“Zero Emission, Zero Compromises”: An Intersectional, Qualitative Exploration of Masculinities in Tesla’s Consumer Stories

Abstract

In light of gendered dynamics complicating masculine adoption of self-driving and electric vehicles (EV), we examine how Tesla’s video consumer stories envision masculinities within sociotechnical systems of automobility, exploring how corporate representations co-construct drivers and vehicles in gendered ways. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we show how the driver-car appropriates movement as a work of raced, gendered, age-dependent, and classed culture: EVs validate energy-soaked lifestyles in an age of climate change, enabling “green” enactments of fast, aggressive, and reckless styles of hegemonic driving performed by ecomodern masculinities; over-masculinized dynamics of techno-eroticism forge automated vehicles (AV) as technologically-advanced devices, crystallizing fantasies of men’s hegemonic love for technology within drivers’ mobility patterns. Tesla’s narratives sketch a future of mobility dominated by gendered sociotechnical adjustments, where neither energy-based nor technology-based reconfigurations of automobility spark critical conversations around reconfigurations of “behind-the-wheel” masculinities, leaving unquestioned what it means for them to demand space, speed, and comfort.