Masculine Space Research Articles

‘Never, Never Sick At Sea’: Gender Differences in Health Care Utilisation on Board South African Naval Vessels

International research indicates that women use health care more than men do. Previous figures for South African Navy ships showed that women sailors tend to visit their ships' sickbays more than twice as often as their male counterparts. While the physical environment can (partly) explain the medical findings, biological processes are deemed insufficient to explain all the gender-differences in health care utilisation. This paper argues that health is a social as well as biological phenomenon, and explores gender issues, from a social constructionist perspective, that may enlighten the understanding of these gender discrepancies. The military is a highly patriarchal society, and the structural positions of women and men in the military is believed to influence health care through highlighting the influence of the social construction of ships as masculine space. This includes themes of power, threat, and resistance. This is enacted through male control over women through clothing, rituals, and language, also through sexual harassment, an unsupportive environment, and conditions of acceptance.

Staging Sex and Masculinity at the Mineshaft

This article serves as an inquiry into masculine space: it uses the gay male clubs of the 1970s to discuss masculinity, performance, and spatial configuration. Within these spaces, gay men underwent a conversion (public to the other men at the clubs, private to society at large); they inverted dominant culture for their own purposes, projecting, acting on, and maybe even transcending their imaginings and desires. The reciprocity between space and program as conceptual frame and the individual’s practices as intervention are important parts of this article.

Engendering Heroism: Ming-Qing Women's Song Lyrics to the Tune Man Jiang Hong

AbstractThe heroic lyric had long been a masculine symbolic space linked with the male social world of career and achievement. However, the participation of a critical mass of Ming-Qing women lyricists, whose gendered consciousness played a role in their textual production, complicated the issue. This paper examines how women crossed gender boundaries to appropriate masculine poetics, particularly within the dimension of the heroic lyric to the tune Man jiang hong, to voice their reflections on larger historical circumstances as well as women's gender roles in their society.

Contested Masculine Spaces in Greek Orthodoxy

The main controversies connected with the “issue of women” in contemporary Greek Orthodoxy concern their exclusion from the ministerial and sacramental orders of the church as well as from entering Mount Athos. There is a conspicuous absence of strong sentiments and reactions on the part of Greek women regarding this exclusion. Consequently, the main challenges to these exclusionary positions are coming not so much from within Greek society itself, but rather from outside, forcing Orthodox hierarchs and theologians as well as the state to respond. This article aims at exposing and analysing some of these responses showing how tradition and certain feminine images are used to project these controversial issues not as a “battle between the sexes”, but rather as one between Orthodoxy, Greekness and the West.

Check it while I wreck it: black womanhood, hip hop culture, and the public sphere

Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions - graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music - of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of society, from speech to dress. While hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are grappling with the gender politics of a predominately masculine space. In this provocative study, Gwendolyn D. Pough explores the complex relationship between black women, hip-hop, and feminism. Examining a wide range of genres, including rap music, novels, spoken word poetry, hip-hop cinema, and hip-hop soul music, she traces the rhetoric of black women bringing wreck. Pough demonstrates how influential women rappers such as Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot, and Lil' Kim are building on the legacy of earlier generations of women - from Sojourner Truth to sisters of the black power and civil rights movements - to disrupt and break into the dominant patriarchal public sphere. She discusses the ways in which today's young black women struggle against the stereotypical language of the past (castrating black mother, mammy, sapphire) and the present (bitch, ho, chickenhead), and shows how rap provides an avenue to tell their own life stories, to construct their identities, and to dismantle historical and contemporary negative representations of black womanhood. Pough also looks at the on-going public dialogue between male and female rappers about love and relationships, explaining how the denigrating rhetoric used by men has been appropriated by black women rappers as a means to empowerment in their own lyrics. The author concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of rap music as well as of third wave and black feminism. This fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of hip-hop urges young black women to harness the energy, vitality, and activist roots of hip-hop culture and rap music to claim a public voice for themselves and to bring wreck on sexism and misogyny in mainstream society.

‘A sort of land debatable’: female influence, civic virtue and middle-class identity, c 1830-c 1860[1

The recent emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere as a predominantly masculine space means that the wider meanings and interpretations of respectable women's presence at public occasions have been ignored or misunderstood. This article addresses the contribution of urban middle-class women to the public construction and expression of middle-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the way in which women were written into civic narratives as champions of public virtue. It is argued that the notion of ‘female influence’ allowed women to expand their public roles, and even to participate in potentially subversive political activities. However, it also effectively contained such activities by distancing ‘respectable’ women from the potentially corrupting arena of political controversy.

Multiple Pleasures

This article explores the issue of gender and computer games by looking at the growing population of women in massive multiplayer online role-playing environments (MMORPGs). It explores what are traditionally seen as masculine spaces and seeks to understand the variety of reasons women might participate. Through ethnographic and interview data, the themes of social interaction, mastery and status, team participation, and exploration are considered as compelling activities female gamers are engaging in online. Given that these online games often include a component of fighting, the issue of violence is discussed. Rather than seeing this group of players as an anomaly, this article explores how focusing on the pleasures women derive from gaming might lend a more complex understanding of both gender and computer games. Finally, a consideration of how design is affecting this emerging genre is explored.

Love’s Coming (Out)

In The Threshold of the Visible World (1996), Kaja Silverman advances a subtle, ethical, post-Lacanian account of what constitutes “the active gift of love” and how this might be expressed on the screen. She argues for an orientation of subject to love object which is not merely an alternative to romantic passion, but an account of how identification of the loving subject and love object “might function in a way that results in neither the triumph of self-sameness, nor craven submission to an exteriorised but essentialized ideal” (p. 79). In a move particularly relevant to our focus in this paper, she goes on to suggest that a gift of love so constituted entails an escape from conformity with culturally dictated ideals and thence a capacity “to put ourselves in a positive identificatory relation to bodies which we have been taught to abhor and repudiate” (Ibid.). Two lesbian/gay teen films of the late 1990s—Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Amal (1998; also known as Show Me Love) and Simon Shore’s Get Real (1999)—offer an illuminating contrast in the ways they deal with the possibility of the gift of love in the conflictual contexts of teenage gay and lesbian love and sexuality and of small-town spaces. Space solicits desire, but the sexual frisson that is evoked through encounters in various spaces depicted as offering excitement, risk, and bodily pleasures seems limited in three ways. First, the progression from desire to love is severely circumscribed by cultural presuppositions about the physical and social attributes of appropriate love objects. This is particularly evident in the Hollywood teen film, with its recurrent male and female Cinderella roles. Second, the desire represented is predominantly heterosexual, so the appropriate love object is further specified by the assumption of heteronormativity. Finally, there is a persistent attribution of space to woman and time to man—as early as the late eighteenth century William Blake had written, “Space is a woman” (in Bal, 1988, p.169)—and although this has been questioned by feminist thinkers (see Irigaray 1987) it still pervades filmic imagery. As Sue Best (1995, pp.182-3) notes, the bounded spaces that people inhabit—“the nation, regions, cities and the home”—often rely on feminine metaphor to describe their attributes, contours, architecture; in the case of the romantic ‘home’, its enclosures suggest a warm, uterine space and maternal care. In a related sense, the open spaces of the countryside, the city streets and solitary travel have connoted a masculine space and prerogative. Traditionally, man moves through these spaces with a sense of temporal purpose, while woman bides her time in bounded domestic space. In Fucking Amal, the film’s preoccupation with enclosed spaces, and especially the domestic spaces of home and school, on the one hand generates an intense mood of claustrophobia and on the other communicates the terrifying aloneness of the young person abjected by the “in”-crowd. A measure of the inanity of the teenage boys of this small Swedish community is the unexamined misogyny of their spatial thinking, as when, for example, Jessica’s boyfriend Markus asserts that boys are interested in and understand technology, like cell phones, and that girls are instead good at things like

Appropriate[ing] dress: women's rhetorical style in nineteenth-century America

Carol Mattingly examines the importance of dress and appearance for nineteenth-century women speakers and explores how women appropriated gendered conceptions of dress and appearance to define the struggle for representation and power that is rhetoric. Although crucial to women's effectiveness as speakers, Mattingly notes, appearance has been ignored because it was taken for granted by men. Because women rarely spoke in public before the nineteenth century, no guidelines existed regarding appropriate dress when they began to speak to audiences. Dress evoked immediate images of gender, an essential consideration for women speakers because of its strong association with place, locating women in the domestic sphere and creating a primary image that women speakers would work with - and against - throughout the century. Opposition to conspicuous change for women often necessitated the subtle transfer of comforting images when women sought to inhabit traditionally masculine spaces. The most successful women speakers carefully negotiated expectations by highlighting some conventions even as they broke others. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America features twenty-five illustrations.

Victorian Divorce Anxiety and the Lawyer–Statesman in Fin de Siecle Advertising, Literature, and Debate

In 1908, the American Bar Association banned as unethical all forms of advertising and soliciting by lawyers. Henceforth, attorneys who advertised would be subject to professional discipline — including disbarment for character adjudged une t for the practice of law. Although the promulgation of canons of ethics was not uncommon in an era when most professions were becoming more elite and self-regulated, only the legal profession subjected itself to an absolute ban on advertising. Thus, at the same time that doctors, educators, detectives and performers began to use the paid media extensively, lawyers felt it necessary to desist from advertising altogether. The ABA’ s decision to make all advertising unethical relates to cultural anxieties over a blurring of modernity’ s once distinct boundaries of public and private space, a blurring made increasingly unmanageable in Victorian-era society by the proliferation of lawyer advertising and divorce representations at the turn-of-the-century. In the nineteenth century, lawyers were represented as both public servants and masculinized men. 1 The duality of this representational strategy, referred to frequently in legal sources and literature as the “ lawyer‐ statesman,” 2 ree ects the cone ation of public space and masculine space that occurred with the advent of modernity. Characters represented as lawyer‐ statesmen generally possessed the type of masculine attributes that Bordo, 3 Keller 4 and others state were valued by the Enlightenment. These characteristics include a strict separation of public image from personal life, an emphasis on scientie c inquiry that favors reason over emotion, and a focus on truth as a universal constant. Thus, the ideal lawyer‐ statesman would be an emotionally detached, dispassionate, and rational individual who, either as an esteemed private lawyer or as a politician, dedicated himself to work on behalf of the public’ s interest.

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Narratives of History, Nature, and Death at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific

Punchbowl is also a site for production of stories state tells about why young men die in war. There are two distinct kinds of spaces produced at Punchbowl: burial space, occupying most of 112.5 acres with neat symmetrical rows of graves; and space of memorial, with its texts, maps, inscriptions, illustrations, instructions, and prayers.1 On surface of things, second space appears to be full of words while first is starkly silent. But orderly march of soldiers' graves inhabits a dense historical text, where narratives are written directly onto material soil,2 while signifying practices of memorial are also riddled with silences. The two textual sites are mutually constitutive of one another, producing through their interactive imagery a set of stories that pacify death, sanitize war, and enable future wars to be thought. Both memorial and cemetery are tacitly gendered spaces, where inscriptions of masculinity and femininity are hidden in plain sight/site. Tracking the often silent and hidden operations of gender3 at Punchbowl leads into an implicitly masculine space, one that is planned, controlled, disciplined, orderly. The memorial tells a monoglossic, regulated story of external danger and national victory. (The Vietnam war is omitted from story, although dead soldiers from Vietnam occupy many of graves.) The site contains no disorder, no mystery,

"Hassiba Ben Bouali, If You Could See Our Algeria": Women and Public Space in Algeria

Reprinted from the 1995 Middle East Report special issue on Algeria, this essay asks how to interpret Algerian feminists of the early 1990s holding public demonstrations in the name of Hassiba Ben Bouali, a moudjahida killed by the French during the Battle of Algiers in 1956–1957? Women’s movement into public space exposes the interplay among Algerian society’s spatial arrangements, the status of women, and the ideological underpinnings of the Algerian state since independence. What are the complex ways women must negotiate either acceptance into masculine space or valorize their own internalized perceptions as intruders disturbing the equilibrium of a regulated, single-sex, urban milieu?

“Good vibration” or domination?: Stylized repetition in mythopoetic performance of masculinity

Performances in the mythopoetic men's movement are designed to restore a deep and essential masculinity theorized by Robert Bly and those who have written handbooks attempting to put Bly's theory into practice. Judith Butler's analysis of gender as performatively constituted by “stylized repetitions of acts” establishes that the masculinity Bly and others wish to restore does not occur prior to the performances they propose to achieve that restoration. Application of Butler's analysis to three constellations of mythopoetic performance (the dividing practice of pathologizing the “soft” or uninitiated male, the attempt to “contain” masculine space, and the nonconsensual initiation of boys) reveals the construction, rather than restoration, of masculinity by the movement. In particular, the nonconsensual initiation of boys represents an ultimately sadistic performance that destabilizes the movement's claims for an essential masculinity and warrants feminist resistance.

Renaissance Florence: A Social History

Introducion Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti Part I. The Theatre of Florence: 1. Florentine politics and urban spaces John M. Najemy 2. Theatres of everyday life Sharon T. Strocchia Part II. The Public Realm: 3. The Piazza della Signoria as practiced place Stephen J. Milner 4. Structuring communal history through repeated metaphors of rule Sarah Blake McHam 5. Corporate beneficence and historical narratives of communal well-being Philip Gavitt 6. The spaces of plebian ritual and the boundaries of transgression David Rosenthal 7. Ritual trading at the Florentine wool cloth botteghe Adrienne Atwell Part III. Relatives, Friends, and Neighbors: 8. Neighborhood as microcosm Nicholas Eckstein 9. The palace and villa as spaces of patrician self-definition Michael Lingohr 10. '... full of people of every sort': the domestic interior Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti Part IV. Men and Women: 11. Mean streets, familiar streets, or the fat woodcarver and the masculine spaces of renaissance Florence Guido Ruggiero 12. Did women have a space? Natalie Thomas Part V. The Spaces of the Spiritual: 13. Sacred place and liturgical space: Florence's renaissance churches Robert W. Gaston 14. Memorial chapels in churches: The privatization and transformation of sacred spaces Jonathan Katz Nelson 15. The aural space of the sacred in renaissance Florence Peter Howard 16. Identity and alliance: urban presence, spatial privilege, and Florentine renaissance convents Saundra Weddle Part VI. Across Space and Time: 17. The workshop as the space of collaborative artisitic production Anabel Thomas 18. The replicated image in Florence, 1300-1600 Patricia Emison 19. From the workshop to the academy: the emergence of the artist in renaissance Florence Andrea Bolland.