Abstract
Recent writing in geography and its cognate disciplines suggests that the crisis of masculinity is in large part about the marginalization of men. With this paper, we take this spatial metaphor to task using David Fincher's Fight Club as a foil against which we try to pin larger issues of masculinity and urban life. That Flight Club can be viewed as alienated men confronting their homosocial and homoerotic selves through laddish revolutionary pranks detracts from its potential as a commentary on larger social tensions and contradictions. Men are simultaneously in the center and at the margins of what Bourdieu describes as the habitus; they are simultaneously playful and despairing, they are simultaneously alienated and the purveyors of hegemonic order. Fincher's movie engages these spatial metaphors and offers an opportunity to destroy the habitus, to change both masculinity and culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aitken S., 2002: Tuning the self: city space and SF horror movies. In: Kitchen R. and Kneale J. (eds), Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction. Continuum Press, London.
Borde R. and Chaumeton E., 2003: A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953. City Light Books, San Francisco.
Bourdieu P., 1977a: Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage, London.
Bourdieu P., 1977b: Outline of a Theory of Practice. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bourdieu P., 1984: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Routledge, London.
Bourdieu P., 1989: Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory 7(1): 14–25.
Bourdieu P., 1990a: In Other Words-Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bourdieu P., 1990b: The Logic of Practice. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bourdieu P. and Wacquant L., 1992: An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bruno G., 2002: Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. Verso, New York.
Clover C., 1989: Her body, himself: gender and the slasher film. In: Donald J. (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema, pp. 91–133. British Film Institute, London.
Connell R., 1993: The big picture: masculinities in recent world history. Theory and Society 22: 597–623.
Crang M., 2002: Rethinking the observer: film, mobility, and the construction of the subject. In: Cresswell T. and Dixon D. (eds), Engaging Film Geographies of Mobility and Identity, pp. 13–31. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham.
Creswell T., 2000: Falling down: Resistance as diagnostic. In: Sharpe J., Routledge P., Philo C. and Paddison R. (eds), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance, pp. 256–268. Routledge, New York and London.
Cresswell T and Dixon D., 2002: Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham.
Dyer R., 1999: Seven. British Film Institute, London.
Fincher D., 2000: Fight Club. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, DVD 2000035.
Fleming D. and Roth R., 1991: Place in advertising. Geographical Review 81(3): 281–291.
Garnham N. and Williams R., 1980: Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture: An introduction. Media, Culture and Society 2: 209–230.
Giroux H., 1995: Pulp Fiction and the culture of violence. Harvard Educational Review 65(2): 299–314.
Harvey D., 1996: Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishers, London.
Jacobs J., 1992: Cultures of the past and urban transformation: the Spital-fields Market redevelopment in East London. In: Anderson K. and Gale F. (eds), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, pp. 183–198. Longman Cheshire, Melbourne.
Jameson F., 1992: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Jordan M., 2002: Marxism, not manhood: accommodation and impasse in Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Chuck Palanuik's Fight Club. Men and Masculinities 4(4): 368–379.
Kirsch S., 2002: Spectacular violence, hypergeography, and the question of alienation in Pulp Fiction. In: Cresswell T. and Dixon D. (eds), Engaging Film Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham.
Mitchell D., 2000: Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Blackwell Publishers, New York.
Painter J., 1997: Regulation, regime and practice in urban politics. In: Lauria M. (ed.), Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, pp. 122–143. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Painter J., 2002: Pierre Bourdieu. In: Crang M. and Thrift N. (eds), Thinking Space, pp. 239–259. Routledge, New York.
Parkes D. and Thrift N., 1980: Times, Spaces and Places: A Chronogeographic Perspective. Wiley, Chichester.
Pile S. and Thrift N., 1995: Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. Routledge, London.
Podmore J., 1998: (Re)reading the 'loft living' habitus in Montreal's inner city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22(2): 283–301.
Rose G., 2001: Visual Methodologies. Sage Publications, London.
Sauer C., 1925: The morphology of landscape. In: Agnew J., Livingstone D. and Rogers A., (eds), Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, pp. 296–315. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.
Schickel R., 2003: Hollywood's dark shadows. Los Angeles Times Book Review 2/9/2003: R2.
Seidler V., 1994: Unreasonable Men: Maculinity and Social Theory. Routledge, London.
Shiel M. and Fitzmaurice T., 2001: Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA.
Short J., Benton L., Luce B. and Walton J., 1993: Reconstructing the image of an industrial city. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83(2): 207–224.
Thompson J., 1991: Introduction. In: Bourdieu P., Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Watson S., 1991: Gilding the smokestacks: the new symbolic representations of deindustrialized regions. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9(1): 59–70.
Williams R., 1982: The Sociology of Culture. Schocken Books, New York.
Williams R., 1981: Culture. Fontana Press, London.
Wynne D. and O'Connor J., 1998: Consumption and the postmodern city. Urban Studies 5(6): 841–864.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Craine, J., Aitken, S.C. Street fighting: Placing the crisis of masculinity in David Fincher's Fight Club . GeoJournal 59, 289–296 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GEJO.0000026702.99315.b5
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GEJO.0000026702.99315.b5