Street fighting: Placing the crisis of masculinity in David "Fincher's Fight Club"

Recent writing in geography and its cognate disciplines suggests that the crisis of masculinity is in large part about the marginalization of men. With this paper, we take this spatial metaphor to task using David Fincher's Fight Club as a foil against which we try to pin larger issues of masculinity and urban life. That Flight Club can be viewed as alienated men confronting their homosocial and homoerotic selves through laddish revolutionary pranks detracts from its potential as a commentary on larger social tensions and contradictions. Men are simultaneously in the center and at the margins of what Bourdieu describes as the habitus; they are simultaneously playful and despairing, they are simultaneously alienated and the purveyors of hegemonic order. Fincher's movie engages these spatial metaphors and offers an opportunity to destroy the habitus, to change both masculinity and culture.