Dead Poets Society has had a very positive popular reception (Carton 64; Spitz 19), but its critical history has seen the film censured by leftist and conservative critics alike (Spitz 19). I think it is important to consider these various responses, both popular and critical, because Dead Poets Society is directed towards a young audience (Carton 64; Spitz 19). Hollywood movies hold a strong pedagogical power over students, teaching them how to see themselves in relation to the rest of the world (Gale and Densmore 601). Along with certain ideas about poetry, life, and identity, the young audience of Dead Poets Society is learning about gender. In fact, it can be argued that popular culture is “now the most important teacher of gender” (Clum xvii-xviii).
Mike Hammond argues that the real subject of Dead Poets Society is masculinity (55). As the title of his work Masculinities suggests, R. W. Connell emphasizes the plurality of masculinity. He also stresses that the relations between these multiple masculinities are not neutral. Rather, “[t]here is a gender politics within masculinity” (37). He employs the term “hegemonic masculinity” and explores the “relations of alliance, dominance and subordination” that empower it (37). An investigation of these relations demands an investigation of the intersectionality of gender, class, race, and sexuality (75-76). In agreement with Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory, Connell implicitly states that masculinity is a construction constituted through certain practices (65). He argues that “[t]he practices that construct masculinity are onto-formative” (65), meaning “our enactments of masculinity and femininity bring a social reality into being” (239).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s use of the term “homosociality” describes a particular aspect of gender relations. She defines the homosocial as “the entire spectrum of same-sex bonds,” including but not limited to homosexuality (“Homophobia” 127). She posits a “special relationship” between male homosocial bonds and patriarchy (“Homophobia” 128). In this gender system, women are often used as an object of exchange to consolidate the relationship between two men or two groups of men (“Homophobia” 127). For example, the patriarchal institution of marriage was, historically, often a contract, not between man and woman, but between a woman’s family and the family of the suitor (“Homophobia” 127). Such historical situations have evolved into the current situation in which “modern, homophobic constructions of male heterosexuality have a conceptual dependence on a distinction between men’s identification (with men) and their desire (for women)” (Epistemology 62). Sedgwick attempts to expose “how close may be the slippage or even the melding between identification and desire” (Epistemology 62).
Dead Poets Society was released at a time when masculinity was in a crisis (Hammond 56). The men’s movement of the 1970s had produced the phenomenon of masculinity therapy (Connell 206). In the 1980s, workshops such as those run by Robert Bly encouraged men to retrieve their repressed masculinity through a return to a primal state of nature (Connell 207-09). The boys in the film participate in just such a fantasy. They hold their club meetings in “the Indian cave” and begin each session by reciting a passage from Thoreau’s Walden, a Romantic narrative about the return to a state of nature associated with American Aboriginals but only made possible “because that wilderness is sanitized of Indians and of the hard historical fact of European conquest” (Carton 65). The boys also appropriate a superficial version of African culture as they chant a verse about the Congo River while dancing to the beat of a drum (66). Thus the film presents “modern institutional man’s reunification with nature in racial terms” (65).
The film evokes another initiation trope: the platonic love within an eroticized mentorship relationship. In ancient Greek culture, an older man’s pursuit of an adolescent boy had an “educational function”: “the boys were apprentices in the ways and virtues of Athenian citizenship, whose privileges they inherited” (Sedgwick, Between Men 4). The film, however, suppresses any such possible relationship between Keating and his students through such details as the photograph of Keating’s girlfriend that sits on his desk (Modleski 139). Hammond further elaborates on “the relationships of older authority figures to adolescent males” and the suppressed homoerotic subtext of the film (55).

Works Cited
Carton, Evan. “Better Dead than Read: The Society of Poets.” Tikkun 4.6 (1989): 64-67. Print.
Clum, John M. “He’s All Man”: Learning Masculinity, Gayness, and Love from American Movies. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print.
Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Print.
Gale, Trevor, and Kathleen Densmore. “Questions of (Re)production and Legitimation: A Second Screening of Three Films on Teacher-Student Relations.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 33.5 (2001): 601-19. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. .
Hammond, Mike. “The Historical and the Hysterical: Melodrama, War and Masculinity in Dead Poets Society.” You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men. Eds. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. 52-64. Print.
Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
—. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Print.
—. “Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend.” Raritan 2.3 (1983): 126-51. Print.
Spitz, Ellen Handler. “Carpe Diem, Carpe Mortem: Reflections on Dead Poets Society.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 11.3 (1992): 19-31. Print.