Lovers: Men, Women, and Gender Equality

Kord, Susanne; Krimmer, Elisabeth

doi:10.1057/9781137016218_9

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This broadly reverses the troubled or sinister treatment of working‐class people seen in New Hollywood productions of the previous era (Jameson 1977). But it supports expectations of an instrumentalized working class deployed as white, male “hard bodies” in contemporary action films (Kord and Krimmer 2016; Kraszewski 2019). Thus although we see them regularly, working people mostly have partial, subordinate agency and are depicted through a distorted race‐gender lens.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

Nostalgic Resignation:Working‐ClassCharacters in Neoliberal Film

Ikeler

Scannell

Charles³

et al. 2023

Sociological Forum

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article interrogates the depiction of working‐class and subaltern characters in neoliberal US cinema. Deploying a Marxian class schema in a content analysis of 53 top‐grossing films released between 1980 and 2010, we find working‐class characters unexpectedly prominent. They appear in most films, lead in a plurality, and are far more often heroes than heavies. Yet the vast majority are white, male and US‐born while exhibiting near ubiquitous subordination to up‐class co‐leads, mainly professional‐managers. Most working‐class characters also die or exit their class by film's end, abdicating agency and leaving up‐class figures in charge. We argue this amounts to a metaframe of nostalgic resignation: a collective image mobilizing masculinity and Eurocentrism to justify a historic loss of working‐class power. In contrast to critical, disconnected or escapist models of mass media's relation to actual social inequality, we argue these findings support a reproductionist (Althusser 2014) or propagandist (Herman and Chomsky 2002) understanding of that dynamic enriched by Hall's “racially structured dominance” approach (1980).

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%