Abstract
This article introduces the contributions to a BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review special issue on Low Countries masculinities. It outlines a shared theoretical framework that focuses on what historian Mrinalini Sinha has called, 'the rhetorical and ideological efficacy' of notions of masculinity 'in underwriting various arrangements of power'. The article's central argument is that the history of masculinity should move 'beyond masculinity' by analysing the deployment of masculinity in the making, legitimisation and contestation of not just power relations of gender, but also other power relations. It points to the origins of this framework in post-structuralist strands of women's and gender history and evaluates critically the usefulness of the notion of 'hegemonic masculinity' for such an approach. This article is part of the special issue 'Low Countries Histories of Masculinity'.
Highlights
The minimal ambition of any history of masculinity is to demonstrate that masculinity has a history. Scholars in this field share the aim to trace how notions of masculinity have changed over time, to investigate under what conditions this happened, and to explore how these changes have shaped the lives of men and of women. This might sound like a truism, but the idea that masculinity has a history bears repeating in view of the current cultural ascendancy of attempts to redefine sexual difference as a natural given
In the aftermath of the Belgian revolution of 1830 that would result in the break-up of the short-lived United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Dutch poet Johannes Immerzeel wrote sarcastically about Belgian revolutionaries as ‘real men’
In the course of coming to terms, after the break-up with Belgium, with its status as a minor European nation, the Netherlands assembled an idea of national self in which being small became the prerequisite for greatness
Summary
The minimal ambition of any history of masculinity is to demonstrate that masculinity has a history. That too, centred round a love of liberty, but this was a love of a temperate nature that sustained political moderation, morality, industriousness and adherence to the law This snippet from the war of words that accompanied the Belgian revolution offers a glimpse at both historically specific notions of (un) manliness and at their role in an early nineteenth-century language of nation and nationalism. Innocent of the political cynicism Europe’s great powers displayed, its greatness would lie in a moderate and moral manliness that was thought to permeate its domestic politics, its foreign policy and the nature of its colonial rule.[5] This is a history of masculinity that is no longer exclusively about masculinity; it has become a gender history of nation and nationalism The goal of this special issue of bmgn - Low Countries Historical Review is to contribute to a history of masculinity that moves ‘beyond masculinity’. This introduction outlines the conceptual framework on which such an approach to the history of masculinity rests and situates the individual articles within the issue’s overall organisation
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