![]() 6 See for example Claudia Springer, “Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Armored Cyborg in Cinema”, Ge (.).Were the hypermasculine “hard bodies” of the 1980s always presented as the masculine ideal in science fiction films such as RoboCop or The Terminator ? Can science fiction provide alternative models of masculinity? Can it even call into question male hegemony? Through close textual analyses of four major science fiction films of the 1980s and 1990s, this paper wishes to examine the changing representations and definitions of masculinity offered by science fiction in the two previous decades and its relationship to hegemonic masculinity – how science fiction provided a specific hegemonic model in the 1980s in the guise of hypermasculinity while at the same time highlighting its flaws, which led to its transformation and seeming demise in the late 1990s, with the appearance of alternative models of masculinity. VER ONE PUSH HERO THE LONE CYBORG HOW TOa human opposed to non-humans, thus seems to be reformulated into a more specific questioning about what it means to be a man, or how to define masculinity. The central question of science fiction, what it is to be a Man, i.e. Hypermasculinity puts masculinity on show by making muscles highly visible: hypermasculine heroes often wear tight and revealing clothes, like Dolph Lundgren in Masters of the Universe (Gary Goddard, 1987), or no clothes at all, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first appearance in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) – even Robocop’s metallic armor reproduces a body-built torso by incorporating sculpted titanium pectorals ( RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987).
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