Codes Of Masculinity Research Articles

“This is a most disgusting case”: Imperial Policy, Class and Gender in the “Rangoon Outrage” of 1899

“This is a most disgusting case”: Imperial Policy, Class and Gender in the “Rangoon Outrage” of 1899 Jeremy Neill Introduction On an otherwise unremarkable Easter Sunday, 1899, a middle-aged Burmese woman named Ma Gun was returning from prayer at the Shwedagon Pagoda, on the grounds of the British Army Cantonment in Rangoon. In the cantonment, the newly arrived West Kent Regiment was in quarantine due to a smallpox outbreak in Rangoon. Most of the regiment was finishing their midday meal when a disturbance broke out near “C” company’s barracks, on a wooded hill overlooking one of the main roads leading to the pagoda. Details of what happened were disputed, but facts soon emerged alleging that a number of soldiers from the Regiment waylaid Ma Gun near their barracks and sexually assaulted her in a case that came to be known as the “Rangoon Outrage” in the press and by the British government. This case, and the military’s apparent attempt to cover up what happened, demonstrates that the imperial project was far from monolithic, and that different elements of the British Empire’s mechanisms of control frequently worked at cross-purposes. The masculine code of the soldiers involved trumped the legal and moral structures designed to control their behavior and undermined attempts to rationalize the benefits of colonial rule. Feminist historians describe rape as violence against women for the purpose of social control, and as a way for men to assert their masculine identity. Susan Brownmiller goes as far as to state “From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”2 Studies of nineteenth century England show endemic sexual violence among the working classes, and that the legal system was increasingly trying to control working class violence, including expanding definitions of rape and more actively prosecuting it.3 The example of the Rangoon Outrage raises a number of questions. To what extent did attitudes in far-flung posts of the Empire reflect legal thinking in the metropole? What level of disconnect was there between working class ideas of sexual access and the legal culture that British soldiers in Rangoon found themselves in at the end of the Victorian era? Ronald Hyam has made the argument that Empire was a sexual playground for the British bourgeoisie, but did this apply to the working classes who made up the common soldiery?4 Did restrictions on prostitution, part of the late Victorian moral project that had a large impact on the military, encourage violence against women? If Empire was a fundamentally masculine project, and rape was a means of establishing male dominance, why was the Raj so concerned with prosecuting this case and punishing those responsible? The answers appear to lie in bourgeois concepts of proper behavior that extended from the slums of industrial cities to far-flung imperial posts. In this case even the bourgeois officers, the “gentlemen” who were supposed to control the working class, seemed actively to protect the soldiers involved in a heinous crime. Colonial masculinity was not monolithic, and this case shows that the masculine code of the military could cross class lines. Shani D’Cruze argues that the Victorian attitude was one less concerned with the rights of women and more concerned with policing public violence: [S]exual aggression in men was “normal, healthy and inevitable” and constituted serious criminal behavior only when it violated another man’s rights of sexual access, or violated class hierarchies or involved sufficient physical injury to make the assault provable regardless of the sexual dimension involved.5 Where does this case fit? In the imperial context, another element is present, the façade of control that the British needed to project to maintain colonial order, a boundary that the soldiers’ behavior in this case clearly violated. After 1860 the Crown engaged in a systematic attempt to bring India more into line with principles of British jurisprudence, which laid the grounds for conflict in a more complex environment that added race to the legal mixture.6 Did the law apply...

Female sexuality in Hamlet and The Revenger's Tragedy

Revenge tragedy, a subdivision of Renaissance tragedy of blood, expresses a dominantly male perspective. In Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, not only Hamlet but Vindice, as the chief moral spokesman in each play, tells us more about his own needs to set right a world out of joint and epitomizes the aesthetic revenger. The fundamental motive for the tragic action in both plays is revenge according to the masculine code of male domination, yet the revenge motif would be yielded to a psychological development and a detailed study of female sexuality. Shakespeare and Tourneur make explicit the preoccupation with the uncontrollability of female sexuality in their works, for female erotic mobility threatens the power base of patriarchy. The table of incest, adultery, suspicion, hate, and violence explores the boundaries of human corruption in which desire and vengeance have become complicatedly entangled. Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy effectively demonstrate that women cannot function properly outside of the patriarchal structure, and reinforce the patriarchal notion that women cannot survive without men to govern them. Though each woman is presented as a sexual subject in both plays, questions of chastity, references to chastity, adultery, cuckoldry, incest, and misogyny are submerged in the overpowering issue on her life itself. In both plays each woman is the emotional focus in the play’s cultural construction of the guilt, so that she seems determined to take guilt upon herself. The women who cause the male characters’ anguish or break the rules of female conduct are verbally assaulted by men, or destroyed by the masculine code of the punishment of women. Despite a moral difference between Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy the woman’s suffering or death is as much an outcome of the tragic hero’s strategy of the actual vengeance, for his frustration or frenzy in the action of revenge is reflected in an attack on female sexuality as a kind of a defense against his vulnerability, specifically against the femininity.

Engaging Men in Clinical Practice: A Solution-Focused and Strengths-Based Model

Men growing into adulthood are inundated with cultural messages about what it is to be a man in American society. This cultural message recreates the “code of masculinity” for each man within various ethnic, racial, cultural, socioeconomic, and sexual orientation contexts. Working within the code of masculinity as a cultural practice and building on the strengths inherent within a culture by means of a solution-focused practice is the focus of this article.

Examining the Development and Sexual Behavior of Adolescent Males

A careful examination of young men's sexuality by health professionals in pediatrics, primary care, and reproductive health is foundational to adolescent male sexual health and healthy development. Through a review of existing published data, this article provides background and a developmental framework for sexual health services for adolescent boys. The article first defines and provides an overview of adolescent boys' sexual health, and then discusses developmentally focused research on the following topics: (1) early romantic relationships and the evolution of power and influence within these relationships; (2) developmental "readiness" for sex and curiosity; (3) boys' need for closeness and intimacy; (4) adopting codes of masculinity; (5) boys' communicating about sex; and (6) contextual influences from peers, families, and providers. This article concludes by examining the implications of these data for sexual health promotion efforts for adolescent males, including human papillomavirus vaccination.

From Here to Antiquity: Mythical Settings and Modern Sufferings in Contemporary Hollywood's Historical Epics

Scholars dedicated to the study of gender relations frequently consider 1968 as a watershed year which marks the beginning of a period of crisis for the traditional models of white masculinity1 in the United States.2 Arguably as a consequence of this challenge to the white male paradigm, since the mid-1970s film studies has been able to relate the prevailing ideals of masculinity in Hollywood Cinema to the political, social and economic contexts in which they were produced and consumed. In addition, and concurrent with the study of masculinity, film studies began to consider the idea of hyper-masculinity, a representation that appeared to compensate for perceived white male victimization. The hyper-masculine identity has for instance been considered in light of the upsets endured by the codes of masculinity, whether as an aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Feminist movement, the rise of multi-culturalism, the Cold War, and the advent of multinational capitalism.3 My essay considers a more specific perspective of identity formation in film, the representation of hegemonic masculinity4 as evidenced in recent historical epics such as Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), Alexander (2004) and 300 (2007). The first successful peplums since Spartacus (1960), these four films signal the return to the forefront of a geme based in Antiquity and of atemporal masculine characters. In this respect, it seems necessary to situate the analysis of their heroes' representation in the wake of the traditionally antagonistic relationship that American masculine identity maintains with modernity5 ever since the final decades of the 19th century. In agreement with this view, the lack in legitimacy from which hegemonic masculinity currently suffers results as much from the change in the social, political and ideological paradigms of the post World War II era, as from the feelings of decentering, of society Y growing inauthenticity, and of moral disorder caused by the economy of technological innovation since the Second Industrial Revolution.6 My work will examine the specificity of staged codes, practices and values that allow the hero to reach a predominant place in gender relations. To question the gendered identity of a historical epic's hero, in his relationship to modernity, is to identify the way gender is defined, in association on one hand with culture7 and on the other with nature, within the signifying practices that structure the figure's access to hegemonic masculinity. In this context, the essay will pay particular attention to the narrative and aesthetics choices of the films being critiqued, as well as the way the historical figures, therein represented, are characterized by the spaces they inhabit. As I will demonstrate, each film begins with the hero's social, political or symbolic marginalization, a starting point that sets off the reaffirmation of his physical and moral superiority. However, this process invariably culminates in death and a transcendental deification, through which the character insures his posthumous position at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy. My arguments are based on the assumption that in order to impose his persona as a masculine ideal, the hero must manage to re-establish the subordinate relationships upset by intrigue, while maintaining, through authentic experiences, the character of his essentially spiritual and atemporal gendered identity.8 Between city and wilderness Gladiator bases its intrigue on a fraternal rivalry between two men, with dramatic tension instigated by the prospect of succeeding their paternal figure, who happens to be the Emperor of Rome. The trio of characters is composed of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), Army General Maximus (Russell Crowe), who is the spiritual son of Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), the megalomaniacal biological son of the Emperor. Introduced at the conclusion of what is a decisive victory by the Roman army over Germanian barbarians, Marcus Aurelius is represented at the beginning of the film as an old but wise leader who has become disillusioned by years of conquests and the technological supremacy of his Empire. …

Women physicians and the cultures of medicine

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: New Perspectives on Women Physicians and Medicine in the United States, 1849 to the Present Part I: Performing Gender, Being a Woman Physician Chapter 1. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Nineteenth-Century Politics of Women's Health Research Chapter 2. Maternity and the Female Body in the Writings of Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, 1829-1902 Chapter 3. Female Patient Agency and the 1892 Trial of Dr. Mary Dixon Jones in Late Nineteenth-Century Brooklyn Chapter 4. A Chinese Woman Doctor in Progressive Era Chicago Chapter 5. Professionalism versus Sexuality in the Career of Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone, 1904-1998 Part II: Challenging the Culture of Professionalism Chapter 6. The Legacy of Masculine Codes of Honor and the Admission of Women to the Medical Profession in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 7. Women Physicians and the Twentieth-Century Women's Health Movement in the United States Chapter 8. Narrative Forms in Our Bodies, Ourselves Chapter 9. Feminists Fight the Culture of Exclusion in Medical Education, 1970-1990 Part III: Expanding the Boundaries Chapter 10. Women Physicians and Medical Sects in Nineteenth-Century Chicago Chapter 11. Ruth A. Parmelee, Esther P. Lovejoy, and the Discourse of Motherhood in Asia Minor and Greece in the Early Twentieth Century Chapter 12. Women Physicians and a New Agenda for College Health, 1920-1970 Conclusion: Opportunities and Obstacles for Women Physicians in the Twenty-First Century List of Contributors Index

Return of the Ritual: Martial Arts and the Young's Revolt Against the Youth Rebellion

In this essay I want to demonstrate that not only male competitive sport in general but the Oriental martial arts in particular show that female dominance in the education of modern boys is not at all total. In Oriental martial arts we find a number of rituals and a kind of manhood test where boys and young men are taught masculine codes of behaviour. In our non-sensuous, highly technological society it seems that young people and especially young men have a strong need to experience the limits of the body and the importance of pushing the limits of daily life. But it makes it even more important that within the framework of the ritual should be found people who have themselves experienced this fascination and still preserve a humanistic, ethical perspective. Going in for rituals and authority, martial arts may be seen as young people's revolt against youth rebellion, but also against the paucity of sensuous experience and against the cultivation of literary and verbally abstract abilities in our modern society. Nonetheless, martial arts also contain elements familiar to youth rebellion such as an interest in the Far East and in meditation.

Men, masculinities and firefighting: Occupational identity, shop-floor culture and organisational change

As an occupation, firefighting is replete with images of maleness operating around a series of highly masculinised codes and values most notably comprising: risk/danger, heroism, fearlessness/courage, physicality, and bodily strength. This qualitative study of the UK Fire Service seeks to uncover the ways in which these masculine codes and values were evident amidst the daily working lives of a group of full-time, male firefighters. Placing respondent views at the centre of the research, findings suggest that occupational identities were based primarily upon notions of emotional strength, physical and technical competence and collective understandings of risk and responsibility. A commitment to group solidarity was also central to the masculine identities of respondents, with colleagues in administrative and managerial positions being distanced on account of their non-manual occupational roles.

The Role of Gender in `Expressive' Abuse at Abu Ghraib

We analyze the court-martial of Sabrina Harman, one of the alleged `seven rotten apples' associated with specific incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, vis-a-vis the Parsonian distinction between `instrumental' and `expressive' pattern-variables. The Parsonian distinction between instrumental and expressive roles served a multitude of functions simultaneously, and especially given the masculine code of the military. We move beyond Parsons to introduce the new concepts of `expressive abuse', `expressive torture', and `instrumental misuse of expressive functions' to capture the overall thrust of the courts-martial as well as important aspects of the abuse at Abu Ghraib as revealed through testimony, government reports, interviews, and other sources of data. Both co-authors were participant-observers at the courts-martial of Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England, and draw upon the testimony and data from those trials in addition to the documents that are cited.

A Prison within a Prison?

This study uses a narrative analysis to explore the masculinity narratives of male prisoners. Individual interviews were conducted with nine men aged twenty-two to forty-seven. Using a method described by Agar and Hobbs, extracts were taken from each narrative and grouped around local, global, and themal coherence. These showed that participants fell into three groups: one accepting and internalizing the normative codes of hegemonic masculinity, another growing up within these codes but transforming them through key life turning points into something “softer and gentler,” and the third defining their sense of self outside hegemonic norms. The implications of these findings for the men's emotional well-being and for working with hypermasculinity in prisons are discussed along with ideas for developing this research.

The Informal Regulation of Gender: Fear and Loathing in the Locker Room

The author contemplates how shifting, but largely unexamined, codes of masculinity have led to an emergent practice among men in locker rooms to hide their bodies. Contemplating the informal policing and regulation of men by men with respect to increasingly infrequent displays of nakedness, the author draws an unexpected connection between an arguably innocuous modesty among men in locker rooms, on the one hand, and the safety of queers, on the other.

Citizenship in an enlarging Europe: from dream to awakening

Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe considers the impact of economic, political and social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of EU enlargement. In a lively and engaging narrative, Barbara Einhorn uses gender as the lens through which to examine the processes of democratization, marketization and newly emergent nationalism, revealing the centrality of gender to these processes and the ways in which rigid codes of masculinity and femininity limit individuals' choices. Including an examination of mainstream politics versus the promotion of civil society as routes to empowerment and participation, this study highlights the growing public-private divide in the region, pinpointing the negative influences of the neo-liberal market model and its gendered media representations. With great clarity, Einhorn reveals the relevance of fully active citizenship within a vibrant civil society as a measure of democracy and gender equitable societies. Now available in paperback, this new edition includes a substantial new introduction, which revisits the central issues regarding citizenship in the European Union after the second round of enlargement in 2007 (after the hardback edition was published). In particular it address the role of nationalism, gender mainstreaming policies, and migration, making specific reference to Bulgaria and Romania.

Poly-Hegemonic Masculinities

This article explores polyamorous men’s potential to both enlarge and reinforce the concept of hegemonic masculinity through their emotional expressions and management, as well as their sexual expressions and relationships. Polyamorous people openly engage in romantic, sexual, and/or affective relationships with multiple people simultaneously. Polyamory differs from swinging with its emphasis on long-term, emotionally intimate relationships; and from adultery with its focus on honesty and (ideally) full disclosure of the network of sexual relationships to all who participate in or are affected by them. Both men and women have access to additional partners in polyamorous relationships, distinguishing them from polygynous ones. My ethnographic analysis expands sociological understandings of hegemonic masculinity by investigating this previously unexamined area of men’s sexual and romantic interactions. Employing R.W. Connell’s framework of hegemonic masculinity, I analyze some of the ways in which the polyamorous men in my sample are complicit with, marginalized by, subordinate to, and resistant of hegemonic codes of masculinity. I thus expand Connell’s configuration of hegemonic masculinity to include active defiance to its requirements and conclude that, to varied degrees, these poly men attempt to redefine their masculinities and resist the strictures of hegemonic masculinity.

The Addiction of Masculinity:Norman Mailer'sTough Guys Don't Danceand the Cultural Politics of Reaganism

Norman Mailer's 1984 detective novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, this paper argues, is an allegorical satire on the politics of the Reagan eighties and its codes of masculinity. Taking as its starting point Kate Millett's feminist assertion that Mailer always seems to understand what's the matter with masculine arrogance, but he can't give it up, this paper contends that Tough Guys Don't Dance encodes masculinity as a form of addiction. The addiction of masculinity is played through an analysis of the novel's identification of differing masculine language games. The revenge plot of Mailer's detective tale of buried heads in the marijuana patch is read as a satire of the eighties twin backlashes against feminism and the sixties. Set in Cape Cod's Provincetown, the novel's tough guy plot is also entangled in early AIDS crisis.

Troubled Manhood in the Early Republic: The Life and Autobiography of Sailor Horace Lane

This essay examines the life and autobiography of Horace Lane (1789-1866), an alcoholic sailor who became a thief and convict after his seafaring career ended. Study of Lane's life offers a revealing example of failed manhood in the early republic. It also sheds light on how the dominant society defined acceptable codes of masculinity and how it treated men who violated these codes. Lane's 1839 autobiography The Wandering Boy warrants analysis not only as a historical document illuminating his life but also as a personal narrative interpreting that life. This essay situates Lane's text in the context of memoirs by other ex-sailors, convicts, and alcoholics and suggests resonances among these seemingly disparate narratives. Discussion of The Wandering Boy also offers another perspective from which to view antebellum slave narratives and the evangelical reform literature to "uplift" different groups of men, including alcoholic seamen. Another major goal of this essay is to contribute to several areas of scholarship, including the historiographies of antebellum reform and seafaring life, the burgeoning scholarship on nineteenth-century manhood, and both literary and historical analyses of the autobiographies of nonprivileged people in the early republic.

Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (review)

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism Jamie Ebersole Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. By Richard Fantina, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 206 pp. $65.00. For nearly three decades, scholars have been busy rethinking how masculinity operates in Hemingway's life and work, replacing the celebrated macho persona with a Hemingway motivated by various psychosexual desires. Yet, as Richard Fantina argues in his important new book Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism, "[a]lthough many critics now readily dismiss the old Hemingway myth of machismo, few seem prepared to acknowledge the masochism that prevails in much of his work" (1). Fantina's book aims to redress this critical oversight, making the case that masochism is a central feature of Hemingway's major works. He uses the term masochism in its specific sexual sense, meaning the desire of a man "to submit himself sexually to, and to suffer pain and/or humiliation administered by, a woman whom he has elevated into a position of superiority and dominance" (6). As his book's title suggests, Fantina argues that this dynamic of the dominant woman and passive male often exists alongside the characters' machismo. As he puts it quite directly at one point, "Hemingway's men dominate in the world. His women often dominate in the bedroom" (77). In building his case, Fantina draws on a number of theorists of masochism, including Freud, Leo Bersani, Kaja Silverman, and most crucially Gilles Deleuze, whose 1967 book Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty reconsiders the novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in order to question the popular concept of sadomasochism. Contrary to many Freudian theories, which see masochism as a perversion complementary to sadism, Deleuze argues that masochism is a distinct phenomenon and a legitimate expression of masculinity. Whereas the sadist wreaks sexual violence on an unwilling victim, the masochist educates a sympathetic partner to be the cold and cruel woman he desires. By submitting to the woman and participating in ritualized scenes of humiliation and suspense, Deleuze suggests, the masochist opens up the possibility for a subversion of patriarchal law and a rebirth as a new man. Fantina locates a similar masochistic dynamic in Hemingway's work, arguing that although one doesn't find the whip-wielding dominatrix of Sacher-Masoch's novels, Hemingway's male characters continually submit to dominant women, and thus push the boundaries [End Page 143] of acceptable masculine behavior. Following Deleuze, then, Fantina expresses his desire to move beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, stating that his "purpose in these pages is not to offer another psychoanalytical interpretation but rather to discuss Hemingway's work in the tradition of literary masochism and the critical responses to it," a tradition that includes writers as different as Swinburne, Wilde, Lawrence, and Joyce (2). In this context of literary masochism, Fantina reconsiders a number of Hemingway's novels and stories. The early chapters of the book examine Hemingway's works in relation to various theories of masochism, highlighting how specific elements of masochism—including fetishism, humiliation, pain, suspense, and the contract—function in Hemingway's novels and stories. Subsequent chapters then extend these analyses, explaining in more detail how masochism works in many of the novels and considering related topics, such as the relationship between sodomy and homophobia in several novels and the role of masochism in the colonialism of the later work. What emerges from these analyses is the sense that Hemingway and his male characters are constantly negotiating between cultural codes of masculinity and their secret masochistic desires. For instance, Fantina argues that masochism plays a central role in The Sun Also Rises, with Jake as the passive, wounded war veteran and Brett as the dominant woman. Fantina persuasively shows that the novel shares many similarities with Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, particularly in the way it continually humiliates the masochist by providing a rival for the woman's affection. In Venus in Furs, Wanda often tells Severin about her attraction to other men and instructs him to arrange her meeting with his primary rival, the Greek. Similarly, in The Sun Also Rises, Brett tells Jake about her love of Romero, insisting that Jake introduce them. In this instance and in other moments of...

“For Home, Country and Race”: The Gendered Ideals of Citizenship in English Elementary and Evening Continuation Schools, 1885-1914

Between 1885 and 1914, English Elementary and Evening Continuation Schools - the institutions designed to cater to the educational needs of the working class - engaged in both formal and informal efforts to indoctrinate their students in the principles of “good citizenship”. This ideological initiative was an attempt to construct “appropriate” individual and collective character traits in children, many of whom were never expected to attain formal political rights. The books and lessons of the schools tended to romanticize English history and use specific figures from the past to explain values and traits deemed especially worthy in the“good citizen”. This article points to the ways in which these projected civic virtues were explained to working-class boys through association with accepted notions of virtuous masculinity. Demonstrated with examples of both real and fictitious martial heroes this masculine code resembled the ethic of service to the nation prevalent in elite educational culture, but with an entirely different result implied.

Er skadeskulturen i sport en machokultur

Lone Friis Thing: Is sport injury gendered? 
 
 This article discusses how sport injuries in female handball in a non-professional context intersect with masculinity codes. It asks whether dominant forms of masculinity involve learned behaviours that cause risk taking, violence or disregard for health. The article is based on data from 17 qualitative interviews with women handball players, with cross ligament (acl-ligament) injuries and field observations from the physiotherapy clinic where the players went for therapy. Masculinity codes are not articulated when it comes to recommencing sport after injury. Danish female handball players do not hurry back to play and they do not ignore their health. But the female players do silence the pain connected with injury and therapy. Pain is a non-spoken subject, and the players adopt techniques to help to displace the centrality of pain in their sports lives.

Fight!! Ippatsu!!

This article focuses on the marketing of “genki” energy health drinks to consider the role of media representations in the every day construction of ideologies of masculinity in contemporary Japan. It is shown that advertisements for these drinks have employed two dominant sets of images of Japanese men and masculinity, portraying either work- and company-based needs for energy and mental acuity or the (masculine) physical strength needed to compete successfully, overcome obstacles, or defeat foes. It is argued that such advertisements have participated in the representational circumscription of the visual codes of masculinity in contemporary Japan, and through this representational regime have reflected and reproduced a dominant gender ideology that sanctions a powerful, corporatist, middle-class masculinity.

Virtuoso Codes of Violin Performance: Power, Military Heroism, and Gender (1789-1830)

Beyond its glossy surface of virtuosity and lyricism, a violin concerto is replete with a vocabulary of hidden and (on second glance) not so hidden gestures. From Beethoven's timpani strokes to Paganini's marches and fanfares, the genre employs a host of "heroic" elements and gestures borrowed from military band music. In the period 1789-1830 these borrowings were hardly restricted to a purely musical level. Rather, I argue, military themes and ideas permeated virtually every aspect of a violin concerto's composition, performance, and reception. In the famous concertos as with countless now-forgotten works (of Viotti, Kreutzer, Rode, Baillot, Spohr, Alday, De Beriot, Lipinski, and Prume), the combination of military topoi with the soloist's leading role characterized the violinist as a military hero. Simultaneously, the tendency to compare violinists to mythological or historical figures became increasingly focused on the image of military leaders (Scipio, Alexander, and Napoleon). All the while, the act of performance exuded masculine codes of power, partly through the symbolism of the bow as a weapon. Taken together, it is these codes of military heroism and gendered power that shaped the culture of violin virtuosity, itself an outgrowth of a larger cultural trend stemming from NapolŽonÕs own military heroism.