Running head: FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS VIEW OF MASCULINITY 1
Friday Night Lights view of masculinity
Sarah Bailey
Texas Tech University
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS VIEW OF MASCULINITY 2 Over the past few decades’ football has become Americas pastime. The critically acclaimed television series, Friday Night Lights showcases a small Texas town and the passion the town has for football. The show takes place in the fictional town of Dillon,
Texas, and shows many aspects of football. The show exposes the personal lives of the players and coaches and shows how the successful Dillon Panthers live their everyday lives! This paper focuses on the way masculinity is portrayed in FNL. The show implies that to be seen as a man one had to be tough, play sports and drink beer.
Friday Night Lights premiered in 2006 and the network doubted that it would appeal to the mass audiences. Johnson (2010) stated,
“Friday Night Light’s promotional and critical transformation from a heartland-
appeal, network-audience football drama at its launch in the fall of 2006 to its re-
valuation as a premium-appeal, subscriber-based, quality TV series by the fall of
2008 offers a rare opportunity to chart industry promotion and critical discourse
clearly premised on such acts of imagination, based in “commonsense”
conceptualizations of geography as capital” (P60).
People all over the nation were getting caught up in the football and dram that surrounded these players. Due to the vast reach of the show, the views that are portrayed in the series have the potential to impact many young individuals and football players across the nation. The show has dominant male roles and select individuals that are often in the show may be showing young kids the wrong ways to live life.
Tim Riggins was the Dillon Panthers star player, the school’s heartthrob and a heavy drinker. The show uses Tim’s drinking habits to showcase his masculinity. Kerr stated, “Over the course of the 50 episodes of Friday Night Lights ’ first three seasons, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS VIEW OF MASCULINITY 3 Tim Riggins is shown drinking in 36 (Kerr, 459). Tim Riggins is a heavy drinker and plays a big role in the show. “Over the first three seasons of Friday Night Lights was a constructed relationship between masculinity and alcohol”(Kerr, 457). This relationship was established by using Riggins’s character; he is one of the main characters and sets an example for the town. Due to the shows popularity Tim Riggins could potentially be seen as a role model for youth all over the nation. Kids who aspire to be the star player on their high school football team will look toward Tim Riggins for guidance, and they will see alcohol as a key factor. The show uses Tim’s drinking habits and his ability on the football field to make him more masculine. When young children see this masculine figure they will grasp that drinking is associated with masculinity and that is the wrong impression to give.
The third article focuses on masculinity disability and sexuality. This is evident in the show when in the first episode the starting quarterback, Jason Street, faces a serious injury and becomes paralyzed. At the start of the show he was seen as the hero and everyone wanted to be like the quarterback, after he faced the injury and was constrained to life in a wheel chair he had to find another outlet to showcase his masculinity additionally. He had to find another way to express his athleticism because, “In western culture, at least, participation in sport among men was, and to a large extent still is, considered "normal," healthy, and expected, sport functions as a form of socialization into a particularly narrow, heterosexual view of sexuality and masculinity (Cherney&
Lindemann, 2).” The show displays that once Street faced this injury he would never be the same as a man. Before the injury he had a serious girlfriend and once he was paralyzed it wasn’t safe for him to participate in sexual activity his girlfriend cheated on FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS VIEW OF MASCULINITY 4 him with Tim Riggins and the relationship ended (Cherney& Lindemann,P.8). His girlfriend didn’t break up with him because he wasn’t a football player anymore but maybe perhaps because he wasn’t as manly as the man she fell in love with. “A purely disability-centered theory approach would call attention to how Street becomes medicalized, emasculated, and motivated to rehabilitate his masculinity after the onset of quadriplegia” (Cherney & Lindemann, P16). As the show progresses, Jason Street feels incomplete without sports in his life, so he joins a league of quad rugby to keep his masculinity. This articles aids to the fact that Friday Night Lights shows masculinity to be found in sports and that it is vital to mans life.
Thought out the series Friday Night Lights, the viewers were exposed to many different takes on masculinity. However one take away was constant, that sport, in this case football, makes one more of a man. . It is important to understand how popular TV shows portray masculinity and the potential effects it has on viewers.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS VIEW OF MASCULINITY 5
References
Cherney, J. L., & Lindemann, K. (2014). Queering street: Homosociality, masculinity,
and Disability in Friday Night Lights. Western Journal Of Communication, 78(1),
1-21. doi:10.1080/10570314.2013.792388
Johnson, V. E. (2010). The persistence of geographic myth in a convergent media era.
Journal Of Popular Film & Television, 38(2), 58-65.
Kerr, R. L. (2014). A beer a minute in Texas football: Heavy drinking and the heroizing
of the antihero in Friday Night Lights. International Review For The Sociology Of
Sport, 49(3/4), 451-467. doi:10.1177/1012690213495535