In No Dads No Masters, the garage becomes a liminal space where working-class masculinities are performed. It becomes a stage for experimentation, testing, execution, and failure. Neither quite domestic or public, the "garage" allows us to mod ourselves behind particle board walls and 2x4 studs, or open up the carport doors and spill out onto the driveway like a 10 point buck.
The personal histories that I inherited from the problematic images of violence and sexuality– within the sword-and-sorcery fantasy images– clash against my progressive social and political interests in unpleasant ways. Anxiety arises from my inability to reach reconciliation between my nostalgia for the genre and my resistance of the patriarchal oppression that is celebrated within it. No Dads No Masters taps into the anxieties of this disjunction through self deprecating humor and an appreciation of failure, dumbness, anger, and vulnerability. The interstitial spaces of collage and assemblage offers me the ability to complicate these gendered figurations, put the power of their imagehood into question, while also working through the slippery tangled figuration of a material self. No Dads No Masters is not radical. It doesn't take the idea of a White American working-class manhood and jettison it into the nearest star. Its ambitions, however, are just as poetic and destructive, the Frankenstein's monster examining his scars and picking at his bolts, trying to figure out why he is so angry, clumsy, and gross. Pitching my theoretical garage in the landscape of Sword and Sorcery images and aggressive music, tabletop gaming and professional wrestling, woodshop and horror cinema, hunting, sports, and videogames, I am able to take stock of all this shit our dads left us, to loom into the hinterlands to kill what patriarchal monsters await. |