Stranger Things: boys and feminism

ABSTRACT

Contemporary media discourse suggests that feminists exclusively understand boys and the experience of boyhood through such frameworks as ‘toxic masculinity’, positioning boys as the default inheritors of a ‘patriarchal dividend’. Media narratives might be expected to favour such agonistic oppositions, but the dominant forms of scholarship on boys also often take this line, or position boys as subjects at risk of harm done by either the contemporary expectations of masculinity or the historical impact of feminism that has helped produce them. This paper considers some cultural and intellectual problems arising from these dominant ideas about the relations between feminism and boyhood. Through close analysis of Netflix series Stranger Things in the context of the narratives about boys that surround it, we consider representations of boyhood heroism and the pressures on boyhood. We also outline a case for the necessity of feminist research that engages with ideas and images of boys and experiences of boyhood in affirmative terms, which avoids a presumed opposition between the interests of boys and feminism.

KEYWORDS:

• Boys
• feminism
• toxic masculinity
• hegemonic masculinity
• Stranger Things

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research.

Notes

1. Although this is now transcribed as ‘El’ on Netflix subtitles, most fan sites (like Stranger Things Wiki) and media discussion still use the name ‘Elle’.

2. Hills’ insistence on feminist attention to changing historical contexts also draws on Deleuze and Guattari to articulate a ‘logic of capture’ by which analytic objects are ‘contained and interpreted in an endless being-made-what-one-is-a priori’ (Hills 1999, 44).

Additional information

Funding

This research is an output of the Australian Research Council’s Special Research Initiative on Australian Society and Culture, within the project ‘Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem’.

Notes on contributors

Catherine Driscoll

Catherine Driscoll is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research ranges across the areas of youth and gender studies, popular cultural and media studies, cultural theory, modernist studies, and rural cultural studies. Her books include Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (2002), Modernist Cultural Studies (2010), Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (2011), The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience (2014), and The Hunger Games: Spectacle, Risk, and the Girl Action Hero (with Heatwole 2018).

Liam Grealy

Liam Grealy is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. He is employed by the Housing for Health Incubator, for which his work examines housing and infrastructure policy in regional and remote Australia and southeast Louisiana. His research and policy work also relates to youth and media, preventive detention, and higher education research.