Right from the outset, Ayoade’s film establishes the presence of a masculine hierarchy. I believe that The Double-both book and film-reveals both the existence of these masculine hierarchies and their constructed, unstable nature. Building on Judith Butler’s work, scholars believe certain types of gender performance are capable of exposing the constructed nature of masculinity and subverting the existing system. Yet the recent poststructuralist turn in masculinity studies emphasizes the inherent instability of these seemingly fixed masculine hierarchies. On the other hand, the system of masculinity also creates division among men, generating hierarchies with privileged and subordinate groups. On the one hand, a hegemonic masculinity serves to keep women subordinate socially, politically, and culturally. Rather, following the lead of Raewyn Connell, they concentrate on masculinity as a system of power relations both between men and women and among men themselves. However, gender theorists have moved away from defining masculinity based on a normative checklist of features. To be sure, in today’s society such characteristics carry important social and cultural currency for the men who possess them, a fact that Ayoade’s film highlights.
īy masculinity, I do not simply mean a set of traits such as suave self-confidence, a manly swagger, or the ability to seduce women. And, I would argue, Richard Ayoade’s 2013 transposition of The Double to a retro-futuristic dystopian world uncovers a polemic against masculinity in Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Mayakovsky” locates a camp aesthetic behind the great Soviet poet’s overblown, declamatory style. Thus Wide Sargasso Sea famously picks up the untold story of Bertha Mason, the madwoman that Charlotte Brontë kept locked in the attic. Often, it takes an adaptation or spin-off of a classic literary work to reveal the hidden dynamics of gender and sexuality that bubble just beneath the surface of the canonical text.
This is the first in a series of posts organized by the North American Dostoevsky Society, which is hosting a multimedia, online event in connection with a screening of Richard Ayoade’s film adaptation of The Double on November 6.Ĭonnor Doak is a lecturer in Russian at the University of Bristol, UK.
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