Neal M. King

I study gender in popular culture, focusing on two fields: men’s accounts of their aging, and Hollywood storytelling about violent heroism. Most of the research has focused on cop movies and television shows focused on male heroes, and then interview research with middle-aged men as they figure out how to grow old in a world that sells anti-aging products to them.

My first two books focused on violent heroism in Hollywood movies. My third focused on controversies over the release of The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and my latest, co-authored with doctoral students at Virginia Tech, looks at current trends in gender inequality on popular screens. Most of my journal articles and chapters look either at slices of popular cinema and television, or at men’s accounts of their aging process.

My journal articles include smaller studies of cinema and television, and then my cooperative work in feminist gerontology on aging men, an international collaboration with Toni Calasanti, Virginia Tech; Ilkka Pietilä, University of Helsinki; and Hanna Ojala, Tampere University, Finland.

Current work is focused on mean girl movies from Hollywood and the production of a century of cop cinema and television.