LFA: MASCULINITY IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA
At this year's Literature/Film Association conference in New Orleans, Dr. Scahill chaired a panel on the role of gender in film adaptation. Each of the three papers specifically examined masculinity, race, and homosociality in Hollywood cinema. Co-panelist Sarah Ropp addressed the Oliver Stone film Savages, while scholars Jodi Van der Horn-Gibson and Janice Kelly provided a retrospective on the film representation of black masculinity over the last century.
In his paper "Plastic Tubes and Pots and Pans: Frankensteinian Masculinities in Weird Science," Dr. Scahill argued that the 1985 John Hughes film functions as a working-through of ideological tensions over conflicting models of white masculinity in the 1980s. Weird Science represents Hughes' tenuous embrace of a new "yuppie masculinity" based in conspicuous consumption, the display of status, and the mastery of home technology, a role he would fully embrace with a year later with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
