The Rise and Fall of The Club Kids

Last week I blogged about the cult sensation, book turned movie Party Monster: The Rise and Fall of the Club Kids. I think both the book and movie are interesting to look at yet again, this time in the context of the ideology of what it is to be masculine in modern society. As Meyers discussed in her piece on Masculinities of the OC, the hegemonic male is a stereotypical aspect of hegemonic desire; he is tanned, buffed and bronzed. He is heroic. He is aggressive. He is all male. And, when reading her piece, it became clear that though she was discussing the OC, she was making presumptions that most fiction in our youth culture is presented with the male protagonist being this hegemonic concept of masculinity.

Party Monster, however, is interesting in that the characters are all subordinate, as they are homosexual and effeminate in total. So, does this mean that Party Monster is counter-hegemonic because it is not representing hegemonic masculinity to exclusion? I think the answer is yes. Yes because their representations of the protagonist is not the ideological stereotype.