Men at Work

Image Credit: Iron Horse Entertainment
Image Credit: Iron Horse Entertainment

Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), the titular figure in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, is perhaps the nicest man I have ever encountered on screen outside of a Hallmark Christmas film. Although I initially found it easier to believe that a half-lizard man was stalking Manhattan’s sewers than that someone with Tatum’s looks could be so kind, I quickly realized that Soderbergh was using this hyper-sweetness against Mike. It’s the initial warning that he’s not your father’s hero. When Mike first saunters across the frame, he is nude. I point this out not simply as an excuse to include this gif but because it’s significant that Mike first exists as mere body. This body underscores his physical masculinity (he does in fact have a Y chromosome—a very, very nice one), but the film calls into question the cultural signification of this flesh. He may be male, but does this make him a man?

Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949 and drag queens burst onto the pop cultural scene in the 1990s, people have acknowledged that femininity is something you do, not something you are. As Judith Butler taught generations of gender studies majors, femininity is an act that must be continuously performed in order to have meaning. Masculinity, on the other hand, has mostly remained the default position. Men are assumed to be masculine—unless they act in an obviously feminine manner—and women who are not performing their proper feminine roles are immediately derided as masculine. Masculinity itself is, therefore, taken for granted, the natural gender at odds with feminine artificiality. With the help of a few rip-away pants and leopard thongs, Magic Mike attacks masculinity’s unassailable position by revealing that it is no less a performance than femininity. Indeed, in Magic Mike, masculinity is entirely a performance—one centered on money. Continue reading “Men at Work”