Playing with the boys: contesting and performing masculinity in Top Gun

This thesis considers how Top Gun works as a site for exploring and constructing masculinity through the male body and performance. It examines areas of contestation, complicating and underscoring the construction of a postmodern, performative masculinity, and suggesting the film as axiomatic of a historical shift in cinematic masculinity using the exhibition of the male body to perform masculinity in order to construct its postmodern formulation. It demonstrates how Top Gun leans heavily on the performance of the masculine, combining the spectacle of the male form with aspects of homeovestism, in settings and occupations that privilege the homosocial/homoerotic domain of masculinity while displaying striking levels of misogyny. The essay also argues that cinematic engulfment and exhibitionism reinforce elements of performative masculinity, while presenting a reconfigured oedipal conflict, and even a rather queer love triangle (or two), that resolves in a dominant reading that affirms— a now problematized and unstable— masculinity.