The Remasculation Film: Themes and Variations

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a discourse of masculinity crisis precipitated the appearance of a number of what Susan Jeffords describes as “rearticulations of screen masculinity,” which influenced the production of a group of films whose narrative diegeses reaffirmed the heteronormative, hypermasculine façade onscreen. These films are identified and defined in this book as remasculation pictures, or narratives that showcase the hero’s oscillation between two oppositional expressions of screen masculinity. In the rhetoric of the remasculation film, the protagonist’s emasculation initiates a quest to remasculate by reaffirming the dominance and authority of the hypermasculine archetype.