Tough Guy in Drag? How the external, critical discourses surrounding Kathryn Bigelow demonstrate the wider problems of the gender question

Abstract

This article argues that the various approaches adopted towards Kathryn Bigelow’s work, and their tendency to focus on a gendered discourse, obscures the wider political discourses these texts contain. In particular, by analysing the representation of masculinity across the films, it is possible to see how the work of this director and her collaborators is equally representative of its cultural context and how it uses the trope of the male body as a site for a dialectical study of the uses and status of male strength within an imperialistically-minded western society.