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Keywords: Masculinity

  • MEDIA

    Queering the airwaves for TV diversity

    • Adolfo Aranjuez
    • 29 November 2016
    17 Comments

    A recent Screen Australia report determined only 5 per cent of characters in Australian TV dramas could be identified as LGBTQI; less than half the proportion of real-world queer individuals in Australia. Media products are inherently normative, legitimising identities and lived realities through visibility. This is important, given the continuing debates surrounding marriage equality and the pervasiveness of homophobia, the result of which was seen in the suicide of 13-year-old Tyrone Unsworth.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Reimagining manhood after ABC's Man Up

    • Adolfo Aranjuez
    • 28 October 2016
    10 Comments

    After sending me to live in Australia, my father tasked my then brother-in-law (a true-blue 'bloke') with teaching me to 'be a man'. He failed, but here was evidence of hegemonic masculinity's perpetuation. My father and I were born into a masculine culture that, unlike Australia's stoicism, is characterised by braggadocious chest-puffing. Yet underpinning both Australia's and the Philippines' conceptions of masculinity is the masking of vulnerability: emotions hide behind silence and bravado.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Antiheroes of the Bush-Cheney arms boom

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 August 2016

    War Dogs is the latest in a string of films from the past few years that are custom made for our cynical times; deeply ironic black comedies and dramas featuring antiheroes who profit to the point of excess off the misery of others. Where those films dealt with the finance industry and gained relevance from the backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis, this one shifts focus to the grimier world of arms dealing, in the context of Bush era conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Orlando shooting brings hate to its natural conclusion

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 June 2016
    45 Comments

    At the epicentre of all this is a place where young, queer men and women had felt safe and free to be themselves. The dead are almost all black, brown, gay and working class. If, as Dr Cornel West has often said, justice is what love looks like in public, then injustice must be what hate looks like, and there is perhaps no greater injustice than murder. Mass murder is hatred realised in full grotesque proportion. This means is that the little things we do to validate hatred are not inconsequential.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Angst and insecurity in public school battle of wills

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 June 2016

    Vice-principal Rickard claims the credit for having lifting the status of the once struggling public school, and sees in the smart but troubled new student Mark both the potential to do well and a danger to his own legacy. For his own part Mark, who was previously kicked out of the private school to which he had earned a scholarship, sees in Rickard a misguided do-gooder and, later, something a little more dangerous: an ambitious man whose ego is the flipside of insecurity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inside the head of an IS martyr

    • Ellena Savage
    • 20 March 2015
    13 Comments

    The language of martyrdom is being used to recruit young Australians to brutal stateless warfare. Because martyrs are morally superior to suburban burnouts. IS propagandist Abu Ismail described Melburnian Jake Bilardi as 'a lion on the battlefield although he was at a young age and with a weak body'. So, Bilardi was a weak young lion and therefore ripe for battle. How obscene!

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Male spirituality in Kiwi portrait of mental illness

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 November 2014

    New Zealand filmmaker Robertson’s latest feature has been described as a cross between modern antipodean classics Once Were Warriors and Shine. Like Warriors, Dark Horse considers masculinity, violence and spirituality in the lives of urban Maoris. Like Shine, it offers a moving portrait of a character whose mental illness appears to be the dark reflection of esoteric, obsessive genius.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Thinking beyond gender equality etiquette

    • Zac Alstin
    • 26 September 2014
    8 Comments

    The message of a recent VicHealth survey is that changing attitudes to gender equality will have the biggest impact on attitudes to violence against women. But what about those of us who already have positive attitudes to gender equality? We can go beyond a superficial and reactive focus on key outcomes and cultivate a deeper appreciation of a person's individual worth.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A distasteful slice of gender politics pie

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 February 2014
    1 Comment

    Adele is a single mother suffering the debilitating after-effects of past trauma. But her story offers no robust consideration of mental illness. In stark contrast to her male counterparts, Adele is merely pitiable and helpless, and lacks the agency to raise herself from despondency. Weakness is thus conflated with femaleness. Only the arrival of a strong, practical and violent man serves to raise her Adele from her stupor.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Disrupting sexism

    • Fatima Measham
    • 26 June 2013
    18 Comments

    Chief of Army Lt Gen David Morrison summed it up well. In condemning the culture of 'permission' that allowed defence officers to exploit women, he said: 'The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.' Framing sexism in terms of permission should sharpen the way we respond to abuse of women — the same compulsion to conform presents us with opportunities to disrupt tacit permissions.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Rebuilding humanity after workplace horror

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 04 April 2013
    3 Comments

    Stéphanie loses her legs in a workplace accident. Alain is a single father who becomes her confidante. Their sexual encounters are shown to restore and affirm her dignity; they highlight the physicality of the act, particularly how Stéphanie's confidence in her own changed body flourishes through it.

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  • MEDIA

    Germaine Greer and gay exploitation

    • Matthew Holloway
    • 28 November 2011
    25 Comments

    It is commonly thought that men represent both the main producers and consumers of pornography. Germaine Greer points out that men are also its victims. In the case of gay porn, just because there is no woman involved doesn't mean that it is not exploitative.

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