'The consumption of masculinity one object at a time': A sociological approach to understanding masculinity vis-a-vis Jean Baudrillard's system of objects

In Rosemary Hennessy's book, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identity in Late Capitalism, an examination of contemporary gender theories warns that current gender scholarship fails to adequately address the ways consumption and materialism are connected to issues of gender and sexuality. The failure to adequately explain the ways consumption intersects with gendered ideologies is particularly concerning for the field of Men's Studies. The last three decades has seen an increasingly sharp rise in the amount of media and advertising devoted to the topics of manhood, masculinity and maleness. This dissertation advances a methodological approach to understanding the ways the ideologies of gender intersect with issues of consumption and materialism. This project utilizes Jean Baudrillard's ideas on the system of objects to examine how cultural understandings of masculinity are created and maintained through the consumption of the ideological meanings established by objects.;The objects-centered approach to understanding gender is applied to three different sets of cultural texts. The rhetoric of men's magazines is examined in order to illuminate the ways advertising gives gendered ideological shape to commodities. An examination of Nike's marketing reveals the way gendered ideologies are embedded into corporate logos. A rhetorical analysis of David Fincher's film, Fight Club, demonstrates how an objects-centered approach to understanding gender functions as a tool for textual analysis. Ultimately, this dissertation reveals that an objects-centered approach to understanding gender can help scholars rethink the relationships the ideological formation of gender has with consumption, systems of oppression and political activism.