Fencing, the Duel and Republican Manhood in the Third Republic

Abstract

This paper will illustrate the principle that masculinities, like femininities and other forms of identity, are constructed. In arguing this point, it pays homage to a well established tradition in the history of sexuality and gender roles that is now many years old. This body of writing has emerged, at least in part, as a reaction against the long dominion in Western culture of an essentialist view of sexual identity, which has held that the skills, qualities and affections of men and women inhere in their sex, from which anatomical and physiological destiny there is no escape or appeal. So long as this view was unchallenged in both popular culture and science, transformations in what we now call gender roles had to take place within a matrix of sexlinked cultural meanings that sustained a patriarchal social order. A way out of this enclosed and self-referential system was provided by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 in The Second Sex. De Beauvoir wrote that man constructs a feminine 'other' as an opposite but complementary identity to his own, which serves as a 'repository' for women's intellectual incapacity, innate domesticity and other cultural myths of patriarchy. As Ludmilla Jordanova has noted, the advantage of de Beauvoir's formulation was its recognition of the asymmetry in this relation of'otherness'. This in turn made it possible to construe the 'feminine side of the dichtomy' as more problematic, indeed, to grasp that women's so-called 'naturalness' was in fact a construction, though in this case by and for men.1 Since the appearance of de Beauvoir's classic, her crucial insight has been both historicized and expanded, so that now we not only understand that these myths of feminized 'nature' have changed over time, but that these changes have provoked historical reconsiderations of masculine 'nature', which previously had been taken more or less for granted. These conceptual departures have shaped much recent theoretical and historical writing on sexual identity and have