Core Post 4 - Lauren Sullivan

          As over-the-top hard-bodied depictions of 1980s masculinity have never interested me much, I had never seen any Arnold Schwarzenegger films before last class and have never thought a lot about how this tangible embodiment of masculinity relates to a broader political and social context. As a result, I found this week’s readings to be informative and interesting. Dyer gives a relatively broad overview of the 1980s shift toward the muscular male star in the chapter on “Star Bodies and Performance,” while Susan Jeffords’ chapter on “Terminal Masculinity” provided a more in-depth analysis of the departure from this 1980s masculinity. Dyer accredits the rise in muscular bodies on-screen to the Reagan-era fitness obsession in which “the disciplinary regime of physical development worked as a metaphor for the striving and enterprise which motivated the Reagan years” (182). According to Jeffords, this aligned white, muscular, male bodies with a concept of “justice,” which really suggested an alignment with the law and national social order (140). In the 1990s, with shifting political and social tides, came a transition toward a commitment to family. I find the manifestation of this in Terminator 2 to be pretty bizarre. Jeffons describes how Sarah Connor cannot take on the role of the Terminator because of her physicality, but the terminator can take on her maternal role. The Terminator can be muscular, physically imposing, and an actual robot and still replace Sarah’s role as mother, but because Sarah is muscular and her emotional tenderness to her son is somewhat subdued, she is described as “more animal than human” (163). I find it interesting how the Terminator can be seen as an ideal father and an embodiment of the shift toward family commitment, when he is ultimately a machine and likely incapable of genuine emotion. Regardless, I do see a shift in presentations in gender in The Terminator. The opposite binary distinctions that Dyer refers to are disrupted both through the masculinizing of the mother and the maternalizing of the Terminator. Sarah takes on  character traits associated with 1980s male masculinity with her affinity for violence and prioritzation of her cause over familial nurturing. The Terminator takes on roles and traits typically associated with motherhood. As a result, the Terminator's transformation to caretaker effectively replaces Sarah's role as mother, and her relation to 1980s masculinity moves her to a marginal role in the narrative.