#Ver one push hero the lone cyborg how to

6 See for example Claudia Springer, “Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Armored Cyborg in Cinema”, Ge (.).

Were the hypermasculine “hard bodies” of the 1980s always presented as the masculine ideal in science fiction films such as RoboCop or The Terminator ? Can science fiction provide alternative models of masculinity? Can it even call into question male hegemony? Through close textual analyses of four major science fiction films of the 1980s and 1990s, this paper wishes to examine the changing representations and definitions of masculinity offered by science fiction in the two previous decades and its relationship to hegemonic masculinity – how science fiction provided a specific hegemonic model in the 1980s in the guise of hypermasculinity while at the same time highlighting its flaws, which led to its transformation and seeming demise in the late 1990s, with the appearance of alternative models of masculinity.

#Ver one push hero the lone cyborg how to

a human opposed to non-humans, thus seems to be reformulated into a more specific questioning about what it means to be a man, or how to define masculinity. The central question of science fiction, what it is to be a Man, i.e.

Hypermasculinity puts masculinity on show by making muscles highly visible: hypermasculine heroes often wear tight and revealing clothes, like Dolph Lundgren in Masters of the Universe (Gary Goddard, 1987), or no clothes at all, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first appearance in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) – even Robocop’s metallic armor reproduces a body-built torso by incorporating sculpted titanium pectorals ( RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987). 5 See Richard Dyer, “Don’t Look Now,” Screen, 23, 3-4 (1982): 61-73.Ģ The most striking aspect of hypermasculinity in 1980s Hollywood is the visibility of the male body and specifically the spotlighting of muscles as ‘natural’ signs of masculine power 5, prominently so in cyborg science fiction films.

However, hypermasculinity can be considered as hegemonic within the context of 1980s America, when “hard bodies” became the dominant model, as Susan Jeffords demonstrates in Hard Bodies, Masculinity in the Reagan Era, 3 dominating other masculinities (especially non-white) as well as women. Hypermasculinity is therefore only one model of masculinity among others – a set of cultural norms and expectations about what men ought to be from a position of power within an unequal system of gender relations. Drawing also on Varda Burstyn’s use of the term to describe “an exaggerated ideal of manhood linked to the role of the warrior”, 2 I will use the term here to emphasize an excessive yet glorified representation of masculine attributes implying a heightened visibility of the male body as spectacle while associating masculinity with dominance, violence and physical force. Connell, who defines it in Masculinities (.)ġ In the 1980s, science-fiction became one of the privileged vehicles for a new representation of masculinity in Hollywood which can be associated with hypermasculinity, building on Lynne Joyrich’s analysis of Miami Vice which sees hypermasculinity as an “excess of maleness acting as a shield” against feminization implied by becoming the object of the look, hypermasculinity thus becoming “the underlying structure of male spectacle” 1. 4 My understanding of hegemonic masculinity comes from R.W.3 “ Bodies were deployed in two fundamental categories: the errant body containing sexually transmitte (.).2 Varda Burstyn, Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Tor (.).1 Lynne Joyrich, “Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity”, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural (.).The evolution of science fiction films in the 1980s and 1990s thus underlines a striking change in the representation of masculinity, from very visible and differential hypermasculinity to gender-blending androgyneity. Hypermasculinity was thus revised in Terminator 2 to present the formerly fearsome Terminator as a protective father undergoing a process of humanization, paving the way for new representations of masculinity and more equal gender relations in The Matrix, which plays on traditional gender roles by matching a beautiful passive hero and an athletic action heroine. Already in the 1980s, hypermasculinity was indeed associated with a loss of humanity, so that it became incompatible with the cultural prominence of the sensitive and nurturing ‘New Man’ of the 1990s. However, the films also highlight the negative aspects of hypermasculinity, embodied especially by the Terminator, the terrifying antagonist of the first film of the franchise. Science fiction films of the 1980s, including The Terminator and RoboCop, seem to foreground hypermasculinity as a new ideal of masculinity, relying on the display and promotion of muscular white male bodies.