Journal Articles by Glen Donnar
Celebrity Studies, 2021
Jian Xu, Glen Donnar & Vikrant Kishore (2021) Internationalising
Celebrity Studies: turning towar... more Jian Xu, Glen Donnar & Vikrant Kishore (2021) Internationalising
Celebrity Studies: turning towards Asia, Celebrity Studies, 12:2, 175-185, DOI:10.1080/19392397.2021.1912069
“They Said It'd Be an Adventure”: Masculinity, Nation, and Empire in Centennial Australian World War I Film and Television
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2018
Centennial commemorations of WWI in 2014-15 triggered a slew of Australian film and television mi... more Centennial commemorations of WWI in 2014-15 triggered a slew of Australian film and television mini-series depicting the nation’s early experiences in the Gallipoli campaign. This article maps how these recent productions’ deployment of adventure as an explicit narrative frame reveals complex continuities, transformations and subversions of adventure tropes and themes that have long structured Australian screen representations. Adventure-war remains a masculinist mode and Australian soldier masculinity idealized as forging the young nation. Yet recent productions also unsettle the customary “coming of age” chronology, indict the influence of adventure fiction, render adventure-war more inclusive and undermine traditional constructions of racial superiority.
‘Food porn’ or intimate sociality: Committed celebrity and cultural performances of overeating in meokbang, pp.122-127
Celebrity Studies, Jan 17, 2017
From Special issue introduction (Neil Ewen):
In this first essay, Donnar examines Meokbang, a... more From Special issue introduction (Neil Ewen):
In this first essay, Donnar examines Meokbang, a phenomenon
which features ‘broadcasting jockeys’ who gain celebrity status by sitting in front of webcams, ‘live-streaming their consumption of vast quantities of food’. Donnar argues that while ‘Moekbang certainly facilitates a sexualised, voyeuristic gaze’, his subtle reading gestures towards how these broadcasts of DIY celebrity ‘navigate cultural
and economic tensions, anxieties and passions specific to Korean society and culture’ and how it 'engenders divergent audience affects and ambivalent modes of viewing, including pleasure, desire, longing, horror, disgust and shame’. Donnar’s careful exploration therefore places the phenomenon within a national, cultural, and historical specificity that serves to problematise hegemonic representational stereotypes of, and assumptions about, Asian culture that are repeatedly elaborated in English language media.
Focusing on The Expendables films, I identify the importance of discourses of professional and cu... more Focusing on The Expendables films, I identify the importance of discourses of professional and cultural redundancy in ‘geri-action’, an emergent subgenre of Hollywood action film that has revitalised the careers of ageing action stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. These redundancies, which hold long-standing significance in 1980s action film, are compounded in geri-action by advanced age and diminished physical capacity. In geri-action, the spectacle of once idealised, muscled bodies is concealed and displaced onto oversized guns, fetishised vehicles and younger action bodies. However much geri-action resists 1980s action stars’ use-by dates, it ultimately admits physical and generic exhaustion.
‘It’s not just a dream. There is a storm coming!’: Financial Crisis, Masculine Anxieties and Vulnerable Homes in American Film
Despite the Gothic’s much-discussed resurgence in mainstream American culture, the role the late ... more Despite the Gothic’s much-discussed resurgence in mainstream American culture, the role the late 2000s financial crisis played in sustaining this renaissance has garnered insufficient critical attention. This article finds the Gothic tradition deployed in contemporary American narrative film to explore the impact of economic crisis and threat, and especially masculine anxieties about a perceived incapacity of men and fathers to protect vulnerable families and homes. Variously invoking the American and Southern Gothics, Take Shelter (2011) and Winter’s Bone (2010) represent how the domestic-everyday was made unfamiliar, unsettling and threatening in the face of metaphorical and real (socio-)economic crisis and disorder. The films’ explicit engagement with contemporary American economic malaise and instability thus illustrates the Gothic’s continued capacity to lay bare historical and cultural moments of national crisis. Illuminating culturally persistent anxieties about the American male condition, Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone materially evoke the Gothic tradition’s ability to scrutinize otherwise unspeakable national anxieties about male capacity to protect home and family, including through a focus on economic-cultural “white Otherness.” The article further asserts the significance of prominent female assumption of the protective role, yet finds that, rather than individuating the experience of financial crisis on failed men, both films deftly declare its systemic, whole-of-society basis. In so doing, the Gothic sensibility of pervasive anxiety and dread in Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone disrupts dominant national discursive tendencies to revivify American institutions of traditional masculinity, family and home in the wakes of 9/11 and the recession.
Male Anxiety, Inadequacy and Victimhood: Insecure Masculinities and Immature Heterosexualities in Contemporary Norwegian Cinema
This article examines white heterosexual men in five recent Norwegian films that expose them as a... more This article examines white heterosexual men in five recent Norwegian films that expose them as anxious and immature. These films mirror wider trends in the evaluation of white male failure and inadequacy across western cinemas since the mid-2000s. Extending critical discourses on ‘crises of masculinity’, especially in American film, this article finds in these films the ambivalent legacy of enforced gender politics in Norway over the last four decades. More specifically, they focus on Norwegian male complaints and ambivalence towards societal developments in favour of gender equality. Male characters exploit the opportunities of sexual liberation. They simultaneously objectify and neurotically fear women. A multitude of mental and physical ‘ailments’ establishes the men as victims. In an attempt to reclaim destabilized masculinities, parents and sexualized women are demonized. Ultimately, however, the desire to contain female sexuality and the transition into (hetero)sexual maturity is frustrated, and male anxieties remain unrelieved and unresolved.
The viewer of the televisual image often looks away from the mediated suffering of (distant) bodi... more The viewer of the televisual image often looks away from the mediated suffering of (distant) bodies, victims of terrorism, overwhelmed, helpless, seemingly consigned to a despairing passivity. But to not look is to refuse recognition of these suffering bodies and to accept their effacement (in death and mediation) as subjects. This paper adopts a 'Levinasian' approach to ‘the face’ to discern a way for the viewer to bear witness and establish a social connection with mediated bodies in suffering. Ultimately, for the viewer, it is not agency but responsiveness that matters, a passive engagement; an openness and a readiness to respond to the Other's call upon us, which makes possible a meaningful engagement. The effacement of mediated bodies in suffering cannot be reversed, but in the viewer's recognition and respons(ibility) it can be exceeded, transcended and they, finally, re-covered as subjects.
“A Support Withdrawn: ‘Spain’s 9/11’ and Australian Newspaper Framing”
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Journal Articles by Glen Donnar
Celebrity Studies: turning towards Asia, Celebrity Studies, 12:2, 175-185, DOI:10.1080/19392397.2021.1912069
In this first essay, Donnar examines Meokbang, a phenomenon
which features ‘broadcasting jockeys’ who gain celebrity status by sitting in front of webcams, ‘live-streaming their consumption of vast quantities of food’. Donnar argues that while ‘Moekbang certainly facilitates a sexualised, voyeuristic gaze’, his subtle reading gestures towards how these broadcasts of DIY celebrity ‘navigate cultural
and economic tensions, anxieties and passions specific to Korean society and culture’ and how it 'engenders divergent audience affects and ambivalent modes of viewing, including pleasure, desire, longing, horror, disgust and shame’. Donnar’s careful exploration therefore places the phenomenon within a national, cultural, and historical specificity that serves to problematise hegemonic representational stereotypes of, and assumptions about, Asian culture that are repeatedly elaborated in English language media.