12. Deconstructing Dad: Satire and Hegemonic Masculinity in Mainstream Television
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What’s sarcastic, droll, brightly coloured, watched by millions and enforces a hegemonic masculine identity? No, not a sports centre update. Family Guy and American Dad!, along with other mainstream popular television shows, feeds into extreme notions of masculinity by depicting humorous macho images that emulate physical strength, aggressiveness, willingness to use violence, and the subordination of women to achieve it. Television as a medium plays an influential role when depicting the stereotypes that are present within social systems. In this paper I discuss the relationships between humour and the construction of a normative hegemonic masculine identity, and explore two examples from Family Guy and American Dad!. I argue that through a steady stream of humorous images, a standard is created that constructs a normative hegemonic masculinity that in turn has created a measuring stick of dominant and subordinate masculine identities. The television shows Family Guy and American Dad! use the power of satire to influence the responses of viewers
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".