Media, Masculinities, and the Machine - F1, Transformers, and Fantasizing Technology at its Limits

Media, Masculinities and the Machine identifies a distinctive phenomenon in today's media culture - the contemporary male fantasy of 'suiting up' and pushing technology to its limits. The authors deconstruct this fantasy using two in-depth studies from American, British and global media: the social imagining of hi-tech in the long-running Transformers franchise and global Formula One motorsport , with links to numerous other areas of contemporary culture. By employing the method of autoethnography to find out what boys and men want and say, the book offers a timely contribution to our understanding of contemporary cultural attachments, as well as informative accounts of two instances united by their apparent gender focus and by their interest in ways of imagining high-tech. Tracking their theme through TV, cinema, toys, computer games, magazines, comics and merchandising, the authors raise important questions about mediated masculinities today and propose a new theoretical framework for uncovering what is going on.Table of ContentChapter 1. Introducing the Social Imagining of High-Tech.; Chapter 2. Fatal Strategies and Affective Play: Towards a new model; Chapter 3. Reflexivity and Method.; Chapter 4. Strategy-Intensity Practices and F1.; Chapter 5. Strategy-Intensity Practices and Transformers.; Chapter 6. Strategy-Intensity Practices and Boys' Toys; (Looking at consumer discourses of 'the machine' to open-out the prior two case studies.); Chapter 7. Smart Masculinities, Dream Machinery, and Masculinized Media.; (Drawing together the role of both mediated masculinities and media technologies as masculinized.).Review QuoteFleming and Sturm have achieved a rare success in academic writing, by producing a book that is both important in its arguments and engaging in its style of writing and presentation. This book focuses on the complex relationship between humans, and more specifically men, and machines, but through their dual treatise of Transformers toys and Formula One racing, they provide insights that will have resonance with a wide variety of disciplines and subjects, including the study of masculinity, fandom, play, everyday life, material culture, technology, sport, social theory and media. — Garry Crawford, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Sociology, University of SalfordReview QuoteLike a Formula 1 driver negotiating a hairpin turn through the sheer downforce of acceleration, Fleming and Sturm stick fast to their objects of analysis and don't let go. Linking affective resonances and processual materialities with hyper-reflexive riffings on methods, theories, fans and their attachments, this book continually assembles and then reassembles itself into new configurations of meaning and intensity. This is a book not only about machines but a machinic book! -- Gregory J. Seigworth, co-editor of The Affect Theory ReaderReview QuoteThe key contribution this book makes is to a non-representational media theory that teases out the complex interrelation between mediated elements ( texts, objects, and so forth) in the ‘affective substrate” of culture.Biographical NoteDamion Sturm, PhD, is a Teaching Fellow for Screen & Media Studies, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Dan Fleming, PhD, is Professor of Screen & Media Studies, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.Identifying a distinctive phenomenon in today's media culture, the authors propose a new theoretical framework for understanding mediated masculinities.Offers a new model to theoretically study important under-researched areas of media culture.A distinctive account for those who need material on masculinities in gendered representational systems.Draws on some of the best available scholarship to demonstrate its explanatory usefulness.