From the Ruins: Neomasculinity, Media Franchising, and Struggles Over Industrial Reproduction of Culture

As an industrial practice of cultural reproduction that holds potential for both continuity and change over time, media franchising has offered proponents of “neomasculinity” and other alt-right ideologies a tangible battleground for staging visible interventions into popular feminism and social justice movements perceived to threaten the power of masculinity, whiteness, and heterosexuality. The web portal Return of Kings (ROK) offers an instructive lens for considering these politics, as it seeks to identify and intervene in the “ruin” caused by perceived complicity between media franchising and popular feminism. Although the economic impact of ROK’s accompanying boycott suggestions remains limited, such discourses of ruination matter because they articulate the possibility of a franchise activism through which wider attacks on feminism might be waged.