“The Symbol of Something Larger”: a Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary American Culture in Fight Club
Oranuch Somprasit
Feminists have always had much to say about men, their power, their violence against women, and their oppression of women, but comprehending men’s inner selves has been left to men alone. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, a very popular novel which is also made into film by David Fincher, explores the conditions and the driving force of American white masculinity in the late capitalist society. The author claims the novel inspire many cultural phenomenon from Donatella Versace’s collection of men’s clothing with razor blades sewed into it, which is called the “fight club look” to the illegal of Fight Club stage plays. The novel also echoes and raises the topic of discussion about “men in crisis” in contemporary American society. This paper will discuss about the decline of male narrative which is quite obvious in various texts in Post-Vietnam War period, the condition of American white men suffering from emasculation in the modern bourgeois world, and masculinity identity in Postmodern conditions when men long to form their new identity as “new men” but there is no historical recognition which is highly required in identity formation.