History Of Masculinity Research Articles

Sensitive but Sane: Male Visionaries and their Emotional Display in Interwar Belgium

When a wave of Marian apparitions swept over Belgium in 1932-1935 many ‘visionaries’ (c. 200), among them a remarkably high number of men, claimed to encounter the divine. Focusing on these male visionaries and their emotional expressivity, this article aims not only at contributing to a better understanding of Catholic constructions of masculinity, it also accords with the increased attention for the historicity of emotions and, more specifically, for men’s emotional comportment. The male visionaries present a particularly interesting case since they had to live up to multiple expectations about their emotions. Whereas their visibility and trustworthiness as visionaries were founded on their capacity to display their emotions (in accordance with a tradition of emotional mysticism), these men also had to show ‘masculine’ rationality and coolness in order to prove that their experiences were not triggered by exaggerated piety or neurosis. This article is part of the special issue 'Low Countries Histories of Masculinity'.

Tobacco as Cultural Signifier: A Cultural History of Masculinity and Nationality in Habsburg Hungary

Since tobacco smoking acquired important patriotic symbolism in nineteenth century, the history of tobacco sheds light on Hungarian nationalism. Hungarian tobacco growers found the Austrian tobacco tariff policy harmful to their interests, particularly when war disrupted the supply of American tobacco in potential export markets. Pushing for a different tariff, Hungarian patriots turned smoking into a marker of Hungarian patriotism. Tobacco symbolism was prominent during Hungary’s 1848 Revolution, not least because tobacco acquired revolutionary symbolism in Italy and Germany as well. The culture of patriotic tobacco corresponded to revolutionary national ideas in that it mostly transcended class barriers but excluded women.

The Early Quakers, the Peace Testimony and Masculinity in England, 1660-1720

As Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard have asserted, most research into the history of masculinity has concentrated on dominant groups, while more work is needed on the range of codes of behaviour available to other men. Arguably, no aspect of seventeenth-century Quaker behaviour ran more contrary to dominant norms than the insistence on pacifism and rejection of violence. This article considers Friends’ pacifism and its relation to masculinity, including its implications for local society, showing how it related to Quaker rejections of domestic violence and to the violent masculinity of the alehouse. However, non-violent forms of control were used to uphold patriarchal norms and to control women and those whose behaviour was considered to be inappropriate. Developing the insights of the social scientist Kenneth Boulding and philosopher Steve Smith, this article explores how Quaker practices of exclusion and ostracism can be seen as highly effective forms of coercion, even if they did not involve physical force, and in doing so highlight how seventeenth- and twentieth-century interpretations of pacifism differ. Quaker identity and discipline were maintained in strikingly effective ways which often mirrored patriarchal norms, and indeed Friends’ self-perception is shown to have been highly controlled in order to maintain a collective reputation for sobriety, honesty and restraint.

Manly Poses: Identities, Politics, and Lived Experience in the History of Masculinity

Manly PosesIdentities, Politics, and Lived Experience in the History of Masculinity Paul R. Deslandes (bio) Christopher Dummitt. The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. vii, 224 pp.; ill. ISBN 10: 0-7748-1275-3 (pb). Steve Estes. I am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. x, 239 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-8078-5593-6 (pb). Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, eds. Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. xvii, 234 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8203-3232-1(pb). Timothy Hodgdon. Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965–1983. New York: Columbia University Press and Gutenberg-E, 2007. ii. 270 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-2311-3544-0 (e-book) http://www.gutenberg-e.org/hodgdon/ Danny Kaplan. The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2006. xiv, 175 pp. ISBN-10: 1-8454-5193-7 (pb). In a 2002 assessment of recent work on the history of masculinity in Britain, Martin Francis noted the influential role that John Tosh and others have played in developing this important area of study. With specific reference to Tosh's methodological admonitions to historians working in the field and to the scholarly development of an increasingly vibrant subdiscipline, Francis asserted: "John Tosh's insistence that the history of masculinity must be more than the history of homosocial manliness has made possible a more fully rounded exploration of male lives and subjectivities than that which previously existed."1 As indicated by the presence of review articles (such as Francis's) and, now, compilations of the most influential scholarship in the field, this area of study has indeed evolved since Natalie Davis first articulated, in a 1976 essay in Feminist Studies, the desirability of exploring women's and men's lives, concurrently, as fundamentally gendered experiences.2 [End Page 187] In the late 1980s, when Joan Scott alerted readers of the American Historical Review to the possibilities contained in the use of gender as a category of analysis, historians of numerous countries and regions began, in earnest, to take up the subject of masculinity.3 In its earliest incarnations, much of this work focused, somewhat uncritically, on all-male environments and paid little attention to gender as a relational construct or interactions between men and women; effectively privileging prescriptions over experiences and discourse over identities. The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of the field as scholars working in a variety of disciplines have explored, in articles and popular and academic books, distinctive aspects of the masculine experience. Historians of Europe and North America have taken up subjects as diverse as honor and dueling, sport and athleticism, and war and violence.4 More nuanced studies of associational life that pay particular attention to the relational aspects of gender have also begun to appear over the past two decades as historians have returned, with renewed vigor, to the exploration of single-sex institutions and contexts to illustrate how these organizations incorporated gendered discourses and concepts of space into their structures and cultural practices.5 Among some of the most exciting work in this field is scholarship that has examined the relationship between gender and national identities, race, and imperialism in a variety of geographical and institutional contexts.6 Equally innovative approaches have been employed by those interested in exploring the intimate lives of men in the domestic realm or myriad experiences of same-sex and opposite-sex desiring men in varied urban settings.7 As the field has evolved, it has also spurred on several attempts at synthesis reflected, most notably, in the work of scholars like Michael Kimmel and Robert Nye.8 The works under consideration in this essay, each full of intriguing insights into the multifaceted histories of masculinity in, respectively, the United States, Canada, and Israel, all build on these developments. By offering new perspectives, many of the authors examined here seek to dismantle, with varying degrees of success, paradigms that have dominated the field over the past two decades. Among the...

Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture

AbstractThis article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on Victorian masculinity from the 1990s, organized around two major themes: studies that brought to light and analyzed a suppressed history of masculinities that departed from cultural norms (especially homosexual masculinity), and studies devoted to the reassessment of mainstream Victorian manhood. It concludes by looking at a selection of work from the past decade in order to outline recent developments in the field. These studies, which have been able to take for granted that manhood is a valid and coherent subject of inquiry, have been able to integrate the study of masculinity into a variety of Victorian topics, even though there are now fewer works devoted exclusively to masculinity.

‘A Very Sensible Man’: Imagining Fatherhood in England c.1750–1830

AbstractFathers are at once everywhere and nowhere in the historiography of eighteenth‐century England. They interact with children in family history, bear authority in histories of women, gender and marriage, use the role to demonstrate virility, and the capacity for household mastery and citizenship in the history of masculinity, and are metaphors in political culture. Yet there is little sustained work on what constituted the key attributes of fatherhood before 1830. This article shows that the ideal father in the period c.1750 to 1830 was tenderly affectionate, sensitized and moved by babies; he provided hugs, material support and a protective guiding hand. Engrossed in his offspring to the exclusion of much else apart from his wife and national duties, he offered his children a moral example and instruction and possessed a deep understanding of his children's personalities. The genesis of this imagined fatherhood lay in fundamental eighteenth‐century concerns about social, class, gender and familial relationships, and national strength. His form and the language used to describe him owed much to the combined forces of the culture of sensibility and of general Christian ideals antedating Evangelical revival.

It’s a Man’s World? World History Meets the History of Masculinity, in Latin American Studies, for Instance

This article explores the vexed relationship between studies of gender and sexuality, especially as they relate to masculinity, and the growing field of world history. These bodies of scholarship have largely remained separate, even antagonistic, despite shared thematic concerns with transnational flows. Overall, world historians privilege political economy and global connections, while historians of gender and sexuality concern themselves with the cultural production of difference in specific locales. The case of U.S.-based Latin American studies offers ways of thinking across the culture versus economy divide; above all, it suggests that world history can usefully be narrated as a story of masculinities.

Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society by Morag Martin

hope is that the republican values of France, based on equality and brotherhood will be understood and respected. In succeeding moments, we learn that the public defense lawyer of one of the skinheads was of Arabic origin. We also witness the reading of a letter, written months later by the parents of François, to the three young men in prison. In the letter they express the hope that these youths will grow in tolerance and respect for others, and they invite them to write back to them if they wish. This film takes a mature look at violence in contemporary society and a mature and humane response to it by an afflicted family. Appropriate for a course about contemporary society in France, it would be equally adaptable to a course on world cultures, or even a criminal justice course with an international outlook. It provides both educator and students with abundant information. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Society and Culture edited by Marie-Christine Koop MARTIN, MORAG. Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8018-9309-4. Pp. viii+228. $55 (HC). This study offers an overview of the history of the French cosmetics industry, arguably the world’s best-known purveyor of beauty products. Morag Martin, Associate Professor of History at the College at Brockport, State University of New York, traces the industry from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, at which time it already possessed many features of its modern successor, including its commercialization. Several parts of this book were published previously , but the majority of the eight chapters consist of entirely new material. The author demonstrates how tastes in beauty (and the products used to create it) evolved during this time period, from artificially whitened skin, reddened cheeks and powdered wigs inherited from the Ancien Régime, to the subsequent Rousseau-inspired, more natural ideal created with less artifice. She analyzes the cosmetic industry’s response to these changes in consumer taste using as her sources newspaper ads for cosmetics, beauty manuals and medical treatises, as well as stories, poems and anecdotes about beauty (2). The result is a richly annotated examination of the French toilette—both female and male—in its historical and commercial context, the reading of which occasionally feels like a slightly voyeuristic experience. One of the things this reviewer found especially interesting about this book is the fact that Martin not only guides us into the private spaces where women went to make themselves presentable, while showing simultaneously how the definition of this term evolved over time, but that she also takes readers behind the scenes of the male beautification process. Men and primping are not commonly linked, but this book partakes in the recent gender study-inspired interest in the history of masculinity and thus discusses such topics as men’s use of rouge, perfumes, face paint, creams and wigs. In addition, the last chapter is devoted entirely to men’s hair and perhaps more importantly, the dreaded lack thereof. Throughout the book, readers also get a glimpse of the history of medicine Reviews 177 since cosmetics were part of medicine and physicians were involved in creating and selling them. In summary, while the initial five chapters focus on the second half of the title, “beauty,” the final three chapters are centered on the title’s first half, “selling .” In the former part, Martin discusses first how cosmetics were consumed, produced, and advertised at the end of the eighteenth century, and then how beauty products, as they became ever more available to increasing numbers of French consumers, came to be the object of growing criticism from æsthetic, moral and medical perspectives. In the latter part, readers learn how entrepreneurs selling cosmetics reacted to this criticism and the accompanying change in the definition of beauty. Twelve black-and-white figures appear alongside the text, aptly illustrating various beauty standards as well as advertising techniques used to sell cosmetics. In this reviewer’s opinion, the four figures included in Chapter Seven entitled “Selling the Orient” are instrumental in making it one of the strongest chapters, even though it has...

Rakes, highwaymen, and pirates: the making of the modern gentleman in the eighteenth century

Erin Mackie explores the shared histories of the modern polite English gentleman and other less respectable but no less celebrated eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate. Mackie traces the emergence of these character types to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when traditional aristocratic authority was increasingly challenged. She argues that the development of the modern polite gentleman as a male archetype can only be fully comprehended when considered alongside figures of fallen nobility, which, although criminal, were also glamorous enough to reinforce the same ideological order. In Evelina's Lord Orville, Clarissa's Lovelace, Rookwood's Dick Turpin, and Caleb Williams's Falkland, Mackie reads the story of the ideal gentleman alongside that of the outlaw, revealing the parallel lives of these seemingly contradictory characters. Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

Black Males in the Stadium: All ‘Bad Niggers’? French Literature, Sport and Masculinity from the 1920s to the 1950s

In the first part of the twentieth century, ‘sports literature’ presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity. The novels examined the stadiums, the boxing rings or the velodromes and noticed the existence of coloured sportsmen. Black boxers and athletes were considered as original models of manliness competing with the hegemonic masculinity, hitherto written in ‘white’. This essay intends to explore the French ‘sports novels’ published in the first part of the twentieth century. Relying on the history of masculinities and of gender, and on the methodological reflection of ‘race studies’, it examines the meeting between Black identity and athletic masculinity in literature. Thus this articles aims at showing how, through a series of stylistic, narrative and semiotic processes, the fiction essentialized the difference. Both fascinated and scared, the novels stigmatized Black sportsmen and endeavoured to analyse the alterity.

Tightening and Loosening Masculinity's (k)Nots: Masculinity in the Hearst Press during the Interwar Period

Histories of masculinity have documented changes in the definition of American masculinity across centuries, but not decades. This article examines prescriptive and proscriptive statements about men's behavior as they appeared in William Randolph Hearst's American Weekly during the interwar period (1918–1940). Written by professionals and providing summaries of current research, the American Weekly provided authoritative accounts of masculinity to a mass audience. In the early 1920s, reason was explicitly masculine and central to the construction of masculinity, and gender differences were routinely attributed to men's superior evolution. By the late 1930s, reason was implicitly masculine, the breadwinner role was central, and gender differences relied on the known, but unstated, superiority of men.

Christopher E Forth and Bertrand Taithe (eds), French masculinities: history, culture and politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. xi, 249, illus., £50.00 (hardback 978-0-230-00661-4).

Christopher E Forth and Bertrand Taithe's edited volume is a welcome addition to a growing corpus of collected articles on the history of masculinity. What this selection does especially well is provide an overview of the history. Though there are a few essays in the collection that have a very limited research focus, most authors attempt to give an overview of their period and topic. This is especially useful as a starting point for discussing both the scope of the history as well as seeing what still needs to be done. The volume covers only modern history, starting with the late eighteenth century elite and ending with a contemporary piece on the suburbs, the veil and recent rioting by disaffected youths. The majority of the essays focus on the post-1870 period, when both imperialism and the Third Republic redefined and solidified the French male, only to have him questioned and perverted after 1940. The first three chapters cover the Old Regime, the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. What we see here is the shift away from the Old Regime masculine emphasis on civility and refinement (traits which were made fun of by the Germans and the British as effeminate) towards a militarization of society. By the height of the Revolution all able-bodied men were to be treated as property of the state through military service. As Christopher Forth shows, by the late nineteenth century, physicians and anthropologists worried about the softening of the physical body in modern society. The imperial project and the Franco-Prussian war were key moments in defining an unstable and highly criticized version of French masculinity. The French male was weak and overly intellectual and some even suggested that African colonials be recruited into the French army to reinvigorate it. Robert Aldrich's chapter on colonial masculinities reinforces this idea by arguing that colonial domination made up for masculine weakness in France. The First World War did not help quell the sense of threat to the men of the metropole. Judith Surkis uses the example of venereal disease between the wars to illustrate both the precariousness of the French male's ability to protect the family as well as the menace of foreign men who were blamed for spreading the infections. Michael Sibalis, in his masterful overview of French homosexuality and effeminacy, is the only other author to use medical history prominently. For the Second World War, Miranda Pollard investigates the various competing forms of masculinity after the French defeat in 1940 represented by Petain, De Gaulle and the Resistance. Three much more specific topics represent the post-war period: the roman noir, masculine stardom and a discussion of the writer Serge Doubrovsky. Andre Rauch's final chapter on recent violence in the suburbs focuses on the women who are abused and controlled by the disaffected immigrant youths, as much as on the men themselves. Rauch's piece is the most powerful, but also the most problematic. He jumps from topic to topic, not distinguishing between the Muslim youths whose sisters wear veils, and immigrant and French youth from other religious backgrounds. In the Afterword, Robert Nye, one of the leading historians on the topic, points to the continued vision of France as hyper-civilized and thus feminized, especially by Americans post-9/11. France has gone from a great nation to a declining one, both militarily and demographically. French (elite) men have had 200 years of failing to live up to the iconic masculinities created by the Revolution and Napoleon, while hanging on to the Old Regime vision of the civilized, intellectual gentleman.

The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939-1945. By Martin Francis.

The Flyer is an extensive and intensive analysis of the men of the Royal Air Force (RAF) who served on bomber crews or as fighter pilots in the Second World War. While it contributes to the historical literature on the military it aims more broadly to investigate the history of masculinity during the Second World War, and in particular to focus upon how men who were engaged in that most stereotypically ‘manly’ of endeavours, warfare, understood themselves and were represented by others as men. The book, then, is centrally concerned with the history of masculinity and is, in a sense, a collective biography. It is also about how the cultural representations of the flyer were produced during the war years—making the flyer an iconic figure symbolizing the nation at war. The book contributes to the social history of Britain during the period, by exploring questions of social inequality and class-related notions of military manliness within the RAF, and it brings into view the presence of non-white flyers recruited from the empire and their experiences with racial discrimination as well as with the dangers of the war. A primary theme that runs throughout the book is that the world of the RAF reflected the larger British society to which it belonged even given the specificities of flight and military organization.

Between the Psyche and the Social: Masculinity, Subjectivity and the First World War Veteran

This article offers a critique of some recent work on gender, which, influenced by the linguistic turn, over-states the historical significance of identity. Drawing on the work of the First World War tank commander and later Kleinian psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, the article offers some suggestions about what a history of masculinity in the First World War might look if emotional experience, rather than “identity,” was at the centre of study. Focusing on two men, one an officer and Regular soldier, the other a rank-and-file Volunteer, the article explores the emotional impact of the war on the domestic lives of veterans. The war, it argues, drew men into relationships of care that had traditionally been women's domain; in the process creating both a crisis and an opportunity for subjectivity. Many men returned home after the war with practical and emotional capacities that challenged traditional ideals of the “soldier hero.” Simultaneously, however, the widespread distress of veterans meant that women tended to be drawn back into traditional feminine roles, as nurses and mothers.

Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs

Reviewed by: Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 Mary Ann Clawson (bio) Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717–1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs; pp. xiv + 384. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007, $39.95, £25.50. Responding to the challenges of contemporary global and transnational histories, as well as to calls for the rethinking of the British imperial project, Jessica Harland-Jacobs identifies British Freemasonry as a revealing, indeed inspired, entry point into the history of the British Empire as a global formation. In its most assertive formulation, the book argues that the “British Empire was a fraternal enterprise” (17), with Freemasonry operating as an “institution that paralleled (and enabled) expansion of empire and beyond” (2). The book’s range of conceptual vision, geography, and time-span is exceptional. With ideological origins in eighteenth-century Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, British Freemasonry articulated values of universal brotherhood, religious tolerance, and openness to political diversity. Yet during the nineteenth century it evolved an ever-closer identification with the monarchy and the Empire, “an unquestioning ally,” Harland-Jacobs argues, “of the British imperial state” that helped to sustain the Empire as a workable supra-national entity (6). Within this framework, Freemasonry’s contributions were threefold: it operated as an internal social lubricant, an externalized performance of public power, and a means of co-opting indigenous elites. Most convincingly, Harland-Jacobs portrays Masonic lodges as a social and cultural infrastructure of empire that offered “convivial society, moral and spiritual refinement, material assistance, and social advancement” to Empire functionaries, both military and civilian (3–4). One of the book’s many strengths is this account of innovative governance structures that enabled Freemasonry to reproduce itself globally by defining systematic procedures for the formation of new lodges and establishing credentialing mechanisms to verify Masonic membership. As a result, Freemasonry operated as a kind of passport that newly arrived Masons could use to gain social entrée throughout the Empire. Harland-Jacobs’s emphasis on the significance of cultural institutions as a supplement to the typical focus on trade and government as a force of globalization is an especially important contribution, as is her demonstration of how this cultural life was grounded in organizational innovation. The hospitality of the lodge was of course reserved exclusively for men; Freemasonry’s character as an all-male organization was an important component of its identity. Here Harland-Jacobs expands our understanding of the history of masculinities by emphasizing the “significance of homosociality to imperialism (itself a predominantly male environment)” (15). Women were significant as both presence and absence [End Page 517] in these colonial sites, but Harland-Jacobs’s most interesting point is that the homosociality of empire, reproduced in part through Freemasonry, contributed to women’s continued subordination since, “transforming oneself, through Masonry, into a cosmopolite or an imperial citizen was an opportunity available only to men” (16). Finally, Harland-Jacobs greatly advances the analytic reach of both Masonic and British Empire histories in her argument that Freemasonry helped sustain imperial power not only by offering homosocial community and day-to-day amusement to Empire functionaries, but also by contributing to the production of consent in the societies that Britain ruled. If British overseas power, given the relatively small size of the force and personnel it was able to deploy, rested as much on performance and pageantry as on the exercise of force, then Freemasons’ role as “the shock troops of imperial ceremony” (14) was surely significant in conveying the mystique of authority and invulnerability to both supposedly awestruck indigenous populations and its own military and civilian personnel. This valuable insight could be strengthened with documentation that Masonic performativity achieved its desired effect. Here the author’s reliance on not just Masonic sources but a particular kind of Masonic source is limiting. It is not surprising that speeches by visiting dignitaries to Masonic audiences would tend to glorify, and perhaps to overstate, the Masonic contribution to the imperial project. It would be useful to confirm or complicate this picture from the vantage point of sources that could tell us how others, in more candid, less guarded moments, saw and evaluated the Masonic...

Manliness and the“Morality of Field Sports”: E. A. Freeman and Anthony Trollope, 1869–71

This article aims to make a twofold contribution. First, it adds to the now‐flourishing field of the history of masculinity in modern Britain, asking some new questions of the category of manliness...

Boys, Boyhood and the Construction of Masculinity

This introductory article explains the aims of the interdisciplinary conference Masculinity and the Other held at Balliol College, Oxford, August 29-30, 2007, at which all of the papers comprising this special issue of Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies were first presented. It points out the prominence which the notions of the boy and boyhood and the life-cycle enjoyed at the conference and seeks more generally to suggest the benefits a more fully integrated discussion of these topics might bring to the fields of masculinity and gender studies. Keywords: boys, boyhood, masculinity In the scholarship of the last twenty years, there has been a major move away from treating gender as an essentialist identity. In particular, men's studies, which developed in the 1980s in response to a predominantly feminist critique of male power structures, have undergone a veritable sea-change. Instead of stressing the idea of innate and fundamental differences between men and women (sometimes termed the separate-anddifferent cultures mode11), masculine identity has been increasingly treated as a highly contingent social construct. No longer is the study of masculinity restricted to a relatively small number of academic fields (primarily sociology, psychology and cultural studies), but has become instead one of the most vibrant areas of interdisciplinary investigation. R.W. Connell (1998) has referred to this change as the ethnographic moment of the 1990s, when history, cultural anthropology and other disciplines grounded in empirical research and focused on the importance of cultural context became increasingly interested in the formation of male identity. The emergence of a range of new sub-disciplines focused on the study of masculinity has been the result. Prominent among these has been the history of masculinity which developed under the auspices of scholars such as John Tosh and Michael Roper in the early 1990s (Tosh & Roper, 1991; Tosh, 1994), and has since become one of the most popular and innovative fields of historical inquiry. The move towards interdisciplinarity in masculinity studies has been accompanied by growing scepticism about the predominantly structuralist analyses which informed men's studies in the late 1970s and 1980s. Increasingly, scholars have questioned the claim of writers such as Andrew Tolson (1977) and Jeff Hearn (1987) that socio-economic structures and power relations have been chiefly responsible for determining forms of masculinity. In the 1990s, R.W. Connell (1995), among others, argued for a multiplicity of masculinities which did much to undermine existing ideas of male identity as essential and universal, possessed by all men, regardless of age, class, ethnicity or any other cultural marker. In recent years, however, Connell's own work has been criticized for being too closely wedded to a neo-Marxist methodology which unduly privileges the role played by power relations in the formation of identity. With the increasing popularity of social constructionist theories in masculinity studies, scholars such as Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (1997) have questioned Connell's emphasis on hegemony and hierarchy, arguing that it underestimates the extent to which the formation of masculine identity is characterized by fluidity, fragmentation and contradiction. Clearly, the impact of power relations cannot be ignored in any study of masculinity; their role, however, must be problematized as part of a critical analysis which does not treat them as constant and immovable. In addition, some have argued that Connell's pro-feminist stance and preoccupation with the concept of gender oppression has led her to overestimate the importance of the male-female binary in the construction of masculine identity. More recently, scholars have stressed the need to examine how a variety of cultural markers such as age, class and ethnicity, as well as gender, interact and combine in the complex process of identity formation. …

Blood and Tears in the Mirror of Memory: Palestinian Trauma in Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror

Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror explores the historical trauma of the 1975–6 siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tal el–Zaatar in Beirut and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants by Christian militias. Analogous to Holocaust writing, Badr's fictionalized history, grounded in actual survivor testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory, but does so from a specifically female perspective. Collapsing the personal and political, private and public, inside and outside through figured violations of bodies and psyches, Badr repositions women at the centre of the Palestinians’ struggle for and story of survival. Badr's novel traces the annihilation of the possibility of address, accompanied by self–loss and the ability to witness, and the laborious recreation of address. Claiming authority on the basis of the emotional, visceral truth of suffering, she seeks to break the endless cycle of an oppressive and impotent masculine history, constructing an alternative history which at least attempts to address the voice of cultural, national, and gender difference.

Gender in Polar Air: Roald Amundsen and his Aeronautics

The aim of this article is to discuss the polar aeronautics of the 1920s as men, that is: to take seriously the obvious – but so far more or less ignored fact – that polar history is a gendered history: a man's history. It is time to ask what kind of men the polar aviators were: that is the purpose of scrutinizing polar history as a part of the history of masculinity. A more general purpose of gender studies is to study the variety of masculinity as an illustration of the historicity of human behaviour. The conclusion of the article is that the polar aviators were representatives of an archaic kind of masculinity that deviated from the hegemonic engineer-hailing masculinity of the 1920s. They were escapists, of course. They loved flying, of course – and certainly they worshipped technology. At the same time, however, they acted extremely emotionally and even irrationally towards themselves. They were dictated by their strong feelings in a degree that collided with both common sense and the ideals of correct manliness. Thus, the article is intended to be a contribution not only to the study of masculinity, but even to the discussion in social research on the meaning of emotions in human interrelationships.

Book Review: New Histories of Masculinity

Book Review: New Histories of Masculinity