Monsters Next Door Analysis

Jackson Katz’s commentary surrounding the Newtown shooting reiterates feminist, specifically men’s studies, discourses over the last thirty years. Katz, also director of the film ‘Tough Guise’, uses his platform on the Huffington Post website to call for change in the navigation of the socially-fraught waters surrounding mass murder events. A more detailed and focused discussion can be found developing these ideas, in Mia Consalvo’s The Monsters Next Door, wherein which she develops the notion of multiple masculinities and the hierarchy of power that exists within them. This essay will analyse what features of the human body are rendered invisible or significant, as argued by both authors, and where their depictions of masculinity conflict …show more content…
The concept is curiously absent from Katz’s article, which avoids considering how boys and young men produce their developing masculinity as opposed to adults, and the differences in socially-acceptable performances of gender differ between social groups and races and ethnicities, as well as between the hierarchical layers of masculinity itself. Missing the subject is perhaps understandable for a short article produced for a wide online audience, and yet these differences are crucially important, as discussed by Consalvo on the impact of power, race and class on the Columbine shooters, as they provide an additional lens through which to examine the cause of violence committed by men, which is what Katz is seeking to encourage. Where Consalvo makes detailed address to the peer culture that exists in high school and the expectations of masculine acts that are socially rewarded, and to the shooters’ racism, Katz’s discussion restricts itself to an abstract, raceless masculinity and has the effect of ignoring another important variable in shootings: age. For Consalvo, juvenile masculinity is fluid and unformed, still in need of Connell’s masculinity ‘acts’ to confirm itself. This stage of constructing an identity also involves constructing masculinity and ‘trying to determine how violence might fit into their particular construction’ (Consalvo 31), potentially a more …show more content…
Where Katz’s chosen article format blurs the impression of masculinity once more into a single hegemonic entity, Consalvo’s work teases the details back out and encourages a more intersectional approach, which benefits all interpreters and media readers, male or otherwise, white or not, neurotypical or otherwise, gives them the benefit of the multiplicative and rich perspectives that lead to an understanding and undoing of toxic masculinity. Without a more intense reading of the construction of masculinity in news media, the source of violence and the causes of social pressures towards violence may be consistently underestimated and reinforced, such that its application continues to be perceived as the only way both men and boys can truly apply that gender to