Smith, Macs;
(2023)
Parkour Fails and Hébertisme: Laughing at the New Man.
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
, 27
(1)
pp. 74-82.
10.1080/17409292.2023.2152587.
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Abstract
“Parkour Fails” represent a genre of comedic YouTube videos consisting primarily of compilations of failed stunts by practitioners of the extreme sport of parkour. Parkour originated in the suburbs of Paris and involves creative reappropriation of urban furniture. In mass media, it is usually coded as a defiant challenge to urban norms and a symbol of multicultural France’s growing social mobility. However, it was inspired by Hébertisme, a training system embraced by eugenicists and the Vichy government as a way to cultivate the New Man, an idealized figure incarnating fascist values. While parkour athletes do not endorse fascism, many promote their practice with a rhetoric of decadence and decline, return to nature, and masculine power that echoes Vichy’s New Man ideology. This article explores the extent to which parkour fail videos humorously problematize that rhetoric.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Parkour Fails and Hébertisme: Laughing at the New Man |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/17409292.2023.2152587 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2023.2152587 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
| Keywords: | Masculinity; slapstick; Vichy; YouTube; MTV’s Jackass; The Office (NBC) |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10190020 |
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