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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Despite an abundance of transdisciplinary research about adolescence and youth development, we seem no closer to understanding male youth violence such as the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado or the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming than we did 10 years ago. Parents, educators, researchers and policymakers have sought to identify the root causes of this violence by looking at three separate, but overlapping areas: access to handguns, parental influence/authority, and the media's influence on young people. Given that leisure has been identified as a central developmental context for young men and since they consume large quantities of media in their free time, an investigation on how media consumption can influence the ways in which young people construct their identifies vis-a-vis gender socialization processes seems warranted. Therefore, the central purpose of this study was to explore the media consumption of young men to understand how they create and maintain masculinity. Despite more than 30 years of feminist advocacy for the eradication and/or alteration of rigidly defined gender roles, participants in this research project indicated that narrow roles and expectations of what it means to be a "man" and of "manhood" are still firmly entrenched in U.S. society. Using collective memory work (Haug, 1992), participants agreed that their earliest, individual memories of what it means to be a man were steeped in violent media representations of men and maleness. Finally, their collective analysis and theorizing led them to conclude that through media consumption, men actively construct and maintain impressions of masculinity based on notions of heroism, violence, and 'macho' images. In short, participants believed that the media was critical in the production and reproduction of hegemonic masculinity.
Theoretical Framework
Hegemonic Masculinity
Connell (2002, 1995) described "masculinity" as those practices in which men (and sometimes women) engage male social gender roles with the effects being expressed through the body, personality, and culture. Culture, then, serves as both a cause and effect of masculine behavior, and in our western society masculinity has taken shape in relation to securing and maintaining dominance. The masculine power is balanced by the general symbolism of difference whereby the masculine is valued over the feminine. While masculinity is grounded in difference, it is not a static characteristic or personal identity trait. Instead masculinity is a fluid construct that is organized within social relations and ultimately changes those social relations. According to Connell (2005), masculinity is not just an object of knowledge but the interplay between the agency of the individual and the structure of the social institution.
By placing masculinity in a historical moment and cultural context, researchers examine how, at that moment, in that culture, the framework of patriarchy emphasizes the control of emotions and denial of sexuality around the construction of masculinity. As Humphries (1985) suggested, researchers "cannot take seriously the staple references to masculinity and instead develop our own images of how we want to be." (p. 77). This argument contends that while there could be a variety of ways to perform masculinity, men often feel obligated, consciously or unconsciously, to perform masculinity in specific ways that are dependent upon the current cultural climate. These dominant ideological norms of masculinity are referred to as hegemonic masculinity.
What is hegemonic masculinity? According to Connell (2002, 1995), hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practices that embody the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees the dominant position of men and subordination of women. He describes how "terms such as 'hegemonic masculinity' name not fixed character types but configurations of practice generated in particular situations" (1995, p. 196). Thus, hegemonic masculinity is enacted in individual social interactions as well as conveyed through institutional practices (Connell, 1998).
Although hegemonic masculinity is not itself fixed, it is possible to identify some of its critical components in a specific culture and time period such as post-industrial America. Elucidating the features of hegemonic masculinity is a necessary starting point for any cultural analysis. This is not to say that these are the only features of post-industrial hegemonic masculinity; rather, it merely serves as a point of departure for later arguments. Hegemonic masculinity in this context manifests itself in a variety of social practices. A central feature of hegemonic masculinity is its definition of masculinity as being "not-female" (Bird, 1996, p. 125). This concern with avoiding femininity manifests itself into practices that objectify, control, and abuse women (Bird, 1996; McCreary, 1994; Schultz, 2001), a reluctance to express emotions and a privileging of rationality.
Hegemonic masculinity is also constructed through the physicality associated with the body (Gershick & Miller, 2001). Body performances associated with hegemonic masculinity include the exercise of physical violence and heterosexual sexual activity (Connell, 2005, 1995). These practices associated with the body, particularly for young men, are often socially constructed as markers of "true manhood." For example, competitive sports represent a major arena in which masculinity is performed (Kimmel, 1996; Messner, 2002, 1992; Whitson, 1990). Analyses of masculinity and critical analyses of hegemonic masculinity located in the sports sociology in the United States and United Kingdom have devoted extensive attention to examining sports as a context for the construction and maintenance of masculinity and hegemonic masculinity (Anderson, 2005; Bryson, 1987; Messner, 2002, 1998; Pronger, 1999). These researchers have articulated connections between sports contexts, episodes of aggression, socialization processes and the ways in which sporting contexts serve as a fertile training ground for the construction of masculinity and the construction of violent masculinity (Bryson). In addition to analyses that examine the ways in which representations of male athletes normalize violent masculinity, sports sociologists have also attended to the ways in which media representations of males and females contribute to gendered binaries and oppressive ideologies (Anderson & Dill, 2000). We have some understanding of the role of sports in contributing to the construction of masculinity, but little empirical evidence can be found that helps us to understand the effects of media consumption within leisure contexts that may also contribute to the construction of hegemonic masculinity and/or the construction of a violent masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity by its very nature has social authority, and is not easy to challenge openly. Those men who choose separation, or otherwise find themselves separated, from hegemonic masculinity face negative consequences that result from defying social norms (McCreary, 1994). Given that hegemonic masculinity is constructed in individual and institutional practices, it is important to consider the cultural texts through which the gender order is constructed, reified, and negotiated. Indeed, Ging (2005) conducted a study on masculinity and mediated images and found that "mediated fictions are part of wider 'gender scripts' that both inform and are informed by the social structures within which (male) viewers are immersed" (p. 29).
Mass Media as Leisure
Cultural texts such as television, film, books, magazines, music and video games not only exist for the purposes of providing pleasure in the context of leisure, but also have the capacity to impart information and understanding in relation to our gender identities through the transmission of cultural values and social norms. Johnson, Richmond & Kivel (2008) found that leisure is a site for the consumption of media by males that provides pleasure and at the same times serves as a site that reproduces masculinity. In an effort to be more critical of these meaning-making texts, feminist cultural scholars have scrutinized how they convey normative gender expectations (Dow, 1996; Waiters, 1995). In particular, feminist cultural critics have explored the relationship women have to society as material, historical, and imaged beings; emphasizing how that relationship continues to reinforce patriarchal social relations and encourage domination and marginalization (c.f. Brunsdon, D'Acci, & Spigel, 1997). Stemming from this foundational work, many scholars have also begun to question how intertextual and sociological products offer opportunities for men to construct meaning about masculinity in their lives (Clatterbaugh, 1998). According to a recent national poll, boys, are "active users of media, watching hours of television, movies, music videos, and sports, listening to radio and CDs, surfing the internet and playing computer and video games. Researchers have suggested that the cumulative impact of these media may make them some of the most influential forces in their lives, especially during adolescence. Despite these powerful findings, there is remarkably little research on media's influence on boys" (Children Now, 1999, p. 4).
Violence, Mass Media & Masculinity
In April 2002, a 19-year old male, recently expelled from school, opened fire on teachers and students in his school, killing 18 people before killing himself. One spectator, who joined others in public mourning, was heard to say," ... Germany is America now" (Hooper, 2002, para. 23). Such a comment underscores the prevalence of violence generally and the proliferation of school-based youth on youth violence that has emerged in the past decade. Apart from school killings, there has also been an increase in murders committed by people who explicitly acknowledge the influence of media. In the same year of the school shooting addressed above, a 17-year-old French male stabbed a female while wearing a mask from the popular movie "Scream." [In addition, more than 10 male teenagers have murdered friends and family members in North America and in Europe while wearing "Scream" masks or because of having watched the film numerous times (Webster, 2002).[
Parents, educators, researchers and policymakers have sought to identify the root causes of this violence by looking at three separate, but overlapping areas: access to handguns, parental influence and/or the lack of parental influence and authority; and the media's influence on young people. The American Academy of Pediatrics (2002) noted that media violence can often lead to aggressive behavior in children. Over 1,000 studies confirm this link and one study indicates that "by the age of 18, the average American child will have viewed about 200,000 acts of violence on television alone" (Media Violence AAP Committee on Communications in Pediatrics, 1995, p.6). And though that is staggering, Anderson and Dill (2000) argued that the increasing construction of an active aggressive script in video games is more powerful at perpetuating violence than the passive violence experienced in viewing television or movies.
The causes and explanations of violence are complex and multi-layered and though various interests groups (e.g., National Rifle Association) have clung to their respective explanations for the violence, researchers and activists have articulated the link between the consumption of media products by young people and their attitudes toward issues such as sex and violence (c.f. American Academy of Pediatrics, 1995). Indeed, media analyst Jackson Katz (1995) argued that "increasingly, academics, community activists and politicians have been paying attention to the role of the mass media in producing, reproducing and legitimating this violence" (p. 133). And it is perhaps no surprise to learn that males are the primary consumers of these violent images (Children Now, 1999). "From rock and rap music and videos, Hollywood action films, professional and college sports, the culture produces a stream of images of violent, abusive men and promotes characteristics such as dominance, power and control as a means of establishing or maintaining manhood" (Katz & Jhally, 1999, p. E1).
Katz and Jhally (1999) made explicit the connection between school violence, the representation of violence in the media and the consumption of media as a mechanism for normalizing violence when they suggested that what the "school shootings reveal is not a crisis in youth culture, but a crisis in masculinity ... the issue is not just violence in the media but the construction of violent masculinity as a...
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