The New Television Masculinity in Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, the Shield
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Rescuing Men: The New Television Masculinity In Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Boston Legal, & Dexter A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Pamela Hill Nettleton IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Mary Vavrus, Ph.D, Adviser November 2009 © Pamela Hill Nettleton, November/2009 i Acknowledgements I have had the extreme good fortune of benefitting from the guidance, insight, wit, and wisdom of a committee of exceptional and accomplished scholars. First, I wish to thank my advisor, Mary Vavrus, whose insightful work in feminist media studies and political economy is widely respected and admired. She has been an inspiring teacher, an astute critic, and a thoughtful pilot for me through this process, and I attempt to channel her dignity and competence daily. Thank you to my committee chair, Gilbert Rodman, for his unfailing encouragement and support and for his perceptive insights; he has a rare gift for challenging students while simultaneously imbuing them with confidence. Donald Browne honored me with his advice and participation even as he prepared to ease his way out of active teaching, and I learned from him as his student, as his teaching assistant, and as a listener to what must be only a tiny part of his considerable collection of modern symphonic music. Jacqueline Zita’s combination of theoretical acumen and pragmatic activism is the very definition of a feminist scholar, and my days in her classroom were memorable. Laurie Ouellette is a polished and flawless extemporaneous speaker and teacher, and her writing on television is illuminating; I have learned much from her. My gratitude extends to the entire department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. My intellectual life there has been challenging and deeply rewarding, and the commitment of the faculty to each graduate student is sincere and valued. I am also grateful to the University’s department of Gender, ii Women, & Sexuality Studies, where I earned a minor and where I worked with extraordinary women. I thank my colleagues who assiduously read sections of this work and offered valuable insights and reflections, including, in particular, Julie Wilson and Jessica Prody. I am also indebted to the entire body of my graduate cohort, whose insights and comments sharpened my thinking in every course. My deep personal gratitude and admiration go to my three best teachers, my children: Gretchen Nettleton, Christopher Nettleton, and Ian Anderson. And thank you to my husband, William Schrickel, for bringing many cups of tea along with unfailing encouragement. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….i List of Tables……………………………………………………………………..….iv Chapter One Introduction……………………………………………………..…………..………….1 Chapter Two Look! Up in the Sky! Heroes, Not-Quite-Heroes, and the Common Man…….………………………………………………………………………………52 Chapter Three The Boys’ Clubhouse As Wedding Chapel: Marrying My Best Friend……………………………………………………………………..……..……125 Chapter Four Undoing the Dichotomy: The Emergence of the Transgendered Figure in Male- Centered Television……………….…………….……………………………………178 Chapter Five The Towers Come Down, Viagra Goes Up: Male Sexual Anxiety as Plot Device…………………………………………………………………………………205 Chapter Six Conclusion…………………………….………………………………………………238 References…………………………………………………………………………....274 iv List of Tables Table 1: Commercials During Two Rescue Me Reruns Broadcast in March 2007….. 12 Table 2: 9/11 Deaths by Location……………………………………………………. 65 Table 3: 9/11 Deaths by Occupation, Method, and Location….……….……………. 65 1 Chapter One Introduction I grew up in a household of women, with five sisters and no brothers. Even the dogs were female. In those pre-Title IX years, professional and school- and community-sponsored women’s sports were limited to cheerleading, dance line, and gymnastics. I grew up knowing nothing of sticks, mitts, jock straps, and scorekeeping, and little of the strange male creatures that played such games. Years later, after I had a daughter, I had a son. When he was six and wise well beyond his years, he sat his single mother down and in a serious voice delivered a well- prepared presentation on the importance of sport to a young man. He wanted to play hockey, and he wanted me to enroll him in a PeeWee league. He carefully traced his proclivity for the sport, reminding me that he enjoyed watching it on television, that he liked banging a puck into the garage door, that he thought he might even be pretty good at it, if he practiced. He recognized that I might have heard it was violent, and he reassured me that he would not let himself be hurt nor would he intentionally pound on others. He would need equipment and he knew it would cost money, and if forfeiting his allowance would help bridge the gap, he was willing to offer that up for the cause. His Uncle John was going to coach; he would join Uncle John’s team, and surely I trusted Uncle John. And then he said, with great dignity and with his chubby little hand on my knee, “This is what men do.” At his first practice, I stood knee-deep in snow watching him attempt to skate 2 inside a fenced-in outdoor rink on a freezing Minnesota night. Within minutes, the moment I dreaded occurred: he built up speed, struggled to reach the puck, teetered off balance, and with a colossal crash, slammed into two other skaters. A pile of yelping boys slid across the ice and into the boards with a great crunch, arms, legs, and sticks tangled. I was certain he had been dismembered. Just as I leaned over the fence to ask in a quavering voice, “Sweetie, are you all right?” he popped up with an ear-to-ear grin and yelled, “Did you see that? Wasn’t that great?” I didn’t understand, and that was just fine—it was his world, not mine. Thus began his 25-year stint as a hockey goalie (he is now a television sportscaster), and my education at his hands of what it can mean to grow up male in modern America. He realized, even at that tender age, that there were lessons that he could not learn at his mother’s knee, and he sought out mentors, brothers, and uncles who could teach him what he wanted to learn. He understood that there were codes and values for boys and he wanted to learn them from men—and for this to happen, he politely asked me to please step out of the way. I cannot claim to have immediately comprehended the importance of this in his life, but I came to see, in ways both small and large, how he was nurtured by the company of men. Today he is a husband, about to become a father, a compassionate and thoughtful feminist who can stop a 90-mile-an-hour puck flying straight at his head. In turn, he mentored his younger brother, who also grew up a hockey goalie, and driving to and from ice rinks nine months a year with sweaty leather perfuming the interior of my car, I grew thoughtful about the yin-and-yang conflicts of being single and being a parent, being a woman and raising sons, and being a heterosexual feminist. 3 My eldest child is a daughter, and while I cannot completely side with essentialist evaluations of gender, my sons asked for and occupied a different sort of space than she did—and if I asked the world to respect hers, then I realized that I needed to ask myself to respect theirs. Masculinity During my children’s childhood, I began to develop deep and troubling concerns about how media—the field in which I worked as a journalist, editor, and scholar— formed expectations and constructions of gender in America. I was both intrigued and uneasy about what media made of femininity and women, and also of how media represented what masculinity could and could not be in this country. As a feminist media scholar, my early scholarly work centered on representations of women in magazine advertisements, a body of texts rich in opportunities to analyze objectification, sexism, and misogyny. Much valuable feminist work exists and remains to be done in this field, but I began to think that little would shift in conceptions of masculinity and femininity while “female” was studied as if it were the only gender. I began to think through gender in the media—still in feminist terms, but now thinking of men as gendered beings, too. How is masculinity constructed in the media? How do media naturalize masculinity? What is rendered visible and invisible in these representations? Which masculinities are foreclosed and which are nurtured? What is at stake culturally in this process? These issues are of critical importance to me, and what I can observe in how they work in the lives of the men I care for is fascinating, troubling, and only 4 infrequently hopeful. It seems to me that patriarchy can be delegitimized most effectively and feminism advanced most successfully if men, as well as women, are treated as being gendered and being affected by cultural representations of gender. And to do that, it is necessary to study their representations as women’s have been studied, to apply feminist theory and cultural studies and media studies approaches to how American media construct masculinity. The events of 9/11 The morning of September 11, 2001, I was editorial director of a lifestyle magazine in my metropolitan area. As the work day in the Midwest began and as my staff arrived at the office, news reports from New York and Washington, D. C., from Pennsylvania and around the world, trickled in. One of my young editors came into my office wide-eyed at the television coverage of the towers being hit and asked, “What did we do?” His immediate conclusion was that U.S.