Gender Roles in Contemporary Culture.

Fight Club: Gender roles in contemporary culture

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk was a rare cultural phenomenon when it was first released. It was a literary work of trade fiction that became a best-seller because of its ability to tap into a cultural obsession of its time, namely the idea that masculinity is a threatened commodity. In the novel, a group of men create a secret club where they attempt to demonstrate their primal masculinity by engaging in bare-fisted brawling. This is portrayed as a way for men to find their identity in a faceless, placeless world where the traditional methods for men to prove themselves have been stripped away. Fight Club exemplifies a recent trend in contemporary attempts to construct a form of primitive masculinity that idealize a primordial past, absent of women and embodying an essentialized views of manhood.

The narrator of Fight...
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