ABSTRACT
He was the strong but silent type: the stereotypical white male hero of classic Hollywood fi lm, the one against whom all difference-represented by comic or villainous ethnic types, the poor and the cowardly, the drunken and disabled, sissy boys and women, non-Americans and nonwhites-were measured and found wanting. Seemingly beyond representation, he was as much hidden as revealed by the cinematic conventions that produced him. In contemporary Hollywood, an idealized notion of empowered white masculinity still dominates screen entertainment, but it no longer appears beyond representation. Thanks in large part to the critical eye of feminist scholar ship of the past four decades, the historically specifi c performances and masquerades, anxieties and hysterical symptoms, gendered and genrespecifi c codes of narration that create such fantasies of gender privilege have been exposed to view.
