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Modern Family and Masculinity as Homophobia

sara.gladwin's picture

The article "Masculintity as Homophia" reminded me several times of the show Modern Family. In particular, there is a scene in one of the episodes of the show in which one of the husbands, Phil, is shopping with his father-in-law's wife Gloria, when he runs into an old college rival. His college rivel as always been better then him in everything and Phil decides to use Gloria as a representation of how succesful he has been in his life. His rival, seeing Phil's extremely hot Columbian "wife," then admits that Phil has indeed done well for himself. I tried to search youtube for a clip of this but came up short- but I thought this scene embodied so well some of Kimmal's points about masculinty. Kimmal states that  "Women become a kind of currency that men use to improve their ranking on the masculine social scale" (61). Gloria becomes Phil's way of proving his masculinity to his highschool rival. I thought it was interesting that Phil's desperation to not be "unmasked" as a masculine failure was so prevalent that he went to the extremes of using Gloria as the symbol of ultimate success.