Steven Cohan

Steven Cohan's Masked Men is a blend of history, gender studies, and film analysis. According to Masked Men, images of masculinity on film during the 1950s shifted almost as much as notions of masculinity in real life. Masculinity was in flux because the war had weakened gender norms at home and at the workplace.
The postwar and cold war environment created a strange atmosphere for masculinity. There was some anxiety about the mental stability of returning veterans that "exaggerated the danger their ungovernable masculinity posed to the social order" (xii). The necessities of the new global order also created contradictory messages for manhood. A hard masculinity was required for national strength and for defending the nation's borders from the Communist other. Yet a softer masculinity was also needed to form "the foundation of an orderly, responsible home life" (xii). This complex mix of historical and cultural pressures created what Cohan describes as "the masculine masquerade" that he finds in movies of the 1950s, which he examines in the on- and off-screen images of actors like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, William Holden, Tony Curtis, and Rock Hudson.
By examining the images of masculinity in film, fan magazines, and contemporary film literature, Cohan found that a specific kind of masculinity was privileged: the white, heterosexual, married, professional father in the gray flannel suit. Despite the clear preference for this image of manliness, this was not a monolithic image. Many of these portrayals of the man in the gray flannel suit reveal various cracks in his façade: anxieties about masculinity as masquerade (24-25), the potential feminization of the male breadwinner (15), and possibility of gender confusion and deviant sexuality hidden within the world of male friendship (84-85).
Cohan seeks to define masculinity as a cultural construction through chapters discussing the redefinition of masculinity in the postwar years through the repudiation of male wartime bonding and film noir male violence, the male body as spectacle in films and movie posters, the coding of national identities onto the male body, the role of star personas in both reinforcing and undermining onscreen masculinities, and how the theatricality inherent to cinema calls into question the authenticity of the masculinities portrayed onscreen. He also discusses the emerging categories of the boy movie star (James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift) and the playboy bachelor (Rock Hudson).
Cohan, a professor of English, ably analyzes dozens of films, archives, and material such as posters, stills, and publicity materials. As with any other work concerning this topic, Cohan makes ample use of gender theory and theorists such as Judith Butler.
Cohan's conclusions says it best: "As the era's films and its movie stars document, the unity of gender and sexuality, necessary to authenticate those oppositions [the binary categories that organized the fifties' cultural reality] in the figural, uniformly dressed body of the American male, could be achieved only in performances of masculinity that called its authenticity into doubt" (312).… (plus d'informations)