Hypermasculine Body Ideals and the Construction of Marginal Bodies in the Film, Just Friends

Name of Author : T Nishad

Abstract: Visual representation of the body and its cultural connotations assume critical significance in the diverse filed of gender studies. Body, especially the masculine body, has been utilized as a trope to foreground the culturally coded and normative beauty ideals and widely internalized and acknowledged standards of behavior in the society. Those bodies which deviate from such weird expectations will be deemed to be grotesque for a standard social gaze. Thus as a social being, one is informed in invisible ways to be adhered to the societal expectations of embodiment. The interplay of gender roles and their plurisignant associations can be traced out from the depiction of contemporary Hollywood film characters. Through the paper titled as Hypermasculine Body Ideals and the Construction of Marginal Bodies in the Film, Just Friends, the researcher tries to analyze the film Just Friends to examine how the different body ideals act as a tool to foreground expected gender roles and the struggle for resistance adopted by the deviant one in order to cope up with the society where only thin men are fit to be seen.

Keywords : Hypermasculine, Resistance, Social Gaze, Marginal Bodies, Embodiment, Gender Roles

DOI :