(Download) "Consuming Media, Making Men: Using Collective Memory Work to Understand Leisure and the Construction of Masculinity (Report)" by Journal of Leisure Research # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Consuming Media, Making Men: Using Collective Memory Work to Understand Leisure and the Construction of Masculinity (Report)
- Author : Journal of Leisure Research
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 291 KB
Description
Introduction Despite an abundance of transdisciplinary research about adolescence and youth development, we seem no closer to understanding male youth violence such as the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado or the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming than we did 10 years ago. Parents, educators, researchers and policymakers have sought to identify the root causes of this violence by looking at three separate, but overlapping areas: access to handguns, parental influence/authority, and the media's influence on young people. Given that leisure has been identified as a central developmental context for young men and since they consume large quantities of media in their free time, an investigation on how media consumption can influence the ways in which young people construct their identifies vis-a-vis gender socialization processes seems warranted. Therefore, the central purpose of this study was to explore the media consumption of young men to understand how they create and maintain masculinity. Despite more than 30 years of feminist advocacy for the eradication and/or alteration of rigidly defined gender roles, participants in this research project indicated that narrow roles and expectations of what it means to be a "man" and of "manhood" are still firmly entrenched in U.S. society. Using collective memory work (Haug, 1992), participants agreed that their earliest, individual memories of what it means to be a man were steeped in violent media representations of men and maleness. Finally, their collective analysis and theorizing led them to conclude that through media consumption, men actively construct and maintain impressions of masculinity based on notions of heroism, violence, and 'macho' images. In short, participants believed that the media was critical in the production and reproduction of hegemonic masculinity.