Christian Masculinity Research Articles

The Muslim Friend: Cross-Confessional Male Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Abstract In early modern Italy, stereotypes about Muslim men’s supposed inclination towards the vice of ‘sodomy’ gave rise to fears that Christian masculinity was being tainted. Eighteenth-century court records from the Republic of Genoa and the Papal States contain numerous instances of cross-confessional male relations that faced persecution by state authorities. In each of these cases, Christian men were prosecuted for taking a sexually ‘passive’ role in relation to sexually ‘active’ Muslims, while the reverse scenario was never pursued. This article argues that the sexual focus of judicial authorities obscured the enduring bonds of affection and mutual obligation that developed between men across religious lines. The existence of these relationships unveils an intimate sphere of connections across faith in the early modern Mediterranean while highlighting an intersectional site of Christian social anxiety, where fears of religious contamination overlapped with concerns about same-sex intimacy.

Making Masculine Monks: Gender, Space, and the Imagined “Child” in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Identity Formation

Bernard of Clairvaux's letter to his young cousin Robert, written in the early 1120s CE, ignited a public controversy between the powerful Cluniacs and the upstart Cistercians over proper monastic practice and recruitment that smoldered throughout the twelfth century. This article examines how Cistercian polemics arose out of this new monastic competition to form Cistercian identity. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians under his influence employed a rhetoric that drew on notions of space, age, and gender to present their rivals as worldly, feminine, and immature and themselves as mature and masculine warriors on the front lines of ascetic battle against the vices. In doing so, the Cistercians deployed a gendered concept of “childhood” and “youth” that shaped their understanding of monastic conversion and progression as maturation from a worldly, feminized child to a mature and masculine monk. By centering “childhood” as a category of analysis, this article demonstrates the importance of age to Cistercian constructions of monastic masculinity. The gender-crossing martial, nuptial, and maternal imagery for which the Cistercians are famous relied on constructions of the “child.” This article shows that “childhood” and “adulthood” are mutually constitutive, gendered categories and reveals that “childhood” is as important to constructing Christian masculinities as notions of “woman.”

Introduction to the Special Issue Catholicism and Gender in Modern Spain†

Introduction to the Special Issue <i>Catholicism and Gender in Modern Spain</i>^†

Soldiery and masculinity in John Chrysostom’s homilies On David and Saul

The purpose of this study is to examine the role and place of soldiery and physical violence in Chrysostom’s understanding of the formation of Christian masculinity. The study specifically relies on the image of David as constructed in Chrysostom’s homilies On David and Saul (CPG 4412). These homilies were possibly preached at the beginning of AD 387, during Lent, following the riots in Antioch and the destruction of the images and statues of the emperor after he imposed a heavy tax on the city. The more famous homilies On the Statues were also preached during this time. On David and Saul have their own unique agenda in portraying Christian masculinity in terms different from conventional Roman masculinity. Soldiery and warfare are no longer the main markers of masculinity, but rather the control of one’s anger, the health of the soul, and displaying mercy and clemency where necessary. The narrative of the cave at En Gedi (1 Sam 24 / 1 Reigns 24 LXX), where David spares Saul’s life, receives most attention in the homilies. Each homily in the homiletic series is examined, after which some main conclusions are drawn regarding the role of soldiery in Chrysostom’s conceptualisation of masculinity.

Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker

Reviewed by: Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker Barbara Zimbalist Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 249. $99.99 cloth; $29.99 paper; $24.00 e-book. Given the incredible scholarly energy responding to the affective turn—and the corresponding attention to affective piety in medieval studies—it is perhaps surprising that a book such as Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion has not appeared before now. As the editors deftly argue, the evolving fields of affect theory and the history of emotions require nuanced consideration of their different effects and forces, and medieval literature not only enables critical reflection on contemporary affect theory but also generates new understandings of premodern affectivity and emotion. The introduction, anchored in a reading of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, takes up the distinction between the titular terms of inquiry. It argues for the importance of the secular in the understanding of premodern emotions and affect, and while, like many of the essays collected here, it draws on well-known work such as Sarah McNamer’s, it departs from the primarily religious orientation and singular, chronological teleology of such studies. Declaring that their “intersectional premodern affect/emotion studies seeks, first, to historicize affect” and thus speak specifically to the affective turn writ large, the editors aim “to challenge an assumption that the history of emotions should function as the privileged method of investigation for feeling before the modern period” (3). As the eight chapters in the collection subsequently demonstrate, medieval literature provides a uniquely rich departure-point from which to analyze the historical and social construction of any particular emotion or affect, and that focus both unites the volume and acts as its major critical intervention. The first two chapters, Stephanie Trigg’s “Weeping like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory” and Patricia DeMarco’s “Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem,” nicely counterpoise each other in their secular and religious investments. Trigg compares the unusual trope of her title as it appears in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Malory’s Morte Darthur, ultimately arguing that it signals gendered meaning depending on context, and reveals “a complex network of proverbial feeling, translation, genre instability and gender anxiety, across the medieval period and beyond” (42). She shows how the formal capacity of figurative language reveals medieval emotions by surveying early [End Page 291] medieval instances of the trope, its proverbial character, and its transmission in early modern literature. DeMarco adds genre and audience to the terms of analysis as she traces masculine affect in the Siege of Jerusalem. Arguing that the poem both contrasts and complicates religious difference between Jewish and Christian leaders, DeMarco shows how the Siege dehumanizes Jews as “a critical foil against which the masculine Christian subject is defined in the poem” (57). Considering distress, pleasure, joy, anger, and pity, DeMarco reads the poem’s construction of Christian masculinity through affective agency figured as the mastering of the passions and the exercise of a habitus that mediates and contains emotional performance. These chapters’ shared call for reading both historically and contextually anticipate the essays that follow, as each in turn explores specific, often secular, and sometimes overlooked instances of literary, embodied, or performed feeling. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the intersection of gender and embodiment with affect and emotion. Crocker’s “Engendering Affect in Hoccleve’s Series” offers one of the clearest discussions of terminology in the volume, distinguishing affect from emotion in medieval texts by showing how “affects are not simply pre-emotions, but refer to a broad range of somatic, psychic, and spiritual intensities that frequently remain unnamed” (71). Crocker examines how affect allows Hoccleve to create an embodied, “socially intelligible masculinity in late medieval London” with a moral, ethical valence, contingent on a social context that sanctions approved acts of violent aggression and fulfills a regulatory function in relation to women. In Middle English literature, then, ethical masculinity meant not only controlling feelings associated with women through the exercise of...

Constructing soft masculinity: Christian conversion and gendered experience among young Chinese Christian men in Beijing

Considering the influence of religion on the gendered experiences of men, this article explores how “soft masculinity” is constructed among college-educated young Chinese Christian men in Beijing. This article argues that Christian conversion encourages Beijing’s young Christian men to embrace and achieve a relationship-oriented, emotion-centered, and humility-driven masculinity. As these young Chinese men convert to Protestant Christianity, they learn to express their emotions through crying and laughing, to build intimate relationships with God and Christian brothers and sisters, and to confess their weaknesses before others. New masculine virtues revolving around the ideas of emotionality, intimacy, and humility provide insight into how religious practices can be enacted to create soft Christian masculinity in a Chinese urban context in contrast to a more common hegemonic masculinity.

You are not a man, none of you are men! Early Christian masculinity and Lucian’s the Passing of Peregrinus

Much recent work on the masculinities enacted by early Christians has focused upon Christian texts and claims about their heroes and practices among elite Christians. Lucian’s Passing of Peregrinus offers another avenue for thinking about early Christian masculinity. Lucian denies Peregrinus’ claim to masculinity on the basis of his over-concern for honour, especially from the masses, his inability to control his appetites regarding food and sex, his being a parricide, his enacting ‘strange’ ascetic practices and his lack of courage in the face of death. By tying Peregrinus to a Christian community in Judea, Lucian both demonstrates the lack of manliness in the Christian movement, which he suggests is populated mostly by gullible women and children, and further ‘unmans’ Peregrinus by linking him to a community of easily duped people whose praise is not worthy of a philosopher. By presenting this Christian community as a group that not only accepts Peregrinus as a member but also quickly establishes him as their leader, almost at par with Jesus himself, according to Lucian’s account, these early Christians show their lack of self-control by being deceived by a charlatan. Early Christian writers who claimed that their heroes were manly, even more manly than the Greek or Roman heroes, were writing in part to rebut the types of claims made by writers like Lucian.

A Pledge of Faithfulness: How Black Christian Fraternity Men Embody Race, Gender and Religious Identities

ABSTRACTThough much has been written about the benefits that Black sororities and fraternities offer its members as well as broader communities within and beyond the ivory towers, comparatively fewer studies have addressed how these organizations interact with men's constructions and embodiments of masculinities. Moreover, even fewer studies examine the intersections of masculinities, race, and religion. As such, this paper examines how members of one Black Christian fraternity construct their manhood amid these intersections. To do this, we conduct an interpretative phenomenological analysis based on interviews, a photovoice exercise, and field notes taken during a fraternity retreat to examine how members of this fraternity negotiate race-gender-religion as they navigate both college life and emerging adulthood. Our analysis reveals that the men embody Black Christian masculinities as responsibility, assuming leadership roles, and actively working against stereotypes and tropes of Black Christian manhood. Ultimately, we argue that colleges and universities should be cognizant of the ways that Black Christian fraternity men experience and respond to gendered racism and that educators themselves be aware of the subtle ways (cisgender heterosexual) Black manhood can sometimes reinforce heteropatriarchy.

A Homosocial Priesthood of All Believers: Laity and Gender in Interwar Sweden

Around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a growing concern within the Church of Sweden that the church was, to a too large extent, managed by the clergy alone. In an attempt to give the laity a more active and influential role in the Church of Sweden, the Brethren of the Church was established in 1918. Since it was only possible for men to become members, the organization simultaneously addressed a different issue: the view that women had become a much too salient group in church life. This process was described by the Brethren and similar groups as a “feminization” of the church, a phrasing which later came to be used by historians and theologians to explain changes in Western Christianity in the nineteenth century. In other words, the Brethren considered questions of gender vital to their endeavor to create a church in which the laity held a more prominent position. This article analyzes how the perceived feminization and its assumed connection to secularization caused enhanced attempts to uphold and strengthen gender differentiation in the Church of Sweden in the early twentieth century. By analyzing an all-male lay organization, the importance of homosociality in the construction of Christian masculinities will also be discussed.

Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy, by Romig, Andrew J.

Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy, by Romig, Andrew J.

The (Alt)right to rape: violated white masculinities in the Alt-right, and the film Nocturnal Animals

ABSTRACTThis article begins with the troubling idea that aspects of contemporary mainstream representations might echo or encourage facets of arguments that work to further the Alt-right’s agenda, and it focuses in particular on the critically respected film Nocturnal Animals. The paper argues that contemporary screen representations like Manchester By the Sea and Nocturnal Animals replicate stories about white men supposedly violated by women and minorities. The Alt-right, a global political collective of organizations, has at its heart a shared grievance at the supposed violation and victimization of white heterosexual Christian masculinities, and this article seeks to highlight a disturbing overlap between Alt-right ideas and representations in popular screen representations in the USA. The analysis of Nocturnal Animals takes up the idea of white masculinity in crisis as outlined by Susan Jeffords, Richard Dyer, and Sean Redmond, considering its influence released just before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The discussion considers the relationship of white masculinity in crisis with sexual violence, whilst exploring how a sense of grievance against women and minorities on the part of white men legitimizes and justifies violent and violating reactions. Nocturnal Animals is found to be a deeply misogynist text, which endorses aggrieved white masculinities.

The violence of the masculine ideal: A case for nomadic masculinities

In this article, I argue that a different kind of discourse on Christian masculinities in post-apartheid South Africa is possible despite the prevalence of largely idealised and politically conservative ideologies of masculinities promoted primarily through the public and private performance of violent masculinities. Drawing on a redacted critique of current prevalent discourses of transformation in critical masculinities studies such as alternatives masculinities, hegemonic masculinities, liberated masculinities and toxic masculinities, I underscore how these discourses are limited in their thinking on masculinities in general as they presume the ideal of what a liberated man should be like. Specifically, I argue that idealised masculine ideals, even in their liberatory forms, eschew mobility and fluidity and, therefore, end up restricting the possibility for transformative action. I propose, instead, that we reinscribe discourses of Christian masculinities with the notion of nomadic subjectivity, espoused by Rosi Braidotti, as a form of transpositional praxis of being in order to expand our linguistic repertoire of transformative masculinities. Such a shift in focus, as I demonstrate, has the propensity to aid us in constructing and implementing creative and imaginative programmes of engaging men in rethinking scripts of masculinities.

The violence of the masculine ideal: A case for nomadic masculinities

In this article, I argue that a different kind of discourse on Christian masculinities in post-apartheid South Africa is possible despite the prevalence of largely idealised and politically conservative ideologies of masculinities promoted primarily through the public and private performance of violent masculinities. Drawing on a redacted critique of current prevalent discourses of transformation in critical masculinities studies such as alternatives masculinities, hegemonic masculinities, liberated masculinities and toxic masculinities, I underscore how these discourses are limited in their thinking on masculinities in general as they presume the ideal of what a liberated man should be like. Specifically, I argue that idealised masculine ideals, even in their liberatory forms, eschew mobility and fluidity and, therefore, end up restricting the possibility for transformative action. I propose, instead, that we reinscribe discourses of Christian masculinities with the notion of nomadic subjectivity, espoused by Rosi Braidotti, as a form of transpositional praxis of being in order to expand our linguistic repertoire of transformative masculinities. Such a shift in focus, as I demonstrate, has the propensity to aid us in constructing and implementing creative and imaginative programmes of engaging men in rethinking scripts of masculinities.

Old Age, Masculinity, and Martyrdom in Late Antiquity: John Chrysostom and the Maccabean Martyrs

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to investigate the intersections between old age, masculinity, and martyrdom in late antiquity, and it will focus specifically on John Chrysostom’s homilies on the Maccabean martyrs (CPG 4441.13; 4354). After an introduction that provides a literature review and a note on the approach followed, the article begins by examining how old age, virtue, and authority function in Chrysostom’s thought. Thereafter, a brief discussion follows on the problem of the Maccabean martyrs as being part of the old covenant/ Testament. It is argued in this case that there is a direct correlation between Chrysostom’s use of old age in the homilies and the status of the martyrs as being part of the old covenant. Finally, the article considers the dynamics between old age, martyrdom, and masculinity in the homilies. Here it is argued that Chrysostom uses the rhetoric of spiritual athletics and spiritual fertility to present the elderly martyrs as exempla of masculinity, which should not only be admired by Chrysostom’s audience, but also imitated. The Maccabean martyrs are recast by Chrysostom in a pedagogical light, and their narratives serve the promotion of a new Christian masculinity in which ascetic practice, especially moderate ascetic practice, serves as its defining feature.

Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and Carolingian Aristocracy by Andrew J. Romig

Reviewed by: Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and Carolingian Aristocracy by Andrew J. Romig Peter Phillip Jones Andrew J. Romig, Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2017) 253 pp. Andrew Romig puts forward a novel approach with this concise yet provocative study of Carolingian aristocratic masculinity. Taking its title from the Liber Manualis, written by Dhuoda of Septimania for her son William in the mid-ninth century, Romig's book argues that throughout the Carolingian realm—beginning during the time of the dynasty's greatest ruler, Charlemagne—the aristocracy subscribed to a discourse of empathy centered on caritas, a complex notion of "complete and all-inclusive love" (3), the exercise of which was the highest calling for the aristocratic male. A theological idiom for empathy, Romig traces caritas as an ideal for Christian living, from the writings of Augustine of Hippo at the turn of the fifth century to the reigns of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, and his sons, before ending with a discussion of caritas' weakening and reconfiguration in the tenth century. Made up of five chapters, plus the introduction and conclusion, the work chronologically explores the definitions, valuations, and associations that accompany caritas through these centuries. Overall, Romig makes a persuasive case for understanding the Carolingians as representing a peculiar moment in history, where lay and religious aristocratic authority became equally reliant upon the same cultural valuation of love, a reliance that limited hierarchization according to one's access to divine power. And while the absence of hard evidence prevents Romig's conclusions from being demonstrated in both Carolingian ideology and reality, his subtle adjustments to the scholarly consensus seem to permit a more sensitive reading of key texts. Where many have viewed Carolingian attempts to instate new moral norms throughout the kingdom as having failed, Romig makes a compelling case for understanding their (at least temporary) success. Where others have seen only idiosyncrasy, Romig teases out a logic that simultaneously familiarizes and maintains a distinctiveness for a Carolingian moral ideology. In Chapter One, "The Authority of the Ascetic Male," Romig articulates the connection between caritas, asceticism, and manliness, to which he goes on to frequently refer in subsequent chapters. Beginning with Augustine of Hippo's interpretation of New Testament ethics and his confrontations of Stoic and Manichean moral philosophies, Romig identifies the establishment of new linguistic associations for terms such as pietas, clementia, and misericordia that [End Page 270] shifted these terms away from Stoic concerns regarding the proper balance of severity and leniency in the service of justice, and toward an all-embracing love that would become the discourse of caritas. The philosophical position carved by Augustine out of the New Testament is then taken and further configured by Gregory the Great into an ideology of Christian male authority in his Book of Pastoral Rule. In Chapter Two, "Manifestos of Carolingian Power," Romig sets the stage by beginning with arguably the most important document of the Carolingian renovatio: the Admonitio Generalis. Countering previous scholarly consensus regarding both the document's intended scope and its success, Romig places it squarely at the beginning of what he sees as an ideological campaign to culturally embed caritas among the Frankish aristocracy. Mediating between scholarly opinions on Charlemagne's state of mind at the time of the reforms articulated in the Admonitio, Romig believes we can read in Charlemagne at this time both strength and weakness—a recognition of the Franks' unprecedented successes in bringing the realm under their control, an apprehension about future blessings, and a pledge to redouble efforts to be deserving of those blessings. Romig then proceeds to examine the works of Paulinus of Aquileia and Alcuin of York, two champions of Charlemagne's reformatory manifesto. These two eminent scholars adapted the ideology detailed by Augustine, and further articulated by Gregory the Great, into an "universal ideology for all Frankish aristocratic men" (8). The Admonitio put the future of the realm in the hands of the aristocracy; Paulinus and Alcuin's writing to encourage Eric of Friuli and Count Wido of Brittany (respectively) to embrace this discourse of caritas attests to this larger agenda. In Chapter Three, "Louis...

Be a Perfect Man. Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy by Andrew J. Romig

Be a Perfect Man. Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy by Andrew J. Romig

Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics ed. by Eric D. Barreto, Matthew L. Skinner, and Steve Walton

Reviewed by: Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics ed. by Eric D. Barreto, Matthew L. Skinner, and Steve Walton Hanna Stenström THS eric d. barreto, matthew l. skinner, and steve walton (eds.), Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics (LNTS 559; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). Pp. xvii + 186. $114. “Luke’s second volume tells a story about power.” These are the introductory words of Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics, which form the point of departure for the book. Acts tells a story about the power of God and stories about political power where Roman officials, and thereby the Roman Empire, play crucial roles (p. xi). In addition, Greco-Roman understanding(s) of masculinity—where power over non-men as well as self-control are fundamental—are operative throughout Acts, for example, in constructions of central characters and in constructions of Christian identity. “Masculinity” and “politics” are therefore suitable foci for reading Acts (p. xii) and are chosen as topics for this volume. The majority of the contributions are edited version of papers and responses presented in the Book of Acts section at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meetings in 2013 and 2014. The volume begins with customary information about abbreviations and contributors [End Page 558] followed by Eric D. Barreto’s “Introduction.” Barreto introduces the essays and the work’s topic and aims. The emphasis is on discourses of masculinity and politics in the text of Acts (pp. xi-xii) and in the context where Acts was written. The aim is not to open totally new ground but to continue work on Acts, politics, and masculinity with new methodological tools (p. xvii). Barreto emphasizes that the story about Acts and power continues. It continues when interpreters of Acts realize that, and how, their understandings of power, politics, and gender influence interpretations and when interpreters reflect on the possible contemporary relevance of Acts’ story of power (p. xii). The following essays are divided in two parts: “Warts and All? Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity” (four essays, no responses) and “Empowering, Engaging or Distancing? Acts in the Discourse of Politics” (three essays, two responses). Part 1 begins with Christina Petterson, “The Language of Gender in Acts.” Petterson explores how grammatical gender and gender as a social construct are interwoven in the narrative of Acts and mutually reinforce each other in the construction of masculine subjects. The theoretical framework of “language ideology” makes it possible to ask for connections between use of language and ideologies (of gender and class). The next three essays relate to earlier studies of Acts and Greco-Roman ideals of elite masculinity: Colleen M. Conway, “Taking the Measure of Masculinity in Acts”; Brittany E. Wilson, “Contextualizing Masculinity in the Book of Acts: Peter and Paul as Test Cases”; Christopher Stroup, “Making Jewish Men in a Greco-Roman World: Masculinity and the Circumcision of Timothy in Acts 16.1–5.” All three want to avoid the choice between alternatives: that Acts either embraces contemporary ideals of masculinity or rejects them in favor of an alternative masculinity. Conway argues that central male characters enact masculinity in spite of violations to their bodies that would normally have deprived them of their masculinity. Wilson claims that Luke formulates a “refiguration” of ancient elite understandings of a real man “in order to further his larger theme of God’s paradoxical power in Jesus” (p. 30). Stroump interprets the circumcision of Timothy in relation to Greco-Roman understandings of Jewish men as feminized through circumcision and to Jewish understandings of circumcision as a non-negotiable element in Jewish masculinity. Thereby, Timothy becomes the example of a new, Christian masculinity. Part 2 begins with Steve Walton, “The State They Were In: Luke’s View of the Roman Empire,” first published in 2002, an overview of scholarly understandings of the Roman Empire in Acts. Matthew L. Skinner (“Who Speaks for [or Against] Rome? Acts in Relation to the Empire”) offers an overview of scholarly understandings of the Roman Empire in Acts after 2002. The overviews are followed by a case study, Bruce W. Winter “Paul and Roman Law: ‘The Luck of the Draw...

Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff

Reviewed by: Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff Ronnie A. Grinberg (bio) Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism. By Sarah Imhoff. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2017. vii + 300 pp. A vibrant scholarship on Jewish women and their gender roles in recent decades has enriched our understanding of American Jewish life. Jewish women were at the forefront of the labor movement in the early twentieth [End Page 448] century and second wave feminism in the latter half of the century, in part because their prescribed gender roles varied from their non-Jewish counterparts. Within Jewish households, for example, it was more acceptable for women to work and for unmarried women, in particular, to have access to the public sphere. But what about American Jewish men? In what ways did their gender roles conform or not to American ideals of masculinity and how did Jewish masculinity shape the American Jewish experience more broadly? Sarah Imhoff rightfully observes that "gender" in the field of American Jewish history has largely equated to the study of women. Her fascinating and meticulously researched book, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, provides a much-needed corrective. Imhoff interweaves two agendas. First, she uncovers the meaning of Jewish masculinity in the early twentieth century. Building on the insights of theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, she maintains that the best way to "understand unarticulated norms is to look at the social margins and unexpected places" (9). Imhoff is careful, however, to note there was never one dominant definition of American Jewish masculinity. She focuses on acculturated Jews who practiced Reform Judaism because they "embodied the norm in the American imagination" and conceived masculinity in marginal locales (5). Imhoff also analyzes how Jewish masculinity was marshalled by acculturated Jews in order to make Judaism into a "good" American religion. Reform Jews sought to cast Judaism as a "good" American religion by claiming it as rational, universal, and democratic as opposed to emotional and superstitious. These gendered philosophical foundations had roots in the Enlightenment. For Judaism to be considered American, it had to conform to this rubric and be "good"—i.e., manly. The rest of the book examines various "margins" of American Jewish life to see the formation of an American Jewish masculinity at work. The four chapters in Part Two focus on mass immigration and efforts by acculturated Jews to transform Eastern European Jews into manly citizens, mainly in the West. Acculturated Jews championed a masculinity that was courageous, physically healthy, and connected to the land but not aggressive or overtly muscular. This vision of Jewish masculinity mirrored but did not outright replicate dominate norms of a more virile Christian masculinity. Chapter Three examines the short-lived Galveston Movement that sought to settle immigrants out West by bringing them into the United States through a port in Texas. Chapter Four looks at the cultural identification some Jews made with American "Indians," while Chapter Five looks at agricultural communities. The final chapter in this section, one of Imhoff's most astute, analyzes American Zionism. [End Page 449] American Zionists focused less on manly muscular bodies, Imhoff argues, and more on incorporeal traits like courage to show that American Jews fell outside of the feminized diaspora. None of these "marginal" locales were central to the American Jewish experience, but each reveals ways that acculturated Jews attempted to both transform Eastern European Jews into healthy male citizens and construct broader perceptions of American Jewish masculinity. The final section of Imhoff's book turns to the criminal and abnormal. "If religious educational pamphlets or philanthropic efforts to mold immigrants told listeners how to be good Jewish boy and men," she writes, "conversations about crime told them what not to be" (200). Chapter Seven analyzes the 1908 Bingham affair, when New York City's police commissioner accused Jews of making up half the criminals in the city. Chapter Eight looks at the Leo Frank case in 1913. The final chapter examines the 1924 murder of a fourteen-year-old boy in Chicago by Nathan "Babe" Leopold and Richard "Dickie" Loeb. Jewish crimes were largely "soft"; they involved theft and deceit rather than murder. When they...

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier

BOURRIER, KAREN. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. 184 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback. Over a decade ago. Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction called for disability studies interventions in Victorian Studies, which has long been invested since work of Bruce Haley in role of health and embodiment. The Measure of Manliness contributes to this developing subfield of Victorian disability studies by putting into conversation long-standing Victorian scholarship on invalidism and illness with more recent disability theory and its investments in social model of disability, where sickness and disability are not fixed biological states but part of a culturally constructed continuum of ideas about fit body (16). Drawing explicitly on Holmes's work. Bourrier focuses on relationship between affect and disability, and how it shapes a normative Victorian masculinity characterized by taciturn strength. Methodologically, her study hinges upon a central dyad: the affective of masculine and disability and impact it has on narrative form of midcentury (16). In a move similar to Georges Canguilhem in The Normal and Pathological and Lennard Davis in Enforcing Normalcy, Bourrier argues for mutual dependence and co-constituency of disability and normative health as key concepts animating Victorian fiction. The archive to which Bourrier turns is mid-century domestic novel, which persistently features what she describes as pairing of strong man and weak man, in which latter serves as an alternative and complementary Victorian mode of masculinity, supplementing masculine strength with his emotional self-consciousness and verbal effusiveness (3). The narrowing of scope to middle-class masculinity enables her to 1 ) connect figure of Victorian disabled man to earlier eighteenth-century man of feeling, and 2) trace strong-weak dualism as a narrative pattern within a particular generic form. Bourrier begins with novels of muscular Christianity: Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857). The contrast between taciturn suffering of characters like Guy Morville or Tom Thurnall and their vulnerable, disabled counterparts valorizes an active masculinity that is physically capable and spiritually sound. It is this model of intimate friendship that underpins Bourrier's second paradigmatic example. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). where Christian masculinity gives way to self-discipline and self-consciousness of self-made man. While represented as individually self-made, John Halifax's social climbing and industry is quietly enabled by Phineas Fletcher's invalidism and influence. Bourrier turns then to Eliot's The Mill on Floss (1860) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) as revisions of this originary strong man-weak man with which both authors were deeply familiar. Eliot's Tom Tulliver and Philip Wakem and James's Caspar Goodwood and Ralph Touchett represent markedly different duos than their predecessors in that disabled weak man does not exist purely to support able strong man; in fact, these men begin to diverge from one another entirely. Measure of Manliness thus traces a trajectory from an uncomplicated and improving friendship between strong man and a weak man to a rivalry to almost no relationship at all (123). …

Preface

preface this vibrantly eclectic issue of Feminist Studies can perhaps best be framed as a series of interventions into current literatures on masculinities and feminisms. Angela Willey and Banu Subramaniam explore the implications of the racialized “white nerd masculinity” that is at the heart of the popular television series The Big Bang Theory, while Jessica Johnson draws our attention to the significance of the virulently muscular brand of Christian masculinity preached by Mark Driscoll in his multi-state Mars Hill Church, which drew thousands of followers during the early 2000s. Both articles reveal the toxicity of these contemporary masculine formations, from their mundane and pervasive exposition in popular culture to more strident articulations in megachurches . Gergely Kunt offers a rare first-person glimpse into the complexities of a World War II sexual economy, examining via the diary of a Hungarian refugee the relationship between militarized masculinity and sexual assault and the exploitation of women in wartime. Other essays in this volume intervene in current debates about the form, histories , and implications of Western feminisms. Jennifer McLerran’s art essay on Mohawk artist Carla Hemlock expands on the “Native feminist ethics” invoked by Yaqui legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie, suggesting that for Native feminists, improving women’s lives cannot be separated from decolonization. Magdalena Grabowska demands Western feminists rethink their commonplace dismissal of women who lived under  Preface state socialism as non-agentive, while Jo Reger calls our attention to the frequently problematized “wave” metaphor as she locates the roots of disidentification with previous generations of feminists. And Eileen Boris’s review essay highlights the racialized, gendered, classed, and transnational intertwining of fashion and feminism. The poet featured in this issue is Rachel Marie-Crane Williams. The issue closes with two reflections on the January 21st Women’s March on Washington: Mrinalini Chakraborty, one of its national organizers, describes in an interview the inception and logistical challenges of the march, while Tracey Jean Boisseau describes uplifting interactions with strangers that many march-goers experienced that day. In “Inside the Social World of Asocials: White Nerd Masculinity, Science, and the Politics of Reverent Disdain,” Angela Willey and Banu Subramaniam analyze what they call the “reverent disdain” for science that continues to pervade feminist scholarship as well as public/popular culture. This reverent disdain leads to resistance to incorporating methodologies from the natural sciences into feminist studies, even while authority is ceded to knowledges produced within those disciplines . Willey and Subramaniam demonstrate the pervasiveness of this reverent disdain through a close reading of the immensely popular television show The Big Bang Theory. While the show portrays science as pure play and curiosity, with an innocent distance from the social, Willey and Subramaniam argue that, through its depiction of nerds, the show constructs brilliance in racialized and gendered ways that police and naturalize the boundaries of knowledge production in science, rendering it inaccessible to practice and to critique. In particular, the show creates an innocent white masculinity that effaces the hierarchies of race and gender that actually exist within science as well as in society at large. Willey and Subramaniam’s goal is to encourage feminist scholarship to reject the binaries of nature and culture and move toward more “naturecultural ” engagements in which critiques of science and engagement with scientific practice coexist as intellectual and political projects. If Willey and Subramaniam highlight how nerd masculinity is made to appear outside of the social even as it reinforces social hierarchies , in “Under Conviction: ‘Real Men’ Reborn on Spiritual and Cinematic Battlefields,” Jessica Johnson excavates a muscular, evangelical Christian project to transform the sociopolitical by intertwining virulent masculinity, Hollywood movies, and the global war on terror. Preface  Johnson troubles the distinction between the evangelical and the (secular ) popular in her ethnography of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, which at its height spread to five states and had approximately 13,000 attendees. The church had a charismatic and social-media savvy preacher named Mark Driscoll who urged men to stop being “pussies” and instructed married women to become sexually alluring beings for their husbands, even as he lay the blame for men’s problems on single women who were too sexually...