‘Hey, mate!’: Intervening the masculinity crisis in ABC’s Man Up

Abstract

This thesis explores the complex entanglements between governmentality, masculinity, health, and mateship in the television series Man Up (2016). Man Up was a three-part documentary series broadcast by the ABC in 2016 that explored how the ‘the pressure to be an Aussie man (is) fuelling a suicide crisis’ (Man Up, episode one: 2016). In this sense, the series was a direct intervention into the Australian population with an intention to benefit men’s lives. However, interventions come with specific presumptions that give shape to these issues. In this sense, I explore how Man Up constructed the problem of masculinity and mental health as one that concerns an exclusive type of man, and is principally focused on issues to do with emotionality and mateship. This effectively occludes those deeper problems to do with homophobia, sexism, and racism that have been a significant part of feminist, queer, and masculinity scholarship, which has major implications for the exclusive category of man the series is able to reach, and effectively reinforces rather than redefines masculine stereotypes. Further, by attempting to re-shape masculinity purely at the level of the self, Man Up reinforces neoliberal ideologies of health that make individuals responsible for themselves, rather than taking into consideration the social, economic, and political conditions of these men’s existence. In turn, I explore how the men of Man Up are also entangled within material realities, such as drought, globalisation, and shifting labour practices, in order to complicate the self-responsibilising logic of the text. In turn, I consider how Man Up might move beyond rigid categories of gender identity, by considering gender in relation to the ways in which it is entangled with more than social constructs.