School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemWhen men were men: masculinity and memory in turn-of-the-millennium cinema( 2017)This thesis explores the imbrications of memory and masculinity in screen culture at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Key works in memory studies from this period argue that remembering and forgetting are complex practices informed by psychological discourses (for example, the debates over recovered memory), cultural and media industries (most notably, the news and popular entertainment industries), and commemorative practices (such as the rituals around Remembrance Day). These factors heavily influence how memory shapes both personal and social identity, and this thesis marshals these insights to explain how key film and television texts at the turn of the millennium remember the (imagined) past of masculinity. Many Hollywood productions of the era feature male protagonists beset by problems of memory and identity (including pathologies such as amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorder), and this thesis argues that in these works, nostalgic desires for lost masculinity have been supplanted by more traumatic modes of memory, ones which provide more critical and conflicted perspectives on both memory and masculinity. These more sophisticated representations demonstrate how the much vaunted contemporary crisis of masculinity is in fact a crisis of male reflexivity, as men struggle to come to terms with their loss of a transcendent or universal subjectivity and its replacement with a specific gendered identity that must compete for recognition within an increasingly pluralistic culture.