Terminating the Postmodern: Masculinity and Pomophobia

Theorizing Masculinity With/In the Media

“…In closing, I want to return to Hall's observation about the body as a signifier of subjectivity, in order to single out work that attempts to put the embodied struggles of hegemonic masculinities and its various others into the context of the postmodern condition. Byers (1995Byers ( ,1996, Savran (1996) and Pfeil (1996) all read Hollywood rnasculinities as a cultural response to the historical trauma and identity crises wrought by the transition to late capitalism or post-Fordism. and homosexuality become "tropes" of a range of economic, social, and cultural shifts and developments since the 1970s.…”

“…I then consider Berger, Wallis, and Watson's Constructing Masculinity (1995) and Smith's Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture (1996), two recent collections that lay the basis for current debates even as they do not exhaust all the possibilities for research and analysis. Work by Bordo (1994), Brod (1995), Byers (1995Byers ( , 1996 Nixon (1996), Pfeil(1996), Savran (1996, Shaviro (1993), Tasker (1993), and Walser (1993) attests to the range of projects and diversity of theoretical routes. My simple argument is that, whereas film studies continues to maintain a prominent place in the study of popular representations of masculinity, because of its own rich tradition of film theory and criticism and a fascination with spectacular Hollywood masculini-ties, studies of masculinities in television, mediated sports, advertising, and publicity, as well as popular music, are also demonstrating the relevance of theoretical work that has pushed, as Carole Spitzack has put it, our "existing visions and articulations" of masculinity.…”

‘All about Eve’: Mothers, Masculinities and the 2011 UK Riots

“…Consequently, practices of stop and search disrupt the codes of masculinity; the male body becomes the object of scrutiny and control by other men. As Thomas Byers (1995, p. 14) puts it: the masculine body in ‘a heterosexual economy, sees itself as inviolable, as hard and sealed off rather than soft or open, as the penetrator rather than the penetrable’.…”

The Intertextual Terminator: The Role of Film in Branding “Arnold Schwarzenegger”

“…While both of the terminators in T2 are coded as "White" and "male", they are constructed through a binary that is underwritten by racial and sexual categories. This is suggested by Byers (1995) who reads the shape-shifting T1000 that oozes through spaces and penetrates its victims with pointy objects as embodying "pomophobia". Pomophobia, he explains, is the displacement of fears about economic instability in a postmodern world onto the bodies of minorities.…”