokes, asserting the perfect number of bikes to own is N + 1 (N is the number of bikes you have already). Another formula, which shows they are not entirely stupid, is S – 1 (S is the number of bikes that will prompt your wife to demand a separation).

It is commonplace for friends and acquaintances to offer kudos to one another after a successful ride. Such kudos might serve as a mark of respect for fellow cyclists, but it can also be read as one more way of marking hierarchies for the 40-something Mamil. The Mamil proposes a new take on the old masculine hierarchy. While it’s easy to mock, deride or undermine earlier iterations of hegemonic masculinity for their commitment to body sculpting, excessive hours spent in the office, or ostentatious soft-top cars or the motorcycling equivalent, it is harder to challenge the eco-friendly, physically fit Mamil. This is precisely why these new figures of contemporary masculinity are such skillful hegemonic creations.

Hegemonic masculinity has routinely relied on masculine camaraderie and jovial banter at the expense of women, and the Strava Mamil continues this bromantic scenario, but for a wider, invested and interested audience. Indeed, there is no Queen of the Mountain accolade. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the UK. As one Wall Street banker puts it:

Every day, bankers check the league tables, a scoreboard that shows who won the biggest deals. Then they check their Strava app to see who’s chewing up the pavement fastest on his $20,000 bike. That’s recreation on Wall Street. […] We like to push ourselves. And it’s not ’80s Wall Street. We’re not out buying Lamborghinis and paying for coke habits. We’re buying $10,000 bikes.

Fitness-culture discourse frames Strava as a “hotly contested virtual race of it’s [sic] own where Stravaddicts are venturing out on rides with the sole intent of sniping segments for themselves and claiming the top of the leaderboards.” While Strava puts discourses of competitive fitness in niche circulation, it also bolsters persistent male hegemony.

Vintage advertising image for Atari’s 2600 game console.

Post by Anthony Smith, University of Salford

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor is Anthony Smith, who completed his PhD in the department in 2013.

Advertisers’ use of family life as a means to market video games and hardware is by no means a new phenomenon. Hugely successful home consoles such as the Atari 2600 (launched in 1977) and the Nintendo Wii (launched in 2006), for example, were each promoted in part on the basis of the familial unity each system encourages. Television commercial spots for these platforms promised fun gaming experiences that children, their parents and their grandparents could enjoy together in living rooms (see videos below).

With this post, however, I identify how advertisers have begun to construct via their campaigns an alternate, more ambiguous relationship between video gaming and family life. Whereas advertisers have previously depicted gaming as a unifying force for the family (or, as I detail below, an activity entirely unrelated to family), recent UK ad campaigns for the Sony PS4 video game console and for Virgin Media’s broadband service suggest that video gaming might in fact be an imperfect fit for the family. In particular, each campaign establishes the father figure who is required to balance familial responsibilities with a video-gaming pastime that excludes other family members.

“This is for the Players”—2013 ad for Sony’s PS4 console.

In the case of the PS4’s marketing, the discursive construction of this figure–who we might term “gamer dad”–emerged as part of Sony PlayStation Europe’s promotional campaign for the device’s launch in 2013, central to which was the assurance that this system “is for the players.” This marketing tactic helped Sony appeal to dedicated video-game players–a group that largely comprises the “early-adopter” market for home consoles, simultaneously positioning the PS4 against the rival Microsoft console (Xbox One, also launched 2013), which in contrast was initially promoted on the basis of its Skype and voice-activated TV-viewing capabilities. Sony’s poster and TV ad campaign further articulated who it envisaged these “players” to be: the PS4 serves, among others, the “rookies and the veterans. The soldiers. The survivors. The 3 am fathers and the multiplayer motor mouths. The trophy collectors. […] The once-in-a-while assassins” and “Fans of jaw-dropping graphics.”

“The players” that Sony’s marketing discursively constructs via these labels largely conform to an enduring stereotype of the “hardcore” gamer; that is, a player who is abrasively competitive (trophy-collecting, motormouth, multiplaying), prioritizes hardware that delivers strong technical performances (“jaw-dropping graphics”), and who favors games that feature fictional killing as a game-world objective (“once-in-a-while assassins”) and–more specifically–games concerning military warfare fictions (“The rookies and the veterans. The soldiers”), such as those of the Call of Duty and Battlefield first-person-shooter (FPS) series.

The marketing of console hardware more generally typically presents this “hardcore” gamer type as an adult male who, apparently without family, has free reign of the living room television (as is the case with the Aaron Paul-starring Xbox One commercial below).

Sony’s “3 am fathers” label, however, presents an unusual version of this type. The “3 am father,” the label implies, is required to pursue his gaming hobby in the morning’s early hours due to the prioritization within the day and evening of his familial and parental role, outside of which his hobby must exist. The label’s further implication is that the “3 am father” plays games that are incompatible with family life, such as violence-depicting FPS games, hence the need for their confinement to the twilight hours.

A Virgin Media commercial spot designed to promote its broadband service similarly constructs the image of a father figure who imperfectly incorporates the playing of “hardcore” video games into a familial context. The ad depicts “Nick,” an anthropomorphized seal on a living room couch, playing a militaristic FPS (Nick is a Navy Seal, apparently). The ad’s voiceover claims Virgin Media’s “superfast fiber broadband […] lets [Nick] download new games quicker,” which is, the voice-over informs, an essential feature for Nick “because every second counts when you’re not being a dad.” The ad subsequently reinforces this point, as the return of Nick’s wife and daughter to the home results in the interruption of his gaming session (see video below).

In line with the “3 am fathers” label, the Virgin Media ad suggests that a chief characteristic of “gamer dad” is the manner in which he must awkwardly situate his “hardcore” gaming hobby around his family’s requirements.

The advertising construct of “gamer dad” has the potential to be considered in relation to wider debates regarding media representations of video-game players, and more specifically players of “hardcore” games. In particular, “gamer dad” can be connected to the more general process within media culture of gendering “hardcore” gaming as a primarily male pursuit. A further component of Sony’s “This is for the players” promotional campaign, a video in which various men and women self-identify the types of players they are (see below), emphasizes this point.

The video at least to some extent avoids gendering tendencies, as it features, for example, a young woman self-identifying as an enthusiast of the FPS series Killzone. However, the apparent characteristics of the video’s one self-identifying mother are largely in opposition to those of the “3 am father,” suggesting that, for parents at least, conventional gender stereotyping continues with regard to representations of “hardcore” video-game players. “I’m a mum who plays with her son,” the woman says to the camera while holding up a placard stating her preference for Skylanders, a child-targeted game series. By suggesting that carrying out parental activities (such as playing Skylanders alongside a son) is the primary and legitimate means by which mothers achieve pleasure, Sony’s promotional campaign aligns mums with the “good mother” stereotype, of which feminists have been highly critical. Thus, while, advertisers make clear that the likes of Nick the Navy Seal and “the 3 am fathers” enjoy and are suited to game-world soldiering and assassinating (as long as such escapades are appropriately cordoned off from family life), they neglect to suggest also that mothers might desire–or can legitimately undertake–such recreational activities.

Mickey Guyton (Image: KMLE/CBS Local)

I recently read a piece on All Access (a radio/music industry website) by R.J. Curtis, trumpeting 2015 as a possible “Year of the Woman” for country music and country music radio. As various country music programmers trumpeted the up-and-coming female country acts poised to break through this year, many of them scratched their heads as to why they have to try so hard to push female artists to the forefront. It’s a question I found myself asking when I was in their shoes in a similarly male-dominated music radio format.

The year was 2003, and I was the Program Director/Music Director at Revolution 103.7, an Alternative station in Chambersburg, PA. “Why Can’t I,” the lead single from Liz Phair’s self-titled album was going for adds, and remembering the important place Phair’s work held in 1990s indie rock, I added the song without hesitation. I immediately got pushback from my general manager and others whose opinion I trusted. Granted, many music critics decried Phair’s move toward “pop-rock” status, but it shouldn’t have mattered. Ask anyone who owns a copy of Exile in Guyville if Liz Phair could ever be considered a “Pop” artist. Still, it was a time when I was expected to play Godsmack or Slipknot instead. Concerned about losing the coveted Male 18-34 listeners to the newer, testosterone-heavy Active Rock format, we Alternative programmers were supposed to mimic them as much as possible.

In the R.J. Curtis piece, Lisa McKay, a Country program director in Raleigh, states that their sister Pop station has a rule about playing no more than three females in a row, while she works to force three females into an hour. My first reaction to this statement is that it shouldn’t need to be forced. Country is a radio format that appeals equally to males and females, and the sales data backs this up. Yet in research that I presented at last April’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) conference, Country playlists skewed 83% male, and it is apparently getting worse. Curtis pointed out that just two of the 30 most played songs at the Country format right now are sung by women. Two. Thus making the current national Country playlist a staggering 93% male. These are numbers I would normally expect in the alpha-male-driven Rock formats, but in a climate where “bro-country” is considered the prevailing trend today, perhaps we should not be surprised.

My second reaction to McKay’s lament was, “Why do we even need a rule about how many consecutive female artists is too many?” Curtis compared the Top 30 Country songs to the Top 30 at Pop radio and found that nine of the top Pop songs were sung by women. Better than Country to be sure, but still producing a national current playlist that is over two-thirds male, and in a format whose target audience is women. Would women really change the station if they heard too many female voices in a row?

In this same article, Los Angeles Country program director Tonya Campos stated that people want success for female artists, “but only for the really good ones,” adding that she cannot add female singers just for the sake of having more female singers. Quality should of course be the rule, but there is also the possibility that a stigma exists about the quality of female country singers. During my dissertation research, I sat in with a Country DJ who took a call from a female listener, complaining that Taylor Swift cannot sing. After politely handling the call, he turned to me and said, “And yet, we never get a call saying Toby Keith or George Strait can’t sing… We only pick on our female artists.” Stories like this probably make Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie nod knowingly at the way radio and the music industry justifies the marginalization of women.

Author Eric Weisbard recently wrote a piece for NPR, collaborating with such music journalism titans as Maura Johnston and Jason King to note how the splintering of music radio formats has caused each to begin dictating the terms by which a song could be classified as Alternative, Country, and so on. So it is that we have come to a point where the two major rock awards at this year’s Grammys were won by artists who many immediately claimed were “not rock.” Beck’s Morning Phase won Rock Album of the Year – a win that was apparently just as controversial as his upset win for overall Album of the Year – and Paramore’s “Ain’t it Fun” won Rock Song of the Year. The band Trapt, a hard rock group best known for the raging 2003 hit “Headstrong,” immediately claimed that these two selections were part of a larger establishment conspiracy to prevent “anything too threatening or in your face” from dominating the rock scene.

Hayley Williams (Image: Neil Roberson)

This complaint could not be farther from the truth when it comes to radio airplay. Although Trapt has not had a hit in years, the “aggro” brand of rock has become so dominant on Rock radio for so long that Grantland music critic Steven Hyden recently described the state of mainstream rock as “ossified.” In other words, an entire generation has been raised on male singers pairing aggression with perceived alienation, entrenching the angry white male aesthetic into a dominant position from which it cannot be pushed aside by newer trends. Formerly an Alternative mainstay, Beck’s lighter fare was immediately ticketed for Adult Album Alternative, and Paramore – fronted by one of the heretofore few acceptable female rock singers, Hayley Williams – was sent directly to Pop radio despite far more critical praise than Liz Phair received a decade ago.

At least Country is trying to stop the same thing from happening with the “bro-country” movement. At times like this, I am reminded of Honna Veerkamp’s terrific piece, “Why Radio Needs Feminism.” Perhaps at least one male-dominated radio format will see the light this year and recognize that women listen too.

At the moment, the Internet is overflowing with new music streaming services. Spotify, Wimp, Beats Music, and Deezer are only a few examples from a popular media format for finding and listening to music. The business idea is to sell subscriptions for the services, containing a large selection of music. The person subscribing can then personalize the collections by making their own playlists and saving favorites on the streaming service. No files are downloaded, but the data is streamed and if payment stops, the access to music will disappear. At the same time, music blogs and file sharing are still available sources of music online, complementing rather than competing with the streaming services.

While young adults participating in interviews about their music use online are overwhelmingly positive regarding the availability of music on the internet today, they also argue that it can be hard to find the music they want to listen to since the amount of music online is endless. The role of guidance—through the streaming services’ interfaces as well as by named experts, music nerds, and persons knowledgeable about technology—is therefore perceived as important. Perhaps the experts take on an even more important role today because of the enormous access to all kinds of music?

Expertise in the area of music and technology has often been ascribed to men and understood as being something masculine. Through the history of popular music artists, producers, journalists, and listeners, those valued as good and important have often been men. Roles as experts like talent scouts and music journalists who have influenced what can be labeled ‘good music’ have contributed, through their positions, to symbolically rule the taste of the music industry. To fill these roles, persons have often been men/masculine and expected to be men/masculine. While women and femininity—especially sexy femininity—has always been used to sell records, music promoted with femininity has often been devalued. So has, often, music defying gender binaries in different ways. This can also be said about music by racialized others and music loved by the working class—music that has not been considered ‘good’ by contemporary critiques. Many devalued genres have been reconsidered and reevaluated in a later historic time, such as jazz and Motown. Much like the role of the music expert or music nerd, the technologically savvy person is often understood as man or masculine. In the area of music, the high fidelity lover building his own speakers as well as the home producer, using computers or a home studio to produce his own music, are known figures—figures that combine technological skills with masculinity and music knowledge.

Thus, when the expert with particular and technological competence in general is regarded as important in order to find and listen to music online today, the field of music consumption is gendered. It is not gendered in a simplistic way—not all experts and technologically savvy persons are men—but when young music consumers talk about music listening online, they understand expert roles and technological competence as something masculine. Interviews show that the persons ascribing technological knowledge to themselves, and using specialist jargon when discussing hardware and software for music listening, were mostly, but not only, men. Also, when asked who had influenced their music taste or who gave them music, dads were mentioned in many interviews, and many young women referred to boyfriends, while moms were less frequently brought up, and girlfriends were not mentioned as musical influences at all.

On streaming services that are presently popular, there may be named and appointed experts fore-fronted in the interface. But there are also algorithms recommending music to listeners and these are not neutral engines. The services are often connected to other social networks (such as Facebook) where your friends may pose as experts. What may at first seem like vast libraries of music are really services spreading opinions, pictures, sounds, and ideas collected from other media, software, and famous, as well as ordinary, people.

It is beyond doubt that women today use the internet for all purposes, including music consumption and gaming (another form of popular culture associated with masculinity). Still experts, music nerds, dads, and boyfriends are points of reference when it comes to good music and technological knowledge. How can this contradiction be understood? The idea that equality is promoted automatically in online cultures—since everybody has access and thus the ability to reach the same position—is clearly incorrect. While digital media permeates our society in new ways, the power imbalances in terms of who is considered an expert in online music use seem familiar. I would even take this reasoning one step further: the expert plays a highly central role for music consumption online, as the interviewees believe. Experts guide others by recommending new music, creating playlists, and writing music blogs. Could the expert be getting even more important in digital music use? If that is the case, and experts are still in different ways perceived as masculine, then guidance for music-use online may be doing the opposite of promoting equality: reinforcing differences.

[For the full article, see Ann Werner and Sofia Johansson, “Experts, Dads and Technology: Gendered Talk About Online Music,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication]

Ann Werner is Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University, Sweden

Red Army, one of the festival surprises, is an exhilarating chronicle of the vicissitudes of the championship Russian team that ruled hockey in the 1980’s. The film examines the period in which the Soviet Union was moving through Perestroika toward collapse, and huge salaries offered by the NHL were enticing Russian ice heroes to move to the United States. It is a lens on international relations between Capitalist and Communist countries, and even more intensely an examination of two philosophies of sport. The lower paid Russians take a team approach to hockey that renders play an art, through which individuals evolve intricate strategies that martial the energies of cooperative endeavor. The mega bucks Americans take a simple, brute every-man-for-himself approach. The comparison highlights a barbarity in the individualistically motivated U. S. players.

Ironically, however, Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the captain of the Russian team, and central figure in Polsky’s documentary, emerges as the protagonist in the festival films closest to the standard American hero, a “John Wayne” prototype, just warmer and more effusive. Wayne played heroes who were the best at what they did, wouldn’t begin a fight, and if dragged into combat made damn sure to finish the conflict their way. Cut off that bolt of cloth, Slava is a tough individualist who refuses to let the Soviet bureaucracy push him around. Going the Wayne prototype one better, Slava balances his dashing self-confidence and brilliance on the ice with a deep loyalty to his fellow players. So he faced a crisis when the NHL came calling, and the Russian powers-that-be broke numerous promises that he would be released from his commitments to play in America. While his teammates kowtowed to the politicos, Slava quit the team rather than be betrayed one more time. And he got his way. Freedom! America! But not the happy ending he envisioned. Once in the United States, Slava’s dedication to the art of group strategies was tested severely. I will leave it to you to discover his American ordeals for yourself when you see Red Army, which you should not miss, and not just because at the press conference Slava reduced a room full of unsentimental film critics to abject admiration.

The later years of the painter J. M. W. Turner, the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s latest film, is another kettle of fish, but equally tasty and unusual. Played by Timothy Spall, in an Oscar caliber performance, Turner is a waddling, grunting, heavy breathing warthog. His physical aspect defies every expectation Western audiences have of their heroes. Not only is he extremely ugly—Spall underwent a profound transformation through the magic of makeup—but his sexual habits and personal hygiene will disgust many moviegoers. Yet Turner emerges in this plotless, peripatetic rendering of the artist’s travels around the seaside at Margate, and in London as a figure with an appealing passion for life and a fidelity to his inner lights. Cinematographer Dick Pope has done an eye-popping job of using the palate of Turner’s colors and his lighting in rendering the tones and textures of the film. Leigh’s depiction of what Turner was as a man and an artist thrillingly blasts every stereotype of masculinity and aesthetics with which we are acquainted.

Finally there is Julien Gahyde (Mathieu Amalric), the protagonist of The Blue Room, directed by Mathieu Amalric. Based on a Georges Simenon mystery about an ordinary man accused of murdering his wife, The Blue Room, at first seems slight. But at his press conference, Amalric helped me to deal with my sense that there was something I wasn’t getting, when he explored with us what he had in mind. We are so used to cinematic and televisual depictions of the bravado, or cunning, or stupidity of the accused murderer that it takes a while to adjust to Amalric’s stunningly atypical depiction of poor, ordinary Gahyde’s psychological paralysis when he becomes the main suspect and finds it impossible to speak on his own behalf. We are given little to confirm whether or not he is guilty, which abandons us to his silence and throws us into his state of confusion. He cannot conceive of himself as a murderer, and yet he is presented with evidence that he must have done the deed. Ultimately, although the court reaches a clear-cut verdict, there is no certainty in the film about what happened. Amalric has brilliantly captured how tenuous our grasp is on our understanding of what we do, let alone the people we are called upon to judge.

The achievements of Polsky, Leigh, and Amalric appear even more impressive when contrasted with the putatively “different” masculinities in two other festival offerings, Gone Girl (Dir. David Fincher) and Eden (Dir. Mia Hansen-Love) which concern, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and Paul (Felix de Givry), respectively. Nick and Paul are part of a growing group of feckless males who stand at the center of movies that depend on the sensational energies of a tormentor to hold the audience in their seats, without shedding any light on either limp protagonist, or spectacular adversary. Some will find this harsh and overly dismissive, and to them I apologize. But Paul’s inability to grow to maturity in the drugged-out 1990’s French electronic music scene that acts as his antagonist and Nick’s victimization by his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), a black widow disguised as a pile of vanilla goo, can’t hold a candle to even one close-up of Julien’s face, or one talking head sequence with Slava, let alone Turner spitting on his canvas as he paints.

Look for Part Four next week.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

This is the sixth of a seven-part seven about the 4^th LeakyCon Fan Convention held in Portland, Oregon, June 27-30, 2013

Men were the minority at LeakyCon among fan attendees but they represented about half of the invited performers. I was especially intrigued by the way masculine norms were altered to suit the desires of LeakyCon’s primarily young, female audience. As I discussed in my last post, attendees value the con so much in part because it provides a public space for them in which they are not primarily defined by their sexuality or treated as sexual objects. Normative, phallic masculinity is the one identity category that is not welcome at LeakyCon. Male-identified performers modeled more open, inclusive, and genderqueer versions of both straight and gay masculinity. They embraced “feminine”-coded genre practices, featured feminist and gay/queer narrative content in their shows, celebrated fans’ active participation, and enthusiastically addressed the romantic/erotic interests and concerns of this particular audience. While male performers popular with adoring young female audiences are often characterized (condescendingly) as sexually non-threatening, this dismissal disguises the larger threat they represent: while such masculine performances are indeed unthreatening to young women, they are deeply threatening to gender/sexual social norms and hierarchies. Many of LeakyCon’s performers have substantial followings; they have largely developed distinct personas outside the con in a variety of arenas: social media, fiction, theatre, and television. Their commonalities were put into relief when they were gathered together at LeakyCon, and these shared characteristics suggested an alternative, genderqueer masculine brand that – although largely subcultural – is clearly making a significant impact on millennial culture.

I first noted this type of masculine performance two years ago when I described Glee’s straight-identified star Darren Criss as modeling a kind of genderqueerness in his own star persona, one that reinforced Glee’s “radically fluid adolescent masculinites.” Part of my reason for attending LeakyCon, initially, was to see whether the theatrical troupe The Starkids, which Criss co-founded, shared his gender-blurring, playful performance style. Indeed they did, but so did the other male performers at LeakyCon. In addition to the Starkids, these included, most prominently, Rent star Anthony Rapp; some of the actors who play Glee’s Dalton Academy Warblers, who hosted wildly popular sing-a-longs; Tom Lenk,  (Buffy’s “Andrew”), who performed his show, “Nerdgasm;” and LeakyCon regular and favorite Hank Green, who this year combined “wizardrock” performing, Nerdfighter gatherings, web-advice panels, and Lizzie Bennett Diaries discussions (Green co-created LBD).

Of these, social media personality and web-series producer Green represents the public intellectual division of LeakyCon’s masculine brand.  His video blogs (“vlogs”) with his brother, Young Adult author and frequent LeakyCon participant John Green, inspired their Nerdfighter fans  to proudly assert their own identity as a nerd community (“DFTBA”!). In this popular vlog, “Human Sexuality is Complicated,” Green subverts masculine norms by presenting a non-binary, queer-theory-friendly explanation of human sexuality in a remarkably compact and accessible manner, notably situating himself along a gender/sexuality continuum in which he acknowledges the “womanly parts of me”:

The physical experience of being in a LeaykCon audience feels like a reimagining of populist theatre without the sexism, insularity, and surveillance that has often limited the value of such public spaces for women and queer people. Feminism and gender/sex non-normativity are explicitly a part of LeakyCon’s definition of egalitarian community, and hence become part of the performance aesthetics as well. Audience participation in total or in part is expected and encouraged. Performers emphasize the shared emotional experience of the players and the audience rather than the celebration of an individual performer. These fangirl popular aesthetics are genderqueer, but they are not camp; they require a sincere performance style. This distinction was evident in the Closing Ceremonies of the Con, which featured the “slash” (non-canon) wedding of two Harry Potter characters (performed by Dumbledore), Sirius and Remus, the couple who fans had voted that they most wanted to see wed. Even in this light-hearted sketch, the actors knew to perform their vows earnestly; their performance tied romantic and erotic behavior together, very like much of the fanfic this audience both reads and writes (vows begin at 6:17):

At LeakyCon, the primary generic frame is the musical. The ubiquitous sing-a-longs — both scheduled and spontaneous – are the most intensely emotionally involving entertainments, and the Starkids musical parodies provide the songbook that everyone knows. Of all LeakyCon’s players, the Starkids’ large troupe and devoted following have done the most to establish and sustain the con’s neo-masculine brand and community feel. As a popular genre, the musical has a democratic appeal, but Starkid shows further that potential by combining accessible songs, non-gendered (primarily group) dancing, and sincere emotional affect (“heart”), with feminist narrative content and the decentering of the heterosexual couple in favor of an inclusive group of friends. Although their shows feature every kind of drag as well as explicitly gay characters, these are never used as simply comic devices; rather, Starkid shows are character-driven and focus on emotional growth through loving companionship. Traits associated with dominant masculinity (grandstanding, bullying, desiring power and control, rigidity, exploitation of others, narcissism) are critiqued while desirable manhood is defined, by contrast, as the attainment of maturity through love. Falling in love is thus presented as more difficult and dangerous for male characters than battling their enemies because it forces them to break with masculine norms and open themselves up to emotional vulnerability. In the fan-favorite, canon-queering song “Granger Danger” from AVPM (2009) both Ron (Joey Richter) and Draco (brilliantly played, in drag, by Lauren Lopez) realize, fearfully, that they are falling love with Hermione: (skip to 1:38):

“Granger Danger” sets Ron on the road to mature manhood, but he doesn’t attain it until the third musical, VPSY (2012), in ‘I’m Just a Sidekick”:

While it is impossible to know how much of LeakyCon’s revised masculine brand will persevere or how it may be changed in the process of mainstreaming (Darren Criss’s career remains intriguing in this regard), it has been an undeniably affecting and inspiring model for thousands – if not millions — of fangirls (and fanboys), who are able to celebrate it through their own performances of masculinity at LeakyCon, such as this Starkid flashmob:

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson, the five boys who make up One Direction, are a fascinating case study in the changing dynamics of the modern music industry. While they share similarities with American boy bands of the past (from New Kids on the Block to *NSync) and with those original moptops of the British Invasion, they also represent a shift in the way such bands are formed, marketed, and made visible to the public. But what interests me most is the way in which the boys’ open, affectionate, and even homoerotic interaction represents a new (and welcome) shift in Western youth culture.

Perhaps the primary appeal of One Direction as a boy band is the combination of youth, exposure, and authenticity that is inherent in their marketing. The boys are all between 18 and 20 years old, already younger than the boy bands of the late 90s, but their youthful image is exacerbated by the rough, unpolished style of their marketing. While bands like *NSync and the Backstreet Boys spent years honing their dance moves, media training, and constructed personality archetypes in countries like Japan and Germany before hitting the Anglo-American market, One Direction has boarded an immediate and unstoppable roller coaster of international fame. As a result of this compressed timeline, the boys can’t actually dance (as anyone who saw their SNL appearance could attest), and their encounters with the press tend to be awkward and unpracticed.

In the era of instantly-posted YouTube clips, personal twitter accounts, and livestreaming webcam video, the boys of One Direction aren’t just reality TV stars – they are reality TV stars positioned in such a way as to appear stripped of almost all mediation and editing. This aesthetic celebrates notions of authenticity and connectedness with the fanbase, following the model my colleague Lindsay Hogan has studied regarding the stardom of Justin Bieber. As a result, YouTube is flooded with videos of the boys acting young and goofy in casual (or perhaps “casual”) settings: teasing each other, playing games, and generally acting like the teenage boys they are.

These kinds of shenanigans are not new. They are strikingly similar, in fact, to clips from the videos my own tweenage musical love, Hanson, would sell to the fans on VHS. The boys of Hanson, like One Direction, were younger than their ’90s boy band counterparts and thus free to act sillier. But Hanson was a band composed of brothers, and thus their videos lacked the final element of One Direction’s “authentic” portrayal of boy band friendship: comfortable homoeroticism.

Even a casual observer of One Direction and its marketing would notice the fact that the boys can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. They hug, grope, and fall asleep on each other constantly, pretend to kiss each other for laughs, and joke about queer relationships between them – to the extent of planning out elaborate hypothetical Valentine’s Day dates with each other. They are also remarkably affectionate, proclaiming their love and devotion to the other boys in the group without a hint of irony.

This is not, of course, the first time the idea of the boy band has been queered. “Popslash,” the term for homoerotic fanfiction about boy bands in the *NSync/BSB era, was one of the first large-scale internet fandoms for so-called “real person” fanfiction. And charges of queerness have always been levied at these types of bands by anti-fans seeking to use sexist, homophobic language to devalue the music tastes of young women. But past incarnations of boy bands always kept up defensively heterosexual presentations, to the extent that *NSync member Lance Bass did not feel comfortable coming out of the closet until 2006 (long after the band’s indefinite “hiatus”).

There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon. First and foremost, the One Direction boys are all quite open about their heterosexuality, publicly tweeting with their current girlfriends and giving interviews about their exes. Their homoeroticism, then, can be seen as a variation on the “bromance” trend – they can play with queerness because their heterosexuality is constantly reinforced, both in the reports of their personal lives and in their aggressively heteronormative song lyrics.

Yet this seems an inadequate explanation when, unlike the highly-constructed joke setups of bromance comedies, One Direction relies so heavily on an aesthetic of honesty and authenticity. What seems more likely is a phenomenon like the one sociologist Mark McCormack presented in a Huffington Post report, which points out the ways in which British teen boy culture is becoming less and less homophobic and more and more accepting of demonstrative male friendship. While the equivalence with American school cultures is less clear, the boys’ rapidly-growing transnational stardom, despite no national differences in marketing, may point to an increasing acceptance of this gentler form of masculinity in the American classroom.

Whatever the explanation, the casual affection and homoeroticism of One Direction opens up new avenues for analysis in the study of tween music cultures. How, for example, is the target tween girl audience responding to the softer masculinities of these presentations? And what effect might this marketing have on tween boys, particularly queer boys struggling to come to terms with their own sexuality?

I don’t have the answers right now, but I plan to keep looking. As soon as I finish listening to “One Thing” on repeat.

How to be a Gentleman was a classic example of poor execution, and as a result, just utterly awful television. Audiences realized this, didn’t watch, and it was quickly removed from the schedule. I don’t think the concept was inherently worse than others, but this show was painful to watch, unfunny, not at all smart. No meaningful lessons about the state of men in this.

Man Up began airing a bit later than most and is just, well, … meh. The show offers glimpses of the inner lives of men, but never with much complexity. It is oddly cast and acted, so that the tone of the series is really unclear. The show isn’t offensive so much as uninspired and cliché. I’d categorize it as trying to ride the tide of interest in shifting constructions of masculinity, but not offering much to engage with, and doubtful to return for a second season.

The surprise of the supposed tidal wave of men in crisis shows, at least for me, has been Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing, which isn’t bad and actually a kind of sweet little show (not that “sweet” is a particularly critical assessment). Sitcom history is not being redefined here, but the show is nuanced in its working through of what it constructs as generational shifts in dominant masculinities. A direct link can be drawn from Allen’s “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” Home Improvement character, a character Robert Hanke excellently critiqued as exemplary of a “mock-macho” masculinity, to the one on offer here. Age has softened the patriarchal perspective that Allen’s Mike Baxter-character voices, and importantly, his boss, played by Hector Elizando, at Outdoor Man—a Cabela’s-like hunting/sporting good store that previously allowed Baxter to traverse the world on catalog photo shoots—more often plays the patriarchal heavy, although both are clearly men who are artifacts of a world gone by.

The show doesn’t harbor undue nostalgia toward a more patriarchal past; instead Mike tries to make sense of his sense of norms relative to a world he now lives in—a gyneco-centric home that he seems more a visitor in than master of. Mike shares his home with three adult/young adult daughters, his wife, and a toddler grandson, creating a very different dynamic than Home Improvement’s family of three rambunctious young sons.

My biggest complaint about the series is the simplicity of Mandy, the middle daughter, who so far seems a caricatured dumb, shopping-loving, female teen, while her sisters are more fascinating studies in the range of femininities now available to women. Despite this, I’ve appreciated the adultness of the parental relationship that, in what might be throwaway lines, acknowledges the process of a couple aging together. A recent episode featured Mike saying something about going “for ice cream” which his wife and the audience (as represented through laugh track) seem uncertain of as a possible double entendre. But no, he meant let’s go for ice cream.

Although Mike may huff and puff about as though he’s king of the roost, it is clear this is not the case, and the resolution of episodic tension often works subtly to critique some of the ways the world works now without supporting the view that Mike’s patriarchal old way is any better. If anything, this connects the series more with the father/adult son tensions evident in Parenthood, Rescue Me, Men of a Certain Age, or Sons of Anarchy, among others, than with sitcoms debuting this fall.

From the vantage of a few months into the season, it seems the trend pieces—that also included men in Free Agents (cancelled) and Up All Night with what were termed “wimpy,” “emasculated,” or “loser” depictions of men—overestimated the phenomenon. ABC’s Work It, featuring victims of the “mancession” dressing as women, is scheduled for a January 3^rd debut. Stay tuned, but my suspicion is that its tenure might not match How to be a Gentleman.

*Update: Since submission of this post, Man Up has been pulled from the ABC schedule.*

This is the first in a series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

Part 1: The Trouble with Male Pop Singing

What immediately struck me about this still of Glee’s Chris Colfer (as Kurt Hummel) and Darren Criss (as Blaine Anderson) from Entertainment Weekly’s January 28, 2011 cover story is that this image might easily have been taken in the mid-to-late 1920s,  but it would have been unlikely to appear in the mainstream press since that time. Attractive young men in collegiate attire, sporting ukuleles or megaphones, singing to each other and to their adoring publics in high-pitched voices was a mainstay of 1920s American popular culture, then vanished during the Depression. Even the easy homoeroticism of a boy positioned between another boy’s legs dates back to popular images of the 1920s. In the early 1930s, a combination of greater media nationalization and censorship, increasing homophobia, and panic regarding the emasculating effects of male unemployment formed the context for the first national public attack on male popular singers as effeminate and as cultural degenerates. As a result, new, restrictive gender conventions became entrenched regarding male vocalizing, and the feminine stigma has remained. Until now, that is. The popularity of Glee, and, in particular, these two singers, has made me think that American culture may finally be starting to break with the gender norms of male singing performance that have persisted for the last 80 years. Since much of my research has focused on the establishment of these gendered conventions, I would like to offer some historical context and share some of the reasons why I find Glee’s representation of male popular singing so potentially groundbreaking.

Male singing has not always been so inextricably tangled up with assumptions about the gender/sexuality of the performer. Before the reactionary gender policing of popular singing, men who sang in falsetto or “double” voice were greatly prized. Song styles such as blues, torch, and crooning were sung by both sexes and all races; lyrics were generally not changed to conform to the sex of the singer or to reinforce heterosexual norms, so that men often sang to men and women to women. Crooners became huge stars for their emotional intensity, intimate microphone delivery, and devotion to romantic love. While they sang primarily to women, they had legions of male fans as well, and both sexes wept listening to their songs.

When a range of cultural authorities condemned crooners, the media industries developed new standards of male vocal performance to quell the controversy. Any gender ambiguity in vocalizing was erased; the popular male countertenor/falsetto voice virtually disappeared, song styles were gender-coded (crooning coded male), female altos were hired to replace the many popular tenors, and all song lyrics were appropriately gendered in performance, so that men sang to and about women, and vice-versa. Bing Crosby epitomized the new standard for males: lower-pitched singing, a lack of emotional vulnerability, and a patriarchal star image. Since then, although young male singers have always remained popular and profitable, their cultural clout has been consistently undermined by masculinist evaluative standards in which the singers themselves have been regularly ridiculed as immature and inauthentic, and their fans dismissed as moronic young females.

From its beginnings, however, Glee has actively worked to challenge this conception. The show’s recognition and critique of dominant cultural constructions of performance and identity has always been one of the its great strengths. Glee has continually acknowledged the emasculating stigma of male singing (the jocks regularly assert that “singing is gay”) while providing a compelling counter-narrative that promotes pop singing as liberating and empowering for both men and society at large. Glee‘s audience has in many ways been understood to be reflective of the socially marginalized types represented on the show, and one of the recurring narrative struggles is determining who gets to speak or, rather, sing. Singing on Glee is thus frequently linked to acts of self-determination in the face of social oppression, a connection that has been most explicitly and forcefully made through gay teen Kurt’s storyline this past season, which has challenged societal homophobia both narratively and musically. In the narrative, Kurt transfers to Dalton Academy to escape bullying and joins the Warblers, an all-male a cappella group fronted by gay crooner Blaine. Musically, Glee also takes a big leap, shifting from exposing the homophobic, misogynist stigma surrounding male singing to actively shattering it and singing on its grave.

From the very first moment Kurt is introduced to Blaine and the Warblers, as they perform a cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” to a group of equally enthusiastic young men, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The song choice is appropriate in that it posits future-boyfriend Blaine as both a romantic and erotic dream object for Kurt, and it presents Dalton as a fantasy space in which the feminine associations of male singing are both desired and regularly celebrated. “Teenage Dream” was the first Glee single to debut at #1 on iTunes, immediately making Criss a star and indicating that a good portion of the American public was eager to embrace the change in vocal politics.

And “Teenage Dream” was only the beginning. This fantasy moment has become a recurring, naturalized fixture of the series. Just as Kurt turned his fantasy of boyfriend Blaine into a reality, so did Glee effectively realize its own redesign of male singing through a multitude of scenes that I never thought I would see on American network television: young men un-ironically singing pop songs to other young men, both gay and straight; teen boys falling in love with other boys as they sing to them; males singing popular songs without changing the lyrics from “him” to “her” to accommodate gender norms; and the restoration and celebration of the countertenor (male alto) sound and singer in American popular culture (I will address Chris Colfer’s celebrated countertenor voice in the next installment of this series). And instead of becoming subjects of cultural ridicule, Colfer’s rapturous countertenor and Criss’s velvety crooner have become Glee’s most popular couple, its stars largely celebrated as role models of a new order of male performer. It’s about time.

For example, almost every Jersey Shore episode features a scene in which the roommates sit down to an elaborate Sunday night dinner—plates of pasta and sauce, sausage and peppers, garlic bread, etc. This traditional Italian-American meal, usually prepared by the matriarch of the house, is a time to put aside arguments and reconnect with “family” before the start of the workweek. It is significant, however, that the shopping, cooking, and very often the cleaning for this ritual meal is orchestrated by the men of the house. This stands in contrast to the casts’ personal experiences with domestic chores. When, for example, Vinny’s mother visits the house in season one, Pauly D compares her to his own mother, an “old school Italian,” because she cleans the Jersey Shore house after fixing the roommates an extravagant lunch. And Snooki claims that Vinny’s mother reminds her of her grandmother: “That’s like a true Italian woman. You want to please everyone else at the table. And then when everyone’s done eating, you clean up and then you eat by yourself.” However, lacking compliant women to perform these domestic labors, the Jersey Shore men must men cook and clean for themselves.

The men also violate traditional gender expectations in their obsessive grooming habits. Mike codifies his daily toilette with formal titles, like “Gym, Tan, Laundry” and discusses his grooming habits as an imperative, not as a personal choice: “If you don’t go to the gym, you don’t look good. If you don’t tan, you’re pale. If you don’t do laundry, you ain’t got no clothes.” Mike also makes weekly trips to the barbershop for haircuts and eyebrow waxing. Likewise, when preparing for a night on the town, the men don something Mike has termed “the shirt before the shirt,” a preshirt that is worn until moments before heading out the door. Although Mike’s clever reframing of his obsessive compulsive grooming habits as de riguer behavior for any self-respecting guido provides yet another way to cash in on his reality stardom, it also deflects attention away from behaviors that would otherwise be deemed “too feminine.”
The women of Jersey Shore are not burdened with a similar beauty regimen; often, when the men head to the gym, they go shopping or get drunk. And Snooki has been known to go to work wearing the same outfit and make up that she wore the previous evening. While we do see the women in the house prepare for a night at the club with hairspray and push up bras, MTV’s cameras do not devote nearly as much screen time to this process. Instead, Jersey Shore highlights the labor that goes into the production of male beauty within the guido subculture.

Can we read the Jersey Shore men’s singular drive to humiliate, bed, and then dispose of an endless string of women as simply another symptom of the complex gender roles they must inhabit in order to be cast members on the Jersey Shore? If Mike didn’t GTL or smush, would he still be a guido? And if the roommates didn’t eat a traditional Italian meal every Sunday could they still lay claim to their status as authentic Italian Americans? Jersey Shore highlights the conditions under which certain gender roles are performed within ethnic subcultures, specifically, how the presence of reality TV’s cameras enforces a compulsory masculinity on the aspiring Jersey Shore “guido.”