Hitchcock Annual (1994) - Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema
Details
- book review: Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema
- author(s): Corey K. Creekmur
- journal: Hitchcock Annual (01/Nov/1994)
- issue: page 168
- journal ISSN: 1062-5518
- keywords: Feminist Analysis, Gender Roles, Ina Rae Hark, James Stewart, Klaus Theweleit, Laura Mulvey, Men, Men in Film, Montgomery Clift, Pat Kirkham, Psychoanalytic Analysis, Raymond Bellour, Screen (1975) - Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, Tania Modleski
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Abstract
Review of "Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema" edited by Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (ISBN 0415077591)
Article
Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds. London & New York: Routledge, 1993. 272 pages. $49.95 doth. $15.95 paper.
Reviewed by COREY K. CREEKMUR
Screening the Male arrives amidst a testosterone surge of critical studies of male stars and the cinematic representation of masculinity, alongside Dennis Bingham's Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (Rutgers, 1994); Susan Jeffords's Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers, 1993); Peter Lehman's Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Temple, 1993); Graham McCann's Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean (Rutgers, 1993); Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992); Robert Sklar's City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Carfield (Princeton, 1992); Paul Smith's Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota, 1993); Yvonne Tasker's Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (Routledge, 1993); as well as two similar anthologies, Male Trouble, edited by Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minnesota, 1993), and You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (St. Martin's Press, 1994).
This astonishing proliferation of academic work on male actors (Bingham, Sklar, and McCann even suggest a subgenre of the tri-star study), contemporary male genres, and the visual representation of the male body is certainly a "post-feminist" phenomenon, even if that controversial designation merely indicates chronology. As a specific inquiry generated by the progressive transformation of feminism into gender studies, alongside th...
Corey K. Creekmur is an Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University, where he teaches courses in film and cultural studies. He is co-editor (with Alexander Doty) of Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian & Queer Essays on Popular Culture, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
