Femininity and the destabilization of the hegemonic masculinity in the sun also.

• Main Author: Yong Min Hui Vicki.
• Other Authors: Angela Anne Frattarola
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45194
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

What is the link between masculinity and femininity? How is the embracing of masculinity also a rejection of femininity? In the exploration of the relationship between the two supposed binaries of the masculine and the feminine, it led me to question what we commonly believe to be absolute truths about gender and gender relations. My essay thus examines the notions of masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club where ideals of masculinity are espoused and the Other—be it women or femininity—is rejected. Deconstructing the masculinity in these works exposes an inherent self-emasculation that subsequently brings to light the weakness in an apparently stable gender identity, and by extension, the weakness in the gender binary itself. It becomes clear that the concepts of masculinity and femininity are not just opposing concepts, but fluid and intersecting with no clear-cut dichotomy. The overt masculinity presented in these texts ironically fractures the gender binary that masculinity was built upon, and depends upon in order to maintain a phallocentric order in which it thrives.