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Prisoners of war: formations of masculinities in Vietnam war fiction and film
| Title: | Prisoners of war: formations of masculinities in Vietnam war fiction and film |
| Author: | Boyle, Brenda Marie |
| Description: | This dissertation argues that the Vietnam War and social movements of the time altered the way Americans conceive of masculinity, an alteration represented in some narratives of the War. Decades after the conclusion of American involvement in Vietnam, this revision of the social gender script is still evident in narratives that are not always directly concerned with the War. This new discourse of masculinities appears in narratives not only fictional, but also in memoirs, films, and recruiting advertisements, suggesting that what Lauren Berlant calls the “National Symbolic,” or the framework through which Americans constitute themselves as Americans, has adjusted along the following lines. First, the era made it imperative to imagine a plurality of masculinities, determining that a single model of masculine gender to which men should aspire might not be desirable and probably never was possible. This explains, among other things, the disenchantment repeatedly expressed by soldiers in the narratives with the John Wayne-model of masculinity displayed in so many World War II movies, and the subsequent need to devise new forms of masculinity that would suit the particularities of the Vietnam War. In pluralizing masculinity, the narratives propose that gender is performative, amorphous, and historically contingent, often concluding that masculinities may not be reserved only for males, but that females also may choose to enact masculinity. Second, the liberation and rights movements of the era made clear that issues such as race, sexuality, and dis/ability directly impact the formations of masculinities. The truism that war makes a boy into a man may be simplistic only about the assumption that there is one true way to be a male; some War narratives suggest that there are many ways to be manly. Third, the combination of the two previous points, that masculinities are pluralized by their being extended to people other than white men and that they are mutable, intimates that the current binary of sex and gender–sex as chromosomal and gender as environmental–may be less definitive than the binary suggests. |
| Permanent Link: |
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1060873937
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/107040 |
| Date: | 2003 |
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