Ageing Masculinity in Nypd Blue
A Spectacle of Incontinence, Impotence, and Mortality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8894758 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Helen Yeates (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 47-56 |
| Publication date | 2001-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-s031-02-04 |
| OpenAlex | W2074123091 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Incontinence and Impotence For the masculine ego the body can be used to draw a defensive line between inside and outside. So long as there is very little fat, tensed muscle and tight sinew can give a hard, clear outline to the body. Flesh and bone can pass itself off as a kind of armour. A hard body will ensure that there are no leakages, across the edges between inner and outer worlds. Nature, it seems, has betrayed the perimeter of the male body. It has opened up there a number of gaps and orifices, though mercifully fewer than the female body. What holes remain must be firmly shut.... Tensed, the whole frontier can be kept on red alert.—Anthony Easthope (qtd. in Buchbinder 133–34) In the popular US police drama NYPD Blue, the invulnerable “citadel” of the male body is being stormed both from the inside and from the outside. The masculinity “red alert” is certainly on, the armour is being peeled off, leakages occur, and penises are dysfunctional on prime-time television. As vulnerability, uncertainty, and mortality are foregrounded, one of the key male bodies on display is revealed as profoundly human, rather than idealized. Indeed, it could be argued that NYPD Blue contains a fascinating exploration of the crisis of humanity metamorphosed into a mortality crisis of a plump middle-aged male detective with prostate problems, incontinence, and impotence. While the “masculine” is still being framed problematically as the “universal” here, the shifts and differences represented within this particular manifestation of hegemonic masculinities warrant close mapping from a feminist perspective
Archaeology · Art · Frontier · Masculinity · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Spectacle · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
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