Chapters authored
Virus World Vulnerability: A Critical Reading of Gender and Performance in Bo Burnham’s “Inside” (2021)
Through an engagement with the seminal work of Raewyn Connell on masculinities and hegemonic masculinity, this chapter argues for the hegemonic norm as producing behaviour among men that can be traced in multiple male subjectivities. The argument is that men respond to the prevailing masculine norm by enacting self-protective disavowal—a complex psychological process that involves the reordering of reality in the interests of the maintenance of power, and one that is seen in cases of both legitimate and imagined threats to the self and the body. Self-protective disavowal is at the core of the “Same Shit” phenomenon—the idea that while the experience of masculinity varies across culture and position in the gender order, self-protective disavowal is a constant that leads to predicable patterns among men. The discussion then explores deliberate vulnerability as a kind of anti-protective disavowal in Bo Burnham’s INSIDE, a complex, undefinable ‘special’ released on Netflix in 2021. The chapter considers Burnham’s work as a departure from self-protective disavowal and “Same Shit” masculinity through deliberate vulnerability and critically evaluates the value of this alternative, especially given the nihilism that reigns over the work and calls into question the validity of uncritically romanticization of alternatives.
Part of the book: Masculinity Studies