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Abstract
Offering a critical interrogation of white masculinity within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), this essay uncovers a key strategy through which hegemonic systems persist, positing the abject body as a trope for understanding the life of hegemonic ideological formations. Adopting the “interspace” of abjection allows hegemonic masculinity to become everything and nothing at the same time and is a “dangerous” strategy that must be denied at all costs. Insofar as hegemony requires its abjection to remain invisible, this essay names hegemonic masculinity “abject” in order to offer critical prophylaxis against white masculinity's attempts to reproduce its cultural privilege.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank John Sloop, the anonymous reviewers, the editorial staff, John Luciates, and Isaac West for their help on this essay.
Notes
1. Demonstrating the film's cult status, Fight Club has recently been elevated to the status of “midnight movie” at independent theaters across the country, including Los Angeles, Detroit, and Nashville. On cult viewings at home, see also Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
2. For readings of the film as misogynistic, see Stacy Thompson, “Punk Cinema,” Cinema Journal 43, issue 2 (2004): 47–66. See also Henry Giroux, “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: ‘Fight Club,’ Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculinity,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 21.1 (Winter 2001): 1–31. For readings of the film as rejecting “the idealization of phallic power” and critiquing “the experiences of men trapped within” the restrictive paradigm of hegemonic masculinity see Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates, “Cinematic Symptoms of Masculinity in Transition: Memory, History and Mythology in Contemporary Film,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society 10 (2005): 299–318. See also Terry Lee, “Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This is What the Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels like,” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25, issue 3–4 (fall/winter 2002): 423.
3. Warren Smith and Debbie Lisle, “It's Not Really About Fighting,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4, issue 1 (April 2002): 135.
4. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 5.
5. Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus’ queer reading suggests another significant “cover-up” within DVD extras: the attempt to contain the homoerotic desire within the film text. See “Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View: The Fight Club DVD as Digital Closet,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19.1 (March 2002): 21–43.
6. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 59.
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
8. John Louis Lucaites and James McDaniel, “Telescopic Mourning/warring in the Global Village: Decomposing (Japanese) Authority Figures,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, issue 1 (Mar 2004): 21–4.
9. Lucaites and McDaniel, 22–4.
10. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 112.
11. Kristeva, 2.
12. Kristeva, 4.
13. Kristeva, 63, 61.
14. Kristeva, 10, 5.
15. Kristeva, 109, 61.
16. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 19, 27.
17. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 25.
18. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (London: Routledge, 1994): 8. See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Metheun, 1986).
19. Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997): 163.
20. Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, ed. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 247.
21. Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, ed. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 247.
22. Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, ed. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 247.
23. Kristeva, 5.
24. Kristeva, 10, 5.
25. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): 191–2.
26. See Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993); Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Tina Chanter, The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
27. Bakhtin, 26.
28. Bakhtin, 9.
29. Bakhtin, 15.
30. Bakhtin, 15–16.
31. Bakhtin, 16.
32. R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19 (2005): 848. Likewise, while J.W. Gibson suggests that American masculinity post-Vietnam has used violence and “warrior” culture to define itself against femininity, this essay suggests that even within the paramilitary culture of Fight Club, there is recourse to the feminine. See J.W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994).
33. Eric King Watts, “Border Patrolling and ‘Passing’ in Eminem's 8 Mile,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22.3 (August 2005): 189.
34. For instance, Susan Jeffords, Remasculinization of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Also see, Susan Jeffords, “The Big Switch: Hollywood Masculinity in the Nineties,” Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hillary Radner, Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993): 196–208.
35. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991): 7.
36. David Savran, Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998): 9.
37. Robert Hanke, “Redesigning Men: Hegemonic Masculinity in Transition,” Men, Masculinity, and Media, ed. Steve Craig (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992): 185–98.
38. Kristeva, 1.
39. Andrew Hewitt, “Masochism and Terror: Fight Club and the Violence of Neo-fascist Ressentiment,” Telos 136 (Fall 2006): 115. See also Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
40. See Michael Clark, “Fight Club, Phallic Masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economies of Patriarchy,” Journal of Men's Studies 11, issue 1 (Fall 2002): 65–76. See also Kevin Alexander Boon, “Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club,” Journal of Men's Studies 11, issue 3 (spring 2003): 267.
41. Gavin Smith, “Inside Out,” Film Comment 35.5 (September/October 1999): 60.
42. See Brian Baker's Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres: 1945–2000 (London: Continuum, 2006). See also Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, “Enjoy Your Fight! Fight Club as a Symptom of the Network Society,” Cultural Values 6.4 (2002): 349–67; and Ruth Quinney, “'Mr. Xerox,’ the Domestic Terrorist, and the Victim-Citizen: Masculine and National Anxiety in Fight Club and Anti-Terror Law,” Law and Literature 19. 2 (Summer 2007): 327–55; and Kathy Smith, “The Emptiness of Zero: Representations of Loss, Absence, Anxiety, and Desire in the Late Twentieth Century,” Critical Quarterly 46, issue 1 (April 2004): 55.
43. Caldwell.
44. Caldwell.
45. Christopher Deacy, “Integration and Rebirth Through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 17, issue 1 (2002): 62–3. See also Glenn Whitehouse, “Unimaginable Variations: Christian Responsibility in the Cinema of Broken Identity,” Literature and Theology 18, issue 3 (September 2004): 321–50.
46. Hewitt, 116–17.
47. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 25.
48. Melissa Iocco, “Addicted to Affliction: Masculinity and Perversity in Crash and Fight Club,” Gothic Studies, 9.1 (May 2007): 49. See also Johnathan Rutherford, “At War.” Cultural Studies 19, issue 5 (September 2005): 622–42.
49. Kristeva, 102.
50. Kristeva, 102.
51. Brookey and Westerfelhaus also suggest that the “post-coital” nature of these fight scenes reveals a queer subtext. See Brookey and Westerfelhaus, 35.
52. See Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
53. Hewitt, 118.
54. Kristeva 5.
55. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 70.
56. Iocco, 54.
57. Alex Tuss, “Masculine Identity and Success: A Critical Analysis of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club,” Journal of Men's Studies, 12, issue 2 (winter 2004): 93.
58. Ta, 266–7.
59. Watts, 204. It is significant to note that Eminem's first major LP, Slim Shady, was, like Fight Club, released in 1999 and tells the story of an alter ego.
60. Ta, 266.
61. Bainbridge and Yates, 307. See also Matt Jordan, “Marxism, Not Manhood: Accommodation and Impasse in Seamus Heaney’ Beowulf and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club,” Men and Masculinities 4, issue 4 (April 2002): 368–79.
62. See George Wilson, “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, issue 1 (winter 2006): 81–95.
63. Caldwell.
64. James Craine and Stuart Aiken, “Street Fighting: Placing the Crisis of Masculinity in David Fincher's Fight Club,” GeoJournal, 59, issue 4 (2004): 295.
65. Kristeva, 3–4.
66. Kristeva, 96.
67. Kristeva, 15
68. Ta, 276. In contrast, however, Brookey and Westerfelhaus suggest that the prominent role of Tyler's penis in the film, his “nice big cock,” signals a homoerotic desire within the text. See Westerfelhaus and Brookey, 29.
69. Smith and Lisle, 134–5.
70. Asbj⊘rn Gr⊘nstad, “One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body,” Film Criticism 28, issue 1 (2003): 5–6.
71. Smith and Lisle, 134 and Gr⊘nstad, 5.
72. Smith and Lisle, 135.
73. Kristeva, 10.