All and nothing: white heterosexual masculinity in contemporary popular cinema

Abstract

This thesis explores popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity, primarily in contemporary Hollywood texts. Through a detailed textual analysis of films, which are firmly placed in the specific historical, social, cultural and political context in which they were produced and consumed, it explores how white heterosexual masculinity in popular American cinema is often represented as an “all and nothing” subjectivity, one both universal and invisible, privileged and victimised, phallic and lacking, unified and deconstructed, enfleshed and disembodied, ordinary and anxiously vacuous, the locus of origins and ontologically empty - a flaying of binary oppositions that only a subjectivity that can construct itself as the dominant norm can wield. Approaching this topic through a variety of theoretical frameworks, including feminist theory, critical race theory, whiteness studies, queer theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it contends that white heterosexual masculinity is a radically unstable, performative construct that consolidates itself through discursive strategies. It also explores how the category of class always traverses white heterosexual masculinity, destabilising its construction as a coherent, seamless category. Finally, it argues for the importance of interrogating popular cinematic representations of “ordinary” straight white men, who are always also extra-ordinary as well.