ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the locker room as a liminal private/public or insider/outsider space that has a historic relationship to hegemonic masculinity. Locker rooms, the chapter argues, also act as functional spaces that inscribe a literacy of masculinity through the rites and rituals associated with them. These spaces also teach a code of masculinity that always works to sexualize and objectify women, to circulate ideals of heterosexual masculinity, and to surveil men into complicity. The heterosexual, sometimes even toxic, masculinity that circulates in popular culture representation frequently invokes the trope of the gaze, and of looking and being looked at. Using references from recent film and television, the chapter contends that both the ongoing performance of masculinity and its idealized forms, and the ubiquitous gaze, enforce a never-ending regulation of hegemonic masculinity.
