Page - 103 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Losers, Food, and Sex | 103www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 99–122 hegemonic masculinities, rendering visible what would otherwise remain hid- den from social discourse.18 The way Rev. (2010–2014) creates its story arc from the first to the last epi- sode is important to consider, too. The way we tell stories is part of learning and teaching practices and thought processes. The art of storytelling teaches us how to use language, how to think and frame, make sense of, and mediate our experiences. Analyzing narratives, their content, aesthetics, forms, and the practices they emerge from and are embedded in, then, can allow for insights into how knowledge, power, myths, ideologies, and histories are (re-)created and communicated within and across societies and cultures.19 Narratives, how- ever, are also a means to draw boundaries, create and naturalize difference and inequality, or subvert existing hegemonic structures. Narratives and masculini- ties, therefore, are closely linked because our experiences, the way we make sense of and create gender, are situated in a socio-cultural narrative context. For the context of this paper, I therefore understand masculinity as “not what it means to be a man (if it were, it would, for instance, be unchanged through time as biological maleness has remained constant for centuries) but a set of as- sumptions about what men are like which are projected on to those with male bodies and which almost inevitably affect the experience of inhabiting a male body”.20 In the production, adoption, and renegotiation of masculinities, media are active agents.21 They provide a playground and resources for gender roles and gender practices, but as active agents they are never neutral but inherently ethical and political.22 Although discourses about gender and gender roles in Christianity often draw on the notion of natural order, for example, the innately motherly role of women or the fatherly role of the priest, the male cleric’s representing the male Jesus, or the male perspective’s being the default (or naturalized) perspective in the writing of history or narratives, Christian masculinities and femininities are not stable; they are as much a (naturalized) construct – and often deliberately so – as their secular counterparts. In particular the gender identity of (male) clerics has undergone change over time. Its production has been co-depend- ent on different factors, such as whether the cleric is a parish priest or a monk, whether he is/was married, the particularities of the specific Christian denomi- nation, or the religious or secular context, to name just a few. Christian gender narratives often drew on existing models of religious and secular masculinities 18 Cf. Mellencamp 1992, 342–343; Mills 2009, 5; Hanke 1998, 89–91; Butt 2010. 19 Cf. Hartley 1999, 45; Hartley 2009, 12–13, 26. 20 Reynolds 2002, 98 (emphasis in the original). 21 Cf. Benshoff/Griffin 2004, 250. 22 Cf. Byars 1991, 4, 6; Fiske 1987, 179.