Suchergebnisse

Although popular culture contrasts men and women as opposites, cross-gender friendships between the sexes are thriving. I agree with other scholars that men's friendships with women are increasing in number, value, and social acceptability in the United States. I argue that we should expand our contexts for understanding cross-gender friendships from dyads or paid bonds to include men and women comrades, coworkers, in-laws, exes, and members of other mixed groups.

Two popular entertainments, the South Park cartoon show and The Blue Man Group theatrical performance, are analyzed as symptomatic of a new configuration of masculinity in the contemporary United States. This masculinity is shaped by young men's ambivalent resistance and accommodation to the consumer culture. It manifests itself in an expulsive anality unlike the bourgeois character traits described by Freud or the polymorphously sensual scatology that Bakhtin ascribes to folk culture. Not the breadwinner masculinity of the post-World War II era, this market masculinity is simultaneously childish, creative, homoerotic, homophobic, racist, cynical, and paranoid. It reflects young men's difficulties in maintaining individual autonomy both against the impersonal authority of the law of the father and against the more seductive power of corporate advertising, which might be called the market of the mother. This analysis furthers feminist efforts toward socially contextualized, nondualistic understandings of masculinity.