Thesis (M. A.)--Oklahoma State University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in electronic format via Internet..

This thesis investigates the way in which tensions between the discursive dominance of the nuclear model and an acknowledgement of the plurality of family forms has been embodied in popular representations of fatherhood. Based on assumptions of gendered spheres of experience that define the domestic sphere as primarily ‘feminine’, fathers occupy an uncertain position within the discourse of the nuclear family. It is this ambiguous position, when contrasted with an assumption of their ultimate dominance, which creates confusion between the symbolic figure of the absent patriarch and the literal presence of the father within family life. Television, in particular, has regularly been forced to confront this dynamic between discursive absence and literal presence, due to the centrality of the nuclear family in both the commissioning and scheduling of programmes. Television’s representation of fatherhood regularly re-asserts or undermines patriarchal privilege by representing the father as a threat to the coherence of the family unit or as an overgrown adolescent who ultimately acquiesces to the ‘natural’ domestic authority of the female. In this way, popular television is able to continue restating a model of the patriarchal nuclear family, while simultaneously acknowledging its contested status as a norm of family life. As highly negotiated attempts to move beyond these common models have proven, however, this approach threatens to replicate a limited discourse of family life through incorporating variation into a single model, rather than broadening available representations. Through an analysis of the representation of fatherhood in the domestic comedy, this thesis begins by investigating the genre’s ability to invert traditional power relationships, allowing it to explore the limits of representing a coherent model of the nuclear family. Progressing to an analysis of the representation of fatherhood in television advertising, it goes on to examine the relationship between an acknowledgement of these limitations and idealised representations of family life within consumer culture. Incorporating a close reading of the ‘Adam’ series of adverts for British Telecom, their representation of a non-nuclear family unit and the role of the father within this unit, this work also considers the potential challenges and rewards of representing alternative models. Exploring both popular and academic discourses of family life throughout, this thesis concludes with a discussion of the possibility of imagining new forms of family that successfully include the father, and the threat to this process posed by their current incorporation into pre-existing representational models.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Brontës' representations of masculinity. In it, I analyse the ways this family of writers depicted forms of masculinity as they developed from late-Romantic child writers to mature novelists and poets of the Victorian period. My chief concern is to situate the Brontës within the historical period of 1829-1855, from Charlotte's first Glass Town stories to the time of her death. This thesis examines the Brontë siblings' complete body of work, including Branwell's contributions to the Angrian saga, Emily's and Anne's Gondal poetry, and Charlotte's and Emily's Belgian devoirs. In undertaking this work, I model my approach on Heather Glen's precise, historical readings in Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (2002), as well as John Tosh's social historical examination of Victorian masculinity, particularly in A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home (1999). This study examines representations of masculinity in the modes of cultural production the Brontës were exposed to: contemporary periodicals, poetry, fiction, domestic handbooks, gift books, educational texts, clerical and medical handbooks, and labour management treatises. I track the Brontës' various engagements with and revisions of Byronic and Carlylean forms of masculinity, as well as the rise and fall of the silver fork dandy and the emergence of both the Victorian self-made man and the new professional. This study considers how the Brontës' representations of gender formation were affected by different modes of familial literary production and collaboration. Though the Brontës shared their creative works from a young age and grew up within the same domestic literary culture, the siblings' depictions of masculinity diverge, and each sister situates herself within various cultural contexts relating, for example, to child-rearing, romance, and professional conduct. My thesis is organised thematically, with chapters examining heroic, domestic, and professional representations of masculinity in the Brontës' works.

This dissertation examines the conception and performance of masculinities amongst two groups of Russian men, half of whom live in Russia and the other half in the United Kingdom. A total of forty in-depth biographical interviews were carried out, twenty in each country, with men of different ages and highly different social backgrounds. On the basis of these interviews, the thesis portrays contemporary Russian masculinities as a complex, socially and historically constructed phenomenon, situated within large-scale social and political processes. It explores the most prominent reference points and social hierarchies employed by the respondents in order to negotiate their individual gender projects, and shows how these are culture-specific, context-specific, and rooted both in individual life history and in the social, economical and political realities of different historical periods. While the respondents play an active role in defining and constructing their own masculinities, they do so within the macro-parameters laid down by the state, in accordance with broader socio-cultural and political factors. Shifts in the macro-parameters (such as the collapse of the Soviet Union or migration to another country) change the environment in which an individual lives and give rise to new resources for negotiating masculinity. Like the reference points and social hierarchies referred to above, these new resources are rooted in specific historical, cultural, political and personal events. Each resource belongs to a particular social topography that orients people towards the places, practices and discourses which they need to realise their masculinity. The main empirical findings in the thesis are ordered in accordance with the contexts, reference points and hierarchies for making masculinity which were referred to by the research participants themselves. The dissertation is structured around four contexts which emerged from the data: (i) the Soviet past; (ii) the first post-Soviet decade (the 1990s); (iii) the second post-Soviet decade (the 2000s); (iv) the immigration period. I explore different masculinity construction strategies and the reference points on which they rely as the site of a socio-cultural power struggle that offers a unique prism through which to understand how Russian masculinities and gender relations are validated and contested, and how they change.

I interviewed 60 rural, white, straight-identified men who have sex with men (MSM). I did so to answer three main research questions: How do rural, white, straight MSM understand their gender and sexual identity? How do their experiences with sexual flexibility relate to the ways in which they understand their gender and sexual identity? How do whiteness and rurality shape how they understand their gender and sexual identity? While participants shared a diversity of experiences, all aligned themselves with straight culture. Participants had varying levels of attractions to women and different sexual histories, but all identified as straight. Sexual identities are not simply descriptors for sexual orientation. They also indicate feelings of belonging in certain communities and cultures, and not belonging in others. My research shows that rural straight MSM are not closeted gay or bisexual men. They are straight men who occasionally enjoy sex with other men. Their narratives, I argue, highlight the difference between sexual orientation, sexual identity, and sexual culture. The ways participants had sex with other men—what I call bud-sex—both reinforced and reflected their alignment with straight culture. Enjoyment of straight culture, I argue, is the main reason the men I interviewed in this study identified as straight. None of them considered sex with men an important aspect of their identity. “Straight” was an identity that encompassed participants’ alignment with mainstream heterosexual institutions, such as marriage, and straight communities, to which they and most people they knew belonged. Collectively, these institutions and communities comprise straight culture. Participants considered straightness an identity, a way of life, and/or a community. Having sex with men was largely irrelevant to their sexual identity and how they understood their masculinity. Talking to them highlights how straightness is cultivated in a variety of institutions and contexts, and in numerous ways. Because participants grew up in and/or lived in white-majority rural areas, the rural straight culture to which they felt connected was by definition white. Their enjoyment of straight culture—and the institutions, communities, and ways of life attached to it—was central to their identification as straight and masculine. / 2021-01-11

Research in recent decades has identified a conception among fathers, and others, of a widespread qualitative change in the potential nature of fatherhood for men. This widely circulated ideal of contemporary, participatory fatherhood is characterised as new, intimate, involved and productive of new practices of ‘masculinity’ (Henwood and Procter, 2003). A belief that fathers play a major part in family life and family a major part in fathers’ lives may, first, change the nature of the life course transition entailed in becoming a father. Second, ‘new’ fatherhood is new in that it is distinguished from a model of authoritarian distance associated with ‘traditional’ fatherhood. What is new is that the primary focus of fatherhood is intimate relationships with children. Third, intimate relationships are generated through fathers’ involvement in family life alongside mothers in a more equitable sharing of the responsibilities of parenting. Finally, as distinctions between maternal and paternal are blurred, some of the lines between ‘masculine’ and ‘not-masculine’ are redrawn. These aspects which the ideal of ‘new’ fatherhood constructs as arenas of change correspond to the domains in relation to which diversity among contemporary fathers are explored in this thesis. Accounts of becoming and being fathers were generated in semi-structured qualitative interviews with a diverse sample of 31 fathers. The first dimension of fatherhood analysed is the place of visions of family and fatherhood in the process of becoming a father. Participants’ situated their orientation to fatherhood in the life course and in the partner relationship. In examining how participants construct family’s needs and parents’ responsibilities, I argue that imagined and lived family relationships are significant for men’s orientations to fatherhood, for their attitude to having further children and for evaluating the resources, material and otherwise, for doing so. The second dimension considered is intergenerational legacies. Participants with different experiences of the father-child relationship engage with their parenting heritage and characterise the legacy they would like to pass on. Connections and breaks with the previous generation of fathers are understood in terms of parent-child relationships, biographical narratives and the relational and discursive resources and constraints of the present. The relation of fatherhood to motherhood is the third dimension explored, through analysis of the different ways in which participants in couples construct, first, the relation between their own practice and their partner’s in the parenting partnership and, second, the relation between caregiving, provision, paid work and career in their own practice. I argue that fathers’ practice is worked through in the lived relationship with their partner, in terms of the division of labour and responsibilities and in the negotiation of similarity and difference, equality and authority, and with reference to a range of discursive resources. Many fathers seek to balance their commitments to the different dimensions of fatherhood in relation to paid work, but in other dimensions of personal life. The fourth aspect of the analysis examines accounts where fathers speak of co-existing contradictory orientations, to freedom and commitment, for example, and moments of ambivalence in relation to the normative articulations of ‘masculinity’ and fatherhood. On the basis of this four-fold analysis of diversity in contemporary multidimensional fatherhood, I argue for a plural focus on the practices of doing family, doing fatherhood and un/doing gender makes conceptual space for engaging critically with the diverse practices through which fathers sustain the relationships and fulfil the responsibilities of multi-dimensional fatherhood.

Larissa Ennis Doctor of Philosophy Department of English March 2012 Title: Melodramas of Ethnicity and Masculinity: Generic Transformations of Late Twentieth Century American Film Gangsters The gangster film genre in America has enjoyed a long history, from the first one-reelers

This thesis examines the paradigms of masculinities during and after Northern Ireland’s conflict to understand how societal transition from intrastate conflict impacts males’ identities and mental health. Focusing on fieldwork conducted predominately in Derry/Londonderry and applying masculinity theories, this thesis explores the experiences of males aged 29 to 40 who grew up during the 1990s’ peace process. Social and mental health professionals and community and youth workers have expressed concern for the mental health and well-being of this population of men, as well as young men born after the peace process. With this concern in mind, this thesis argues that the continuous presence of contested images of masculinity that existed prior to the conflict and that emerged during the conflict, along with the cultural practice of silence, has resulted in an ambiguous understanding of masculinity in the post-conflict era, and has had a negative impact on males’ mental health.

Gilles Villeneuve, Ayrton Senna, Greg Moore, Dale Earnhardt. Only four of a number of high-profile race car drivers to have lost their lives taking part in events at the highest levels of motorsport. The aim of the present study is to analyze the coverage of death in high-level motorsport in the printed sports news of La Presse and The Toronto Star in Canada for the 1982 to 2017 period inclusively. Mobilizing the existing literature on risk-taking, namely Lyng’s concept of edgework, as well as Hall’s work on representation, a thematic analysis of a sample of sports news articles (N=488) was conducted. Three main themes emerged from the analysis. The discussion surrounding motorsport fatalities revolved around the individual (the deceased driver), the social aspect of the death (primarily the family members left behind), and journalistic practices (how to cover death). In conclusion, the coverage of death in motorsport was found to be an instance where the athlete is heroized and sometimes revered even decades after their death. In this aspect, the figure of Gilles Villeneuve remains pivotal to motorsport discussions in Canada, even to this day. It also was found that sports journalists, through their coverage of deadly accidents, enact the traditional roles of the journalist in offering social criticism of their subject matter to their readers, and that motorsport drivers enact a highly specific type of masculinity when practicing their sport.

nÃo hà / The objective of this study is to analyze how men with spinal cord injury experience their sexuality from a different body/identity as paraplegia or quadriplegia, taking into account the interference of erotic and effective exchanges in these experiments. In this dissertation, I develop my narrative from personal and social conflicts these individuals, also showing other forms of vision for the handicapped, wich are linked to the bodies of deviante eroticism and pornography of disability. The methodology used resulted from a need from their own field of study, so the nethnography was the most convenient tool, because it allows interation through the internet, wich provided greater accessibility to and interlocutors. Firstly, the interviews were in person and later mediated by videoconferencing. / O Objetivo deste estudo à analisar como homens com lesÃo medular vivenciam sua sexualidade a partir de uma diferenÃa corporal/identitÃria como a paraplegia ou a tetraplegia, levando em conta a interferÃncia das trocas erÃticas e afetivas nestas experiÃncias. Nessa dissertaÃÃo, desenvolvo minha narrativa a partir dos conflitos pessoais e sociais desses indivÃduos, mostrando tambÃm outras formas de visÃo sobre o deficiente fÃsico, que estÃo ligadas à erotizaÃÃo dos corpos desviantes e à pornografia da deficiÃncia. A metodologia utilizada decorreu de uma necessidade proveniente do prÃprio campo de estudo, a netnografia foi, portanto, a ferramenta mais conveniente, jà que possibilita a interaÃÃo atravÃs da internet, o que proporcionou uma maior acessibilidade aos e dos interlocutores. As entrevistas realizadas foram mediadas primeiramente presencialmente e posteriormente por vÃdeo conferÃncia.