Description
The proposed paper will examine the portrait of “revenge politics” or “eye for an eye politics” in US post 9/11 cinema as one of the examples of contestation of hypermasculinity in popular culture. The aim of this inquiry is to link the implications of construction of political phenomena in US cinema and presenting of hypermasculinity as a justification for violent and aggressive politics within the international arena. One of the underlying assumptions of this paper is that the mobilization of hypermasculinity in films concerning political and security phenomena contributes to the construction of widely supported opinion that violent and aggressive response to international crisis is still the most effective and moreover, justifiable one.
After the events on 9/11 dominated widely supported narrative that violent response to these events is the only acceptable one and that it has moral and rational merit. This paper will examine the connection of this narrative construction and reconstruction in American cinema to the contestation of hypermasculinity in these war movies concerning 9/11.
This paper will examine two mainstream films produced after 9/11: American sniper (2014) and Lone Survivor (2013), by the method of multimodal discourse analysis supported by the Foucauldian conception of discourse and power relations. From the theoretical point of view this paper rests on postmodern feminist ontology and poststructuralist epistemology and concepts of hypermasculinity, hegemonic masculinity and gendered identity of states.
This proposed paper could contribute not only to the pool of postmodern feminist literature in IR but moreover, to the broadening of the field of peace studies since this kind of inquiry has a potential to comprehend why it is widely believed that "we" have to fight in the first place and that the violent coercion is more effective and rightful than international law or negotiation.
