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Pants On Fyre: Parasitic Masculinity And The Fyre Festival Documentaries, Kristen Hoerl, Casey Ryan Kelly
Pants On Fyre: Parasitic Masculinity And The Fyre Festival Documentaries, Kristen Hoerl, Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of an imitative form of white masculine subjectivity that thrives in precarity, even as they recuperate the status of late-stage neoliberalism by symbolically removing parasitic masculinity from the neoliberal social order that it feeds on.
Constructing Lumbersexuality: Marketing An Emergent Masculine Taste Regime, Mark A. Rademacher, Casey R. Kelly
Constructing Lumbersexuality: Marketing An Emergent Masculine Taste Regime, Mark A. Rademacher, Casey R. Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
This article examines the online retailer Huckberry.com as a singular, centralized authority responsible for marketing “lumbersexuality” as an emergent, gender-normative taste regime. As an evolution of the devalued hipster marketplace myth, analysis reveals Huckberry promotes an adaptable taste regime to its young, educated, urban, White male clientele that unites goods, meanings, and practices across multiple fields of consumption that reconnect indie consumption and taste with a fantasy of “authentic” masculinity. We argue that Huckberry offers men semiotic resources that merge the urban with the outdoors in a way that enables the enactment of a fraught though seemingly durable masculine identity …
The Wounded Man: Foxcatcher And The Incoherence Of White Masculine Victimhood, Casey Ryan Kelly
The Wounded Man: Foxcatcher And The Incoherence Of White Masculine Victimhood, Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility of screen masculinity evades criticism and, further, how melancholic male dramas nurture a traumatic attachment to victimhood. Examining the film Foxcatcher (2014), I show how unmasked portraits of white male victimhood function as counterparts to the hard-bodied action hero. The filmmaker’s …
“I’M Here To Do Business. I’M Not Here To Play Games.” Work, Consumption, And Masculinity In Storage Wars, Mark A. Rademacher, Casey Ryan Kelly
“I’M Here To Do Business. I’M Not Here To Play Games.” Work, Consumption, And Masculinity In Storage Wars, Mark A. Rademacher, Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine …
Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric Of The New Culinary Male, Casey Ryan Kelly
Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric Of The New Culinary Male, Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
Between their detailed instructions, measurements, and helpful hints, cookbooks provide directives about the proper management of household space. Cookbooks establish rules that govern intimate habits, helping readers to make sense of how cooking rituals fit within the domestic division of labor. They cultivate, naturalize, and sometimes resist domestic habits as they pass into the realm of unconscious investments that ideological critics call “common sense.” However, Isaac West argues that while cookbooks “invite readers into specific subject positions, some of which are more attainable than others,” they provide cooks with “opportunities for communicating who they are and who they might want …
Feminine Purity And Masculine Revenge-Seeking In Taken (2008), Casey Ryan Kelly
Feminine Purity And Masculine Revenge-Seeking In Taken (2008), Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
The 2008 film Taken depicts the murderous rampage of an ex-CIA agent seeking to recover his teenage daughter from foreign sex traffickers. I argue that Taken articulates a demand for a white male protector to serve as both guardian and avenger of white women’s “purity” against the purportedly violent and sexual impulses of third-world men. A neocolonial narrative retold through film, Taken infers that the protection of white feminine purity legitimates both male conquest abroad and overbearing protection of young women at home. I contend that popular films such as Taken are a part of the broader cultural system of …