Katherine Hyunmi Lee, "The Ghost of Gary Cooper: Masculinity, Homosocial Bonding, and The Sopranos"
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Further complicating and informing Tony's negotiation of various models of masculinity is the extensive homosocial bonding that his profession requires. In fact, the psychic and professional conflicts that drive The Sopranos' narrative often stem from homosocial rather than heterosocial relationships. Yet rather than signify a "wholesale collapse of masculinity," these agonistic relationships, as Eve Sedgwick explains in her influential Between Men, can strengthen heterosexist, patriarchal masculinity. At the same time, Judith Halberstam notes that the fact that men experience these anxieties and require reassurances at all demonstrates that masculinity is simultaneously an overdetermined and incomplete identity category rather than a "natural" state of being:

While normative masculinity depicts itself quite simply as real masculinity, it simultaneously exhibits some anxiety about the status of its own realness: male masculinity as an identity seems to demand authentication: Am I real? Is my masculinity real? The fact that male masculinities of all kinds seem to require recognition of some kind also has the counterintuitive effect of marking their instability and their distance from the real. (Halberstam 353).

Male bonding can thus facilitate identification and assuage anxieties by reifying and authenticating unstable and unreal heterosexist masculine ideals. But such bonding can also facilitate disidentification: When these ideals are not authenticated or when conflicting ideals meet, the constitutively unstable nature of masculinity and the impossibility of total identification become visible. While The Sopranos does little to reconfigure the reciprocal relationship between male bonding and patriarchal structures, it does feature men who bond to mitigate their anxieties and to ameliorate the incommensurability they feel with masculine ideals that never actually existed, ideals that consistently "haunt" them; in other words, they bond because they are not really sure what constitutes a man in the first place.

This dynamic of identification and alienation catalyzed by masculine ideals and homosocial bonding is clearly illustrated in "Boca." "Boca" features two principal story lines, one of which is a self-contained narrative, the other, a continuation of the first season's overall arc. The former focuses on Meadow's soccer coach, Don Hauser, whom the characters praise for his coaching prowess until his various treacheries are revealed: First, he plans to leave Verbum Dei High School for a position at the University of Rhode Island, and, more significantly, he has been having an affair with the team's star, Ally Vandermeed. The second story line features the increasing estrangement between Tony and his uncle, Junior. Junior goes on vacation to Boca Raton with long-standing mistress Bobbi Sanfillipo, who praises his oral sex techniques. Although Junior warns her to keep their sex life a secret, the information circulates through a network of women, and eventually to Tony via Carmela. After Tony taunts Junior with the information, Junior contemplates having his nephew "clipped."

As with so many episodes, the plot of "Boca" moves deftly between Tony's professional and personal obligations, but woven among these two story lines is a sustained examination of homosocial bonding as a means of negotiating various configurations of masculinity. The episode initially situates Tony, Silvio, Artie Bucco, Junior, and Coach Hauser along a continuum of often competing constructions of masculinity informed by various institutions, representations, and traditions. At one end is Hauser, who seemingly personifies a late twentieth-century / early twenty-first-century "enlightened" heterosexual white man. A tough competitor and strategist, Hauser nevertheless coaches girls' soccer in part because he wants to coach his daughter. He is clean-cut, preppily attired, and owns a golden retriever to boot. At the other end are Tony and Silvio, who are equally dedicated fathers (and much wealthier than Hauser), but also engage in masculine excess: The former enthusiastically cheers for Meadow, but by default—when Carmela exclaims, "Look at you, Tony, at girls' soccer," he replies, "What do you want from me? My only son's a couch potato"—and the latter becomes disproportionately angry at a soccer referee ("You blow that whistle one more time, I'm gonna stick it up your fuckin' ass!"). As the episode proceeds, however, these distinctions become increasingly blurred: In spite of his ideal bourgeois male veneer, Hauser is a predator who exploits his position of authority and manipulates a teenage girl both sexually and emotionally. Artie, Tony, and Silvio, on the other hand, repress their initial impulse to murder Hauser and turn him over to authorities.

The scenes that feature homosocial bonding depict a dialectical movement through which men define and gauge their masculinities with one another. Early in "Boca," Artie, Silvio, Tony, and Hauser celebrate at the Bada Bing! after a soccer victory. Tony and Silvio offer the coach a "freebie" with one of the dancers, which Hauser politely declines. This "gift" calls to mind Sedgwick's notion of "erotic triangles," whereby women mediate men's rivalries and attachments with one another. Sedgwick, following Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin, argues that "patriarchal heterosexuality can best be discussed in terms of one or another form of the traffic in women: It is the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men" (Sedgwick 26). Offering the dancer as Coach Hauser's reward is Tony and Silvio's gesture of friendship, intended to initiate Hauser into their specifically homosocial and heterosexist circle (after all, had Hauser been a woman, would they have invited her back to the Bing!?).

At this point in the episode, Hauser's refusal signifies his position as an upstanding man, but after the characters find out about the affair with Ally, the scene retrospectively establishes Hauser as an outsider whose actions follow a different objectionable schema altogether. Rather than implicitly endorse Tony and Silvio's methods of bonding with Hauser, the episode asks us to engage in the same ethical debate as the characters: Artie asks his wife, Charmaine, "You tell me—who's worse, Tony Soprano or that child-molesting fuck?" and indeed, if Hauser's sheepish reaction to the stripper calls attention to Tony and Silvio's blatantly heterosexist values, then Hauser's status as a child-molester asks us to rethink our own investment in masculine ideals informed by a kinder, gentler, suburban bourgeois whiteness. When examined within the context of the episode as a whole, this bonding scene illustrates both how masculinity comes to be defined through relations between men, and how wide the distance is between our ideals and the real.