Personally I was hoping that someone might comment on the observable differences between the images of masculinity embodied by Optimus Prime on the one hand and the George Bush as a roll-up-his-sleeves-and-punch-em out Uncle Sam depicted in the image at the top of this thread. Does it make any difference that one slugger literally gears up for battle, with the human a humunculus directing a giant, shape-shifting machine, while the other has taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves to display his own muscles? Does it make any difference that the Wired author comments wistfully on Optimus Prime’s self-sacrifice, dying for the cause in which he believes, while the image makers of Bush as Sam imagine no such possibility–if he’s the biggest and baddest, he’s got to win. Does the author’s reflecting that, in the world outside the story, Prime is doomed by the dynamics of a toy industry that needs new heroes to sell have anything to do with the nature of heroism in a 15-minutes-of-fame-what-have-you-done-for-us-lately culture in which celebrity churn has replaced enduring archetypes?

Lots of stuff to think about here. A student who wrote for me nothing more than “this is obvious fetishistic thinking” would be damned lucky to get away with a C.

The balls (pun deliberate) are in your court.

Fred, yes there is probably great work somewhere on archetypal national figures and their genders. My thinking on the topic tends to track certain themes: the state emerges out of the repudiation or suppression of kinship as an organizing principal for social life, the state thus arrogates to itself claims of a universal sort, the suppression of kinship ends up meaning the repudiation of the domestic domain generally and its values (including nurture), and that this is all accomplished semiotically through the linkage of certain ‘qualia’ of sociocultural experience with gender. Current claims to universality (sovereignty) are based in the ‘objectivity’ embodied in male reason and ‘hard’ science. Etc. This string of thoughts can be tracked back to Hegel (and others) through Judith Butler, or it could be given a radical feminist slant, as for example, in the work of Catherine Mackinnon. I just tend to see certain forms of ‘political’ or ‘collective’ claims as requiring the suppression of certain other kinds of claims, and this suppression seems everywhere or often to take a gendered form: the rejection of the feminine, of the particular, of the soft, of nurture. My gut thinking here tracks a series of discussions in feminist anthropology from the 1970s to today.

And speaking of gendered embodiments of the nation, check out this crazy image of Angela Merckel:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,490795,00.html

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-07/trans_toy

Thanks also Oneman for reporting on your experiences at the Carnegie Council. Interesting. I love to hear stuff like this: the hallway or classroom discourse that is sometimes more important than what actually gets published.

Personally I prefer the work of Geoff Nunberg. There is a nice video of Nunberg talking about his book here. But Nunberg is not so focused on masculinity…

My general suggestion here is that there is an important linkage between the authoritarian ideology that has been so popular in the US for the last several years (and even longer) and certain gender dynamics. Beyond Lakoff and cognitivism, there would be of course Theweleit’s famous Male Fantasies. Someone at Sadly, No! thought this might be relevant reading right now too:
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/6209.html

The extreme left tends to use male pejoratives and hold to your wounded pride model as well. America does not hold the high moral ground anymore and that is shameful. Everything has gone to pot since 911 and the right stole the show. Restore the pride.

The other player in the blogosphere is the right wing uber-alles types. But their sense of it is that the rot set in before 911 and so they are vindicated. All they are doing is bringing back the sanity. And restoring the pride.

And then every now and again, each side makes sense……..and you know you haven’t gone over to the dark side.

I personally am less than convinced that the answer to the pop-psychology of the Right is to create a pop-psychology of the Left; especially a pop-evolutionary-psychology of the Left if there really can be such a thing…

I don’t understand how you are getting from the IS to the OUGHT here. Why should an analysis of “the way things work” be expected to lead to a particular course of action? Perhaps one might look at the analysis and decide that it could be used to keep the ignorant masses down, under the control of their superiors.

I don’t think that, but I don’t get there from anthropology, I get there from my own moral code (my understanding of Buddhism) *plus* what I see as the state of things in the world.

How is expecting your colleagues to share your views, as a matter of course, NOT sleight of hand? Commanding assent by social pressure rather than by argument?

None of this struck me as particularly useful analysis of the real world — and to be honest, that didn’t seem to be the goal. For the most part, the intention seemed to be to show the audience the sacrifices (mostly of other people) that Americans (as Strong points out, while male Americans) had to be willing to make to keep “our place” in the world. We had to be tough, unsentimental, “realist” — in other words, men — and show the rest of the world how it’s done.

The misogyny of this sort of display is obvious — after all, what is America masculinity if not the rejection of the feminine? Which is, of course, Coulter’s stock-in-trade — and O’Reilly’s, and Hannity’s, and Limbaugh’s, and so on. It’s Marlboro Country over there (without the cigarettes, because addictions are for weak girly-men) — a situation aptly summarized in the expulsion of “touchy-feely” Phil Donahue from MSNBC, and his replacement by the lower-rated but damn manly Michael Savage, whose main (only?) role in society is to collect, concentrate, and regurgitate the homophobia that makes the whole burly man thing work.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/images/uncle_sam_bush.jpg

Also, speaking of paternalistic national symbols, how about Captain America?