Title: Of Gods, Men and the Politics of the “Chosen”: Competing Masculinities and Nationalism in Religio-Mythological Hollywood Epics, 2010-2016

My research seeks to study the narratives, mechanisms and processes of maintaining American global hegemony and geopolitical domination through recent religio-mythological Hollywood “ancient world” epic films within the framework of American nationalism (embedded in American Exceptionalism) and hegemonic masculinity in a specific post-9/11 and “War on Terror” timeframe. This era is culturally captured by the prevalence of Hollywood films glorifying “American” heroic masculinities (usually cisgender-heterosexual male heroes) vanquishing the authoritarian/dictatorial antagonist “other” (also a cisgender-heterosexual male villain), establishing the grounds for interrogating masculinity and nationalism in an American geopolitical context. The films selected as primary texts are big-budget Hollywood films with popular Hollywood stars and re-imagine religio-mythological figures from Judeo-Christian, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Greek mythologies. The primary texts chosen are Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), Noah (2014), Immortals (2011), Clash of the Titans (2010), Wrath of the Titans (2012) and Gods of Egypt (2016).

This research is an attempt to explicate the politics of the “chosen”/“other” embedded within the selected texts that illustrate the intersecting axis of competing masculinities and nationalism and their implications on perceptions of American geopolitical dominance. The “chosen”/“other” dichotomy illuminates narrative, thematic and character patterns within the cinematic texts that could be utilised to explore the American nationalist project, which constructs the desirable American masculinized national “chosen” self in contrast to the non-desirable “other”, while revealing traces of alternate constructions. In this endeavour, the politics of power related to representations of the divine and the masculine are interrogated to map the multifarious ways they navigate American nationalism and a global, transnational Hollywood media aesthetic.

KEYWORDS: Masculinity, Nationalism, Hollywood Religio-Mythological Epic Films, American Geopolitics