Author: Joseph Oland

Critical Position: Photojournalist

Title: Lensebender
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at: https://lensebender.org/2015/04/01/fight_club/
Date: 1st April 2015
Chapter/ Article: Fight Club and Modern Masculinity
Subject/key points and potential for use: Masculinity conflict within the characters surrounding the Narrator in Fight Club.
Quotation: ‘In a film about modern man’s struggle with his own masculinity, it makes sense to surround the main character with
post-surgical victims of testicular cancer – men who have literally been castrated.’

Author: Tori. E. Godfree

Critical Position: Editor and Writer
Title: Film & Media
Publisher/publication: Inquiries Journal
Place of Publication: Online at: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/227/a-generation-of-men-raised-by-women-gender-
constructs-in-fight-club
Date: 2010
Chapter/ Article: A Generation of Men Raised by Women: Gender Constructs in 'Fight Club'
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender issues and feminine men
Quotation: ‘Both Marla and Jack go through tremendous changes in character throughout the movie. The violence they both
experience transforms Jack into a stronger person—making him more self-aware and assertive—and Marla into a more sensitive
person—making her softer and less callous. Whereas Jack displays the more feminine traits in the beginning of the film, and Marla
the more masculine, now each has given up some of those opposing gender qualities and absorbed more of that of their own
gender.’
‘The impression we are left with at the end of Fight Club is that the rearrangement of Marla and Jack’s masculine and feminine
traits leads them to become better people. Marla, as a more feminine woman, is more tender towards Jack, and thus more
appealing to him. Jack, as a more masculine man, is more confident towards Marla, and thus more appealing to her. This suggests
that only through the proper alignment of masculine and feminine traits can one truly achieve good character and proper ethos.
While feminists and supporters have worked vigorously in an attempt to blur the lines of gender constructs, this shows that despite
the progress made, they are still very apparent in modern culture, and modern society.’
Author: Things That Are Hard to Explain
Critical Position: N/A
Title: Things That Are Hard to Explain
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at: https://thingsthatarehardtoexplain.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/gender-in-fight-club/
Date: 15th January 2017
Chapter/ Article: Gender in Fight Club
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender issues and feminine men
Quotation: ‘In the early 90’s the view that culture was becoming feminized was emerging, ‘real men’ had no place; the world has
become emotional, soft and feminine’
‘Activities like shopping are often assumed to be a female past times, and in Fight Club our narrator is a male who is obsessive with
the Ikea furniture in his flat, he also holds a second job as a waiter, a traditionally female service job’

Author: Maggie Kathwaroon

Critical Position: Men’s Studies Teacher
Title: Masculinity Bytes
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at: https://masculinitybytes.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/the-first-rule-of-teaching-fight-club/
Date: 26th April 2013
Chapter/ Article: The First Rule of Teaching Fight Club
Subject/key points and potential for use: The contrast between Tyler and the Narrator (Masculine vs Feminine)
Quotation: ‘Edward Norton stated, “We decided early on that I would start to starve myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift
and go to tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.”
‘To emphasize that these are merely performances of (hyper)masculinity, I show them this scene from the film, in which Edward Norton’s
character and Tyler Durden gaze at a men’s underwear ad. The underwear model’s torso sports an enviable six-pack. Edward Norton’s
character turns to Tyler Durden and asks, “Is that what a man looks like?” Tyler replies, “Self-improvement is masturbation.” At this point,
the irony of this scene is not lost on my students: Brad Pitt looks exactly like the underwear ad model ’
Author: BetaCandy
Critical Position: Journalist
Title: The Hathor Legacy
Publisher/publication: The Hathor Legacy
Place of Publication: Online at: https://thehathorlegacy.com/fight-club-a-generation-of-men-raised-by-women/
Date: 10th April 2005
Chapter/ Article: Fight Club: A generation of men raise by women
Subject/key points and potential for use: The contrast between Tyler and the Narrator (Masculine vs Feminine)
Quotation: ‘Our society hasn’t just broken its promises to women; it’s broken trust with all of us. And the people at the top are
neither men nor women; they are genderless piles of insecurity in the form of human flesh.’
‘it’s all about a man’s search for identity in the form of manhood in a world of men.’

Author: Stella Bruzzi

Critical Position: Author
Title: Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise en Scene in Hollywood
Publisher/publication: Edinburgh University Press
Place of Publication: Cheshire, UK
Date: 2013
Chapter/ Article: How Mise en Scene tells the mans story
Subject/key points and potential for use: Masculinity in film
Quotation: ‘ The strains, the repressive instincts, the disavowals and all other attendant strategies deployed to hold up the
‘normality’ and hegemony of white, middle class, heterosexual masculinity emerge furtively but frequently within classical
Hollywood cinema, at a time when the explicit questioning of masculinity’s status would have been more problematic. Though the
cinematic expression of male anxiety is evidently not confined to melodramas and film noir, the evocation of the ‘strain’ of
masculinity is particularly interesting when functioning within a markedly feminised space.’
‘Ultimately masculinity is stopped from descending into ‘pure spectacle’ by the acceptance of Mulvey’s psychodynamic paradigm , a
paradigm that is here reiterated at the expense of further discussion of style and aesthetics as generators of meaning.’
Author: M. Keither Brooker
Critical Position: Author
Title: Postmodern Hollywood
Publisher/publication: Praeger
Place of Publication: USA
Date: 2007
Chapter/ Article: Breaking up is hard to avoid
Subject/key points and potential for use: Capitalism/ historical context
Quotation: ‘Despite its embedded critique of capitalism, the portrayal in Fight Club of the anticapitalistic guerrilla force seriously
diminishes any potential impact of that critique. For one thing, the bloody violence of the fight clubs hardly seems feasible as a
means of transcending the antagonistic social relations of capitalism. Nor does this fighting really seem preferable to the acquisition
of IKEA furnishings. Furthermore, the guerrilla force that arises in opposition to capitalism seems to have no ideological agenda
other than pure destruction.’
‘After all, films such as Fight Club, Natural Born Killers and Requiem for A dream are so thoroughly about the impossibility of utopia
that they can offer a little in the way of utopian alternatives to the contemporary America they present as such a psychic wasteland.’

Author: Mike Chopra-Gant

Critical Position: Author
Title: Hollywood Genres and Postwar America
Publisher/publication: I.B Tauris & Co Ltd
Place of Publication: USA and Canada
Date: 2006
Chapter/ Article: The troubled postwar family
Subject/key points and potential for use: Historical context
Quotation: ‘ The absence of fathers on military service (and mothers engaged in war work) destabilised the family, leading to a
‘relaxation of sexual morality’ and to ‘neglect of children and so to a rise in juvenile delinquency.’
Author: Robert Ollman
Critical Position: Blog Writer
Title: Fight Club Analysed through a gender role lens
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at: https://robertollman.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/fight-club-analyzed-through-a-gender-role-lens/
Date: December 10th 2012
Chapter/ Article: Analysing Fight Club/Prototypical Male
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender Roles
Quotation: 'This book is trying to replicate how society views how men and women are suppose to look, act, and perceive
themselves in everyday life. This text suggests that Palahniuk is giving the reader another way to view how society perceives the
difference in gender roles.’
‘In today’s society, males have been increasingly looked at as having power, being big, not showing emotion in public, and having
to seem tough at all times. Michael Kimmel, a scholar of masculinity, refers to a traditional model of masculinity that contains four
rules: no sissy stuff, be a big wheel, be a sturdy oak, and Give Em Hell (Kimmel). When he states “no sissy stuff”, he is referring to
no acts that may make you look like a homosexual or anything that the typical female would do (Kimmel). By “being a big wheel”,
he is referring to measuring masculinity through the amount of wealth, power, and overall status you have in society (Kimmel).’
Author: Jacob Wiker
Critical Position: Student
Title: Romance and Identity in Fight Club
Publisher/publication: Engaged Scholarship PDF
Place of Publication: Online at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1501&context=etdarchive
Date: 2013
Chapter/ Article: Identity in Fight Club
Quotation: ' Fight Club’s romance is an engine of the fluctuation of the narrator’s identity – in fact, it actually instigates his masculine crisis. In
the beginning of the novel, the narrator (who, in the critical convention, is usually called “Jack”) is essentially emasculated and without any form
of identity.’
‘When Jack meets Marla Singer, it is her presence that instigates the disassociation of his two identities (Jack and Tyler). The narrator is then
caught between the influence of Marla and of Tyler: he moves away from demasculinization and lack of identity towards Tyler’s ultra-violent,
“macho” hypermasculinity and then diverges, “killing” Tyler by shooting through his own face, and, thus, reaching an equilibrium – in Freudian
terms, a “maturity” that allows him to the opportunity to “commit,” to set aside his own self-obsession in favor of another.'
‘Fight Club is undeniably gender-centric, and, though it appears to be more explicitly concerned with the male gender, it is more implicitly
concerned with the female one. It is against the work’s lone female character, Marla Singer, that the narrator must define himself, and it is she
who is the constant objective of his attention, and, finally, his savior – an interesting reversion of what one might usually expect from something
which is purportedly a romance.’
Author: Jacob Wiker
Critical Position: Student
Title: Romance and Identity in Fight Club
Publisher/publication: Engaged Scholarship PDF
Place of Publication: Online at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1501&context=etdarchive
Date: 2013
Chapter/ Article: Homosexual Relationships
Subject/key points and potential for use: Homosexual Romance
Quotation: ‘The narrative of Fight Club is driven by a specific romance – that between Jack and Marla – or, rather, Jack/Tyler and Marla.
Boiled down to its essence, Fight Club’s romance takes the form of heteronormative “pursuit,” the archetypical fictional and cultural ideal of the
woman “pursued” by the man. However, the novel’s heterosexual romance is complicated by the quasi-homosexual romance between Jack and
Tyler. In fact, numerous critics have remarked on the visible, or, perhaps, rather ill-disguised homoeroticism in Fight Club. Indeed, Fight Club’s
homoeroticism indicates a more complex “love triangle” than traditional interpretations of romance might initially suggest: however,
surprisingly, it is by that heteronormative romance that Jack is finally redeemed, or, at least, saved from Tyler.’
‘Critics have picked up on a considerable number of homosexual elements, specifically, a great deal of sexual tension between Tyler and Jack.
Of course, this is complicated by the fact that Tyler is actually Jack, which makes his homosexual attraction to Tyler narcissistic, as well as love
for a hypermasculinized vision of himself.’
‘Tyler, of course, “is” Jack, so any homoerotic attraction between the two must, again, be narcissistic. He is also the literal embodiment of Jack’s
own distorted yearning for a hypermasculine identity – a yearning so strong that it manifests itself in an entirely different personality, which
must, again, be dealt with before he is “worthy” of Marla.’
Author: Sally Robinson
Critical Position: Professor of English
Title: Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women: Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-Consumerist Critique
Publisher/publication: Colorado Education
Place of Publication: Online at: https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2011/05/01/feminized-men-and-inauthentic-
women-fight-club-and-limits-anti-consumerist-critique
Date: May 1st 2011
Chapter/ Article: Genders
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender Roles
Quotation: ‘It is no accident that the film dwells on the testicular cancer support group, or that it uses Marla’s participation in it as
the narrator’s breaking point. Both the narrator and Marla are faking all the illnesses whose support groups they attend; neither
has blood or brain parasites, neither has tuberculosis, neither has any form of cancer. But, what makes Marla’s faking of testicular
cancer particularly galling to the narrator and significant to the film’s logic is that it proves that gender itself can no longer be
authenticated.’
‘Fight Club does not simply argue that an authentic masculinity needs to be rescued from the wastes of an inauthentic and
feminizing consumer culture; it argues that we need to think about masculinity asoutsideof culture itself. The logic goes
something like this: while femininity is a social construction—and, thus, “fake”—masculinity, rooted in the male body and its
elemental sensations and desires, is a brute fact of nature. The film pursues a masculine authenticity, rather than an authentic
masculinity, and masculinity, thus, becomes the location of the real, the authentic.’