Masculinities in the US Hangout Sitcom examines how four sitcoms – Friends, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, and New Girl – mediate the tense relationship between neoliberalism and masculinities.
Why is Ross in Friends so worried about everything? This book argues that the men in Friends and similar shows that follow young, straight, mostly white twentysomethings in major US cities are beset by a range of social and economic concerns about their place in society. Using multiple methods of analysis to examine these shows – including conjunctural analysis, historiographical method, and critical discourse analysis – a range of topics in these shows are examined, from sexuality through to homosociality, from race through to nationality.
This book makes an insightful contribution to work on the television sitcom and on neoliberalism in culture and society. It will be an ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, post-graduates, and researchers in a range of disciplines including television and screen studies, critical studies on men and masculinities and humor studies.
- The hangout sitcom: Could it be more culturally relevant?
- A brief historiography of US sitcom masculinities
- A typology of straight white men in the hangout sitcom
- Bromantic comedy: Male homosociality, heterosexuality, and relationships
- Breaking the circle: Challenging whiteness in the hangout sitcom’s surrogate families
- First as farce, then as tragedy: Failing and flailing neoliberal men in the UK’s hangout(-style) sitcoms
- Masculinities after the hangout sitcom
Biography
Greg Wolfman is an independent researcher who received his PhD from the University of Huddersfield, UK, in 2020. He is primarily interested in the confluence of and tension between neoliberalism and masculinity, and particularly how this is reflected in cultural forms. His work has been published in NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, and the Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities.
