Description
This paper is part of a project on popular culture and the performative politics of neoliberalism that highlights the importance and shifting nature of market masculinities. In particular, I am concerned with how different genres of film – previously financial cinema, here boxing movies - have performed a masculine subject who is training for, or adapting to (market) uncertainty. Beyond a blunt vision of hegemonic ‘manliness’, I discern a turn to entertain non-hegemonic masculinities; in the process, nurturing and valorising a capacity for emotional reflection and adaptability. In the case of boxing movies, this has almost exclusively been performed in terms of a white working class ‘fighter’ who bucks the form card to realise some larger, emotive dream of redemption from the harsh struggle of (market) life. In recent decades, however, the emotional scripting of working class masculinity has come centre stage in films like Cinderella Man, Fighting, The Fighter, and the MMA focused Warrior. I argue that the emotional reconstruction of market masculinity in these films speaks to a wider revision of neoliberalism to address a set of limits encapsulated in resilience thinking: complexity, uncertainty and the (endless) requirement for adaptability. Almost inevitably, therefore, these cultural scripts also highlight the centrality of gender, race and class within – and therefore the violence of – this augmented vision of neoliberal market life.
