Bonerkiller: Linking White Masculinity in Early Twenty-first Century American Texts and its Inadvertent Critique of Gender Roles to Neoliberal Values
Open AccessThis dissertation contends with fratire and the anxious white masculinity found within. Fratire, first named in 2006, is a genre featuring pejorative humor that mocks authority and attempts to reify an early twenty-first century conceptualization of manliness. Among others, I read Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and Chad Kultgen’s The Average American Male and assess them for the arguments they make about gender roles. On the surface, these arguments valorize freely pursuing copious sexual relations with women and protest any attempt to curtail their masculinity or burden it with any obligation borne of social expectations. I use a methodology of simultaneous empathy and refusal to get at the motivations of fratirists. When fratirists claim that they write irreverently for the sake of being a “real man,” I both follow that logic to its conclusion and employ Jack Halberstam’s low theory and gaga feminism as lens to wander about the structures upon which these arguments for male supremacy are built and deconstruct them. The first part of this dissertation, chapters 1-3, attends to identifying defining elements of fratire, and the second, chapters 4-5 contextualize fratire as a literary genre. Chapter 1 traces the way masculinity functions in three fratire texts, highlighting their utter dependence on a feminine presence, not for the sake of women as agentic actors, but rather as an object against which they can contrast their subject. Chapter 2 begins considering whether fratire could be lodging its own form of social protest. This chapter is an attempt to take fratire’s claim to victimhood at face-value. While I end up conceding that masculinity as a social role is both constructed and prescriptive and therefore arbitrary and restrictive, I also am not quite able to ascribe victimhood. Chapter 3 is my boner chapter, in which I grapple with the phallus in their ever-present forms throughout fratire. I propose boner discourse, which is a mechanism by which fratirists deploy boners, both rhetorical and material, in order to stave off both castration anxiety as well as to distance from the feminine. In Chapter 4 I zoom out and consider the genre as a whole; I link fratire to its predecessors in the American literature canon. I argue that fratire is a nostalgic looking backward at the kind of phantasmic victorious manhood that would have been a twenty-first century inheritance. I also note some points of marked departure from the industrial masculinity valued in the earlier parts of the twentieth century. And finally: my last chapter contends with the emergence of fratire as a publishing niche and examines the economic and technological forces that influence it. In examining the brand of humor and disavowal fratirists use, I become well-acquainted with a rocky landscape of patriarchal pressure pebbled with neoliberal forces that shape narratives, preparing them for sale in storefronts. The performativity of this prescribed masculinity becomes simultaneously the material upon which I discern its motivation and the structure within which I determine what’s at stake by claiming victimhood.
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