Real men have testicles: masculinity in crisis in fight club
- Autores: Isabel Morante Alorda
- Localización: Visiones multidisciplinares sobre la cultura popular: actas del 5.º Congreso Internacional de SELICUP / coord. por Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo, María del Mar Ramón Torrijos, 2014, ISBN 978-84-617-0400-2, págs. 281-291
- Idioma: español
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Fight Club (1996), an award-winning novel by Chuck Palahniuk, was made into a movie of the same name in 1999 by the American director David Fincher, who gave popularity to Palahniuk�s novel becoming one of the most innovative and controversial films of the 90s. The story follows the life of an unnamed character, who starts running an underground fight club in order to overcome his psychological crisis and insomnia. Fighting becomes a therapy for men who want to restore their masculinity in order to achieve psychological peace. The story focuses on the unnamed narrator and his alter ego Tyler Durden, a man who embodies the desired masculinity all men would like to possess. The fight club needs to be understood as a psychological therapy that helps men to feel their power and masculinity in a world that no longer seems to value such qualities. My objective in this paper is to concentrate on Fincher�s production in order to analyse the character of Robert �Bob� Paulson, a man that the unnamed narrator meets for the first time at a testicular cancer therapy group. Bob used to be a bodybuilder until he was diagnosed with cancer and lost his testicles and developed big breasts because of the estrogen treatment. In my analysis I am going to focus my attention on Bob�s body in order to discuss his masculinity in crisis. The figure of Big Bob offers a different conception of masculinity in the story, opposed to the masculinity presented in Tyler Durden. Considering that Bob is a man with breasts, without testicles and with a sweet and soft voice, he could be read as the representation of a feminized man. Could then Big Bob be the embodiment of masculinity in crisis? What does masculinity in crisis really mean?
