Masculinity Studies Research Articles

Gender and Pain in Nineteenth-Century Cancer Care.

Gender and Pain in Nineteenth-Century Cancer Care.

‘My little beautiful mess’: a longitudinal study of working-class masculinity in transition

ABSTRACTThe study of masculinities and social change continues to gain prominence in the field of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM). This article presents a case study of one Anglo-Australian working-class male, Leo, as he experienced multiple transitions – from his final year at secondary school into various service sector jobs and eventually to becoming the first in his family to attend university. The article explores how he constructed his subjectivity in reference to his relationships and diverse experiences. Central to the analysis is the continual and contentious nature of identity work. Drawing on theories associated with both intersectionality and liminality (transitions, in-between-ness), the article explores Leo’s journey contributing to scholarship which seeks to complicate historical conceptions of working-class masculinities. As Leo navigates different spaces, we are compelled to think about the discursive construction of masculinity in reference to social change as well as the multiple axes of inequality which inform his subjectivity.

Masculinities and femininities in sustainable transport policy: a focus on Swedish municipalities

ABSTRACTGender identities are relevant for sustainable transport. By analyzing the synergies between gender inequality (as a problem), and lack of sustainability (another problem), there is a potential to create an understanding of how these problems are linked. Our aim is to better understand how gendered norms find expression in transport policy and planning. Taking a starting point in gender studies we advance four ideal types on masculine and feminine norms and relate them to sustainability in transport. We advance a methodology for studying gender norms in relation to sustainability in terms of how they are expressed in the text. We contribute to a deeper understanding of transportation related to men and masculinity studies, and advance work by masculinity scholars to include sustainability in transportation issues. Through text analysis, we demonstrate empirically how four Swedish municipalities have developed their (sustainable) transport policies 2014–2018. Our results indicate that the level of sustainability, in plans and strategies, are related to the presence of diverse masculine and feminine norms rather than male and female bodies.

Big sperm. The making of the (new) male repro-consumer

ABSTRACT Have you tested your sperm count lately? Not only is reproduction increasingly becoming technologized, but men’s reproductive systems entangle with technological developments in complex ways. This paper takes its empirical point of departure from the marketing of three male fertility surveillance and optimization technologies to examine how men become discursively and visually implicated as repro-consumers. Whereas the Danish company ExSeed Health provides men with a take-home sperm test and lifestyle app, U.S.-located Snowballs Underwear and Polish CoolMen design cooling technologies to ‘naturally’ improve men’s fertility and testosterone levels. Theoretically, the paper draws upon social scientific theorizing of biomedicalization and fertility consumption as a way to ensure ideals of reproductive virility as well as critical studies of men and masculinity that view the latter as a social, relational, and historical construction. Situating the Fertility Tech industry as an important under-theorized example of emergent repro-technologies, this paper analytically discusses how ‘proactive’ and ‘prevention-conscious’ reproductive masculinities appear in the material. The allure of surveillance and optimization technologies lies, the article concludes, in the reiteration of a white, Western biomedical mandate to reproduce as well as in the continued optimization of reproduction.

Jesus als Typos der Mannhaftigkeit

Abstract This article examines the way Cyril of Alexandria interprets the Passion narrative in his commentary on the Gospel of John. It argues that besides the doctrinal, christological focus of his exegesis Cyril is concerned with a second issue: the contested masculinity of Jesus and his followers during the events of the Passion. This concern becomes clear when Cyril designates the cross-bearing Jesus as “the type of manly courage” (typos andreías). Following a survey of the current historical masculinity studies, the article examines Cyril’s interpretation of such scenes of the Johannine Passion account where Jesus is depicted as being arrested, beaten and flogged, humiliated and finally crucified – i.e., depicted in a way that might seem to contradict antique ideals of manliness. It finally analyzes Cyril’s explanations as to various “unmanly” or “manly” traits of Jesus’ adversaries, especially of the Jews, and of his followers: Peter, his beloved disciple and his Mother.

Language and Masculinities: History, Development, and Future

In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research, growing in response to concerns about the limited criticality directed toward men and masculinities in sociolinguistics. In doing so, the field has added to the conceptual and theoretical tool kit of sociolinguistics, furthering both our understanding of the linguistic strategies used by men in a variety of contexts and the myriad links connecting language and the social performance of gender. This review surveys the historical trajectory of scholarship broadly concerned with men, masculinities, and language and charts its development from more critical work on men and masculinities within sociology to its emergence as an independent field of inquiry. I outline some of the key contributions this body of work has made to sociolinguistic theory, methodology, and knowledge and suggest some future research directions through which the field may engage with contemporary social issues.

Hegemonic masculinity and terrorism: the case of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen an increase in the study of the relationship between gender and terrorism. This article analyzes the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and terrorism through the case of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or PKK) and its leader Abdullah Öcalan. Using the method of narrative analysis, the study first examines the concept of hegemonic masculinity. The study attempts to make sense of how the concept of hegemonic masculinity operates within the PKK. To achieve this goal, the study demonstrates the major functions of hegemonic masculinity within terrorist organisations. Accordingly, it is argued that the perspective of masculinity studies can be used to gain a better and highly instructive understanding of political violence and terrorism.

Is Tobias His Own Man? The Book of Tobit as a Coming-Of-Age Tale

ABSTRACT Responding to recent conversations surrounding the maturation of Tobias in the tale, the essay applies recent advancements in masculinity studies to examine the portrayal of Tobias in the book of Tobit as a coming-of-age story. In so doing, the essay offers one of few full length treatments devoted to Tobias in the tale. Analyzing the terminology used to refer to Tobias in conjunction with the shifts in characterization he experiences over the course of the story, the essay proposes that as Tobias advances from being a child, to young manhood, and finally matured manhood, he comes to replicate the model of masculinity passed down to him from his father. As such, his maturation proves less a matter of individuation and more a matter of social conformity than anything else.

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers Lisa Chu Shen (bio) The marriage between masculinity studies and children's literature is a fairly recent phenomenon. Compared with the attention received by femininity and female bodies in children's fiction, masculinity as an object of inquiry arrives rather late on the scene, not least because it was only toward the end of the twentieth century that masculinity studies emerged as an academic discipline. The problem with the continued focus on women and girls in children's literature could "run the risk of further naturalizing masculinity" (Wannamaker 122). Since manhood is a continuation of, rather than a flight from, boyhood, examining how boyhood is represented and constructed offers us insight into the kinds of masculine identities being propagated in children's books and the extent to which such identities conform to normative standards. Academic studies of gender in Chinese fiction, both modern and contemporary, have been largely confined to the study of women (Chow; Liu; Sang; Zhu). As Evans and Strauss note: "narratives on masculinity . . . are notably absent, in part reflecting how gender in academic studies of China is still largely associated with the study of women" (825). This imbalance is being redressed by an emerging body of studies on masculinity in modern and contemporary China, especially in the recent decade (Hird; Louie; Song; Xiao; Yang; Zhong). Nevertheless, in the field of Chinese children's fiction, studies of gender have been largely confined to the representation of femininity, with narratives on masculinities being almost nonexistent. As this essay will show, however, examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuing struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture. On the one hand, [End Page 221] contemporary Chinese conceptions of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity in particular, have been largely Westernized in the process of modernization and globalization. On the other hand, there are alternative models that hinge upon the prospect of modernity but which reflect the persistent influence of the Chinese tradition. The Chinese case illuminates the intersections between masculinity studies, children's literature and modernity studies, intersections that have not yet been explored, due largely to the marginalized positions, in Chinese studies, of both masculinity studies and children's literature. As such, the Chinese case brings light to the role of children's literature in global studies of masculinities in patriarchal societies caught between tradition and modernity where gender categories are being constantly shaped and defined in relation to the tensions inherent in this ever-evolving dyad. Masculinity Studies and Chinese Masculinities Masculinity studies has emerged as a serious academic discipline in the past decades, as gender scholars in sociology, literature, and culture alike are regarding masculinity as a subject worthy of scholarly investigation. As with femininity, masculinity is now being recognized as a constructed concept, rather than innate or inherent (Gilmore; Connell; Kimmel). Manhood, rather than static or timeless, is historical, constructed in relation to "a set of 'others'" (Kimmel 182). Although masculinity is not the exclusive domain of men or manhood (for discussions of female masculinity, refer to Halberstam), it is usually in the context of men's/manhood studies that masculinity is taken as a serious object of inquiry. Since children's literature serves to prepare children for their future roles as gendered adults, it is understandable that authors tend to project their ideas of manhood onto their construction of boyhood. According to sociologist R. W. Connell, hegemonic masculinity is "the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women" (Masculinities 77). Rolf Romøren and John Stephens point out, with reference to Connell, that hegemonic masculinity is taken to be "the version of masculinity which is considered normative within a particular society's expressions of masculinity" (233). They argue that currently, within media images of global popular culture, forms of masculinity grounded in "domination, physical assertiveness, and egocentric individualism" dominate (217). What needs to be made clear is that these forms...

Unmasking Masculinity: Considering Gender, Science, and Nation in Responses to COVID-19

694 Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Eve Ng Unmasking Masculinity: Considering Gender, Science, and Nation in Responses to COVID-19 In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the reluctance of many men—including political leaders—to wear face masks became apparent , with normative masculinity coding the protective value of masks as indicative of a wearer’s weakness.1 Commentators pointed to nations with women as heads-of-state doing better than several prominent nations led by men, highlighting an association between “strong leadership ” and “swaggering masculinity.”2 Male leaders who are “authoritarian , vainglorious and blustering,” such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and President Donald Trump in the United States, have presided over some of the world’s highest COVID-19 infection and mortality numbers , in contrast to, for example, New Zealand under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Taiwan under President Tsai Ing-wen.3 1. Valerio Capraro and Hélène Barcelo, “The Effect of Messaging and Gender on Intentions to Wear a Face Covering to Slow Down COVID-19 Transmission ,” PsyArXiv Preprints, May 11, 2020, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tg7vz; Monica Hesse, “Making Men Feel Manly in Masks Is, Unfortunately, a Public -Health Challenge of Our Time,” Washington Post, June 27, 2020. 2. See Amanda Taub, “Why Are Women-Led Nations Doing Better with Covid-19?” New York Times, May 15, 2020. 3. See Nicholas Kristof, “What the Pandemic Reveals about the Male Ego,” New York Times, June 13, 2020. For per capita rates, see Hannah Ritchie, Eve Ng 695 Yet, beyond the relationship between the gender of a country’s leader and its coronavirus statistics, the gendered dimensions of COVID-19 responses reflect and comprise the shifting authority of science and discourses of national identity. Amid global contestation over economic and political dominance, there is an urgent need for expansive feminist approaches to culturally and historically specific constructions of masculinity .4 At the level of policy, there are issues not just for equitably and successfully addressing the pandemic, but also for informed, multilateral approaches to other pressing global issues, such as immigration, labor, and the environment. For feminist theory, this essay highlights the productiveness of bringing together studies of media discourses, science and technology, and globalization to analyze the contingent feminization of scientific research and knowledge. The coronavirus crisis has also amplified a masculinist nationalism in some countries that is tied to both projections of invulnerability by individual male leaders and the purported strength of the nation. Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Diana Beltekian, Edouard Mathieu, Joe Hasell, Bobbie Macdonald, Charlie Giattino, Max Roser, Breck Yunits, Ernst van Woerden, Daniel Gavrilov, Matthieu Bergel, Shahid Ahmad, and Jason Crawford, “Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) Statistics and Research,” Our World in Data, University of Oxford, https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus (accessed November 3, 2020). 4. For example, see Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). It is also worth noting here that the specific characteristics of hegemonic masculinity are just as contingently defined as marginalized forms of masculinity and that valorized and stigmatized masculinities are co-constructed in particular contexts. R. W. Connell originated and developed the term “hegemonic masculinity” in Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987) and Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America : A Cultural History, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 4th ed.); and Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995). Furthermore, behavioral characteristics associated with normative masculinity are not necessarily instantiated by cis male-bodied individuals, as discussed in work on female masculinity and trans masculinities. For example, see Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz , “Queering Sexuality and Doing Gender: Transgender Men’s Identification with Gender and Sexuality,” Gendered Sexualities 6 (2002): 181–233. 696 Eve Ng Masks versus Malaria Drugs: Hegemonic Masculinity and “Strength” In examining the gendering of healthcare responses to...

Recreación de la zoofilia en la obra de cuatro autores del Caribe colombiano

Although copulation with donkeys on the north coast of Colombia is one of the best-known cultural references in the region, few authors have recreated it in their writings. The few stories that explore these practices allow us to observe recurring structures, linked to the strengthening of virility, which have been ignored by critics. We propose in this article an approach to these relationships in works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jaime Manrique, Ramon Molinares and Raul Gomez Jattin, from the postulates of men and masculinities studies, particularly the positions of Badinter, to consider in depth the notions that these present about it.

Making Fathers: Masculinities and Social Change in the Ghanaian Context

Framed within recent debates about hegemonic masculinity and in-depth historical and contemporary research on fatherhood and gender roles in Ghana, this article explores current ways of becoming and being a father in Ghana. Existing studies of fatherhood and masculinities in Ghana tend to present men in conjugal unions as patriarchal and dominating over their wives and children and fatherhood as related mainly to breadwinning and demonstrating sexual potency. Through observation studies, semi-structured interviews, and focusgroup discussions with fathers from urban and rural contexts, this article explores multiple ways of achieving masculinity through fatherhood and ways in which new fathering ideals and expectations come to be incorporated into local gendered ideals. It suggests that alongside values of providing for their families, ideals of involved fatherhood emerge among the study participants, indicating early signs of a shift away from established sociocultural gendered expectations of hegemonic masculinity.

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies ed. by Ann Marie Rasmussen

Reviewed by: Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies ed. by Ann Marie Rasmussen Emily Houlik-Ritchey ann marie rasmussen, ed., Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2019. Pp. 258. isbn: 978-0-268-10557-0. $60. Rivalrous Masculinities offers a stimulating collection of essays that advances the field's intellectual perspectives on medieval masculinities, sharpening our sense of the multiplicity of medieval masculinities as cultural constructions; their contingency upon social, geographic, and temporal forces; their intersectionality with other social modes of being in the medieval world; and above all, the necessity of our ongoing interrogation of gender, sexuality, and their presentation across disciplines in the medieval world. Rasmussen organizes this volume around 'three foundational claims':1) 'masculinity as a pluralized category'; 2) 'masculinity as an intersectional category of gender'; and 3) 'medieval ways of thinking about gender as being incommensurate with modern assumptions about sex and gender based in heteronormativity' (p. xiii). The Preface lays out ambitious claims, and while not all of the essays fully accomplish each of them, the triumph of the collection stems from each contribution's consistent analysis of multiple, competing iterations of medieval masculinities within a variety of temporal, geographic, generic, and linguistic contexts. Clare A. Lees opens the collection, usefully laying out a brief critical history of medieval masculinity studies in relation to medieval gender studies. Both Lees' essay, 'A Word to the Wise: Men, Gender, and Medieval Masculinities,' and Karma Lochrie's essay, 'Medieval Masculinities without Men,' emphasize a foundational insight: that gender, queer, and transgender studies have 'uncouple[d] masculinities, femininities, queer identities, and sexualities from what had come to look like a stable association between gender and the social, on the one hand, and (hetero) sexuality and embodiment, on the other' (Lees, p. 4). This uncoupling, as Lochrie [End Page 128] stresses, 'open[s] up the possibility—even the urgency—of our own consideration of the ways in which genders dissociated from sex might be produced' (pp. 209–10). Rivalrous Masculinities is at its strongest when its contributors thus dismantle and expose the assumption that masculinities are the natural province of biological males. The strongest essays within the collection proceed from these foundational insights, whether or not they lay them out as explicitly as Lees and Lochrie do. In this vein, the collection contains several intellectual gems that may be of particular interest to readers of Arthuriana. In the first section of the collection, 'Pluralizing Masculinity,' Lees argues that the Old English advice poem 'Precepts' offers 'a masculinity without subjectivity, whereby the constant repetition, or iteration, of the address to the "son"… lays bare the rhetorical structure of masculinity itself' (p. 18). In the stimulating essay 'Men in Trouble: Warrior Angst in Beowulf,' Gillian R. Overing analyzes the affective valences of 'specific formations of masculinity in Old English poetry,' arguing that Beowulf elucidates 'the concerns of the warrior elite to replicate itself, to create and control sameness, to ensure succession and maintain power' in the face of a troubling intersection of the heroic ethos with a clerical culture—a rivalrous intersection that creates 'an impossible quandary for the warrior male' (pp. 28, 37). In 'Predicaments of Piousness: The Trouble with Being a Learned Jewish Family Man in Premodern Europe,' Astrid Lembke analyzes two iterations of a popular Ashkenazic narrative pattern where a human man marries a demon woman, tracing models of masculinity that 'are thinkable in a community that does not offer a model of learned, clerical masculinity… based on abstaining from secular marriage' (pp. 58, 57). Because learned Jewish men had social and religious duties both to family and God, their models of masculinity sought to accommodate the tensions of these competing demands. In the second section of the collection, 'Intersectional Masculinity,' F. Regina Psaki insightfully analyzes an iteration of the medieval debate on the nature of women. In 'Misogyny, Philogyny, Masculinities: Antonio Pucci's Il Contrasto delle donne,' Psaki argues that Pucci 'evades or subverts' epistemological categories and rhetorical moves traditional to medieval misogyny and philogyny texts (p. 105). In so doing, Pucci's contribution to the medieval debate on the nature of women becomes 'a debate on...

Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor by Ayako Kano

Reviewed by: Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor by Ayako Kano Andrea Germer (bio) Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor. By Ayako Kano. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2016. x, 320 pages. $80.00, cloth; $28.00, paper. In the past three decades we have seen a fair number of new monographs and essay collections in European languages that contribute to an intellectual history of feminisms in modern Japan. The Anglophone publications receive greater attention than others as they are the most numerous and within the linguistic command of most scholars. Of these, the works of Gail Lee Bernstein, Vera Mackie, Barbara Molony, Sally Ann Hastings, and Setsu Shigematsu stand out. While there are many more publications on gender history, including recent masculinity studies collections and new queer studies anthologies, Ayako Kano's book Japanese Feminist Debates of 2016 needs to be seen within the trajectory of research that explicitly takes the specter of feminist discourse, thought, and theory into focus. And while her research draws on the discussions of all the above authors, her book uses a fresh approach in outlining some of the crucial conceptual threads of thinking that feminists in Japan have struggled with in the face of ever-changing yet curiously persisting societal norms and ideas of gender. As Kano explains, "various anthologies of Japanese feminism … attest to a process of selection and canonization. Such a process is full of contentions and contradictions" (p. 26). It seems that Kano is the perfect researcher to tackle the paradoxes emerging within "A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor," as indicated in the subtitle of this book. Hers is a soft-toed entry and an extremely careful and nuanced approach to conflicting ideas of different feminisms, laying open also the U.S. paradigm from which she observes and sometimes compares the Japanese feminist struggles and their antifeminist adversaries. Kano's prose provides an entry into the diversity of feminisms and invites readers to glide into the thought and rationales of different actors [End Page 523] within women's movements in Japan. Moreover, her monograph of 2016 opens up to us the feminist discursive space of the 2010s which has subsequently been followed up and pursued with closer scrutiny of (sexual) diversity in yet another anthology, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, which she coedited along with Julia Bullock and James Welker in 2018.1 Kano lays out the structure of her book in the first chapter "Debates? Feminist? Japanese?" by defining each of these major tropes that govern and guide her text. Debates, termed ronsō in Japanese, are written intellectual exchanges and contestations over any sort of political or cultural topic; and rondan is the related expression for the public sphere of such discourses. Historically, rondan have marked a male-dominated space. In a rapidly modernizing society such as post-Meiji Japan, the feminist rondan that Kano unfolds in her discussion emerge as a lively and highly complex sphere of feminists' search for gendered rights and identities. Kano's book then is "about feminism as a thoughtful and contentious practice, about women thinking, reflecting, analyzing, and verbalizing" (p. 13). Yet the shifts in media over the past century have been crucial for the possibilities of this sphere of feminist communication and practice. The recent changes engendered by online debates enhance the basis for critical participation of all men and women, but they are disproportionately used by reactionary, populist, and backlash organizations, individuals, and bots, signaling indeed a new era of vilifying debate that is often more adequately termed harassment and is changing, as Kano writes, "the nature of the thing" (p. 22). The topics of debate that Kano identifies and traces in the core chapters of her book are sexuality, reproduction, and the relationship between motherhood and work, each involving the discussion of multiple intellectual actors, organizations, and transnational theoretical trajectories. Central to the chapter on sexuality (chapter 2) is the contention of "sex for sale" or "sex for self," where Kano identifies the term sei no shōhinka (commodification of sex) as a key concept within Japanese feminisms that captures to a fuller extent the capitalist...

Ecological masculinities: a response to societal crisises of our time

The present article is concerned with the nexus of masculinities and environment. The authors present their critical analyses of two configurations of masculinities the authors refer to as ‘industrial/breadwinner’ and ‘ecomodern’ masculinities that dominate politics worldwide. The authors stated their opinion on the fact that the first two configurations of masculinities are acutely but distinctly in conflict with the wellbeing of the planet. The paper presents an empirical and theoretical analysis of ‘ecological masculinities’, which considers the insights and limitations of masculinities studies, deep ecology, ecological feminism and feminist care theory. In this article, the authors focus their attention on the necessity of ecologisation of masculinities as well as on the need for men and masculinities to ‘ecologise’ relationally and create more caring encounters with self and others. In support of the need in a transition from hegemonisation to ecologisation, necessary configurations beyond the constraints of industrial/breadwinner and ecomodern masculinities are presented. The authors also argue that the potential to expose and resolve the anthropocentric discord between Earth, others and human beings is possible within the very constructs of manhood. The notion of ecological masculinities suggested in the article is a constructive response to the roles of men and masculine identities in the Anthropocene. The exit politics central to the notion of ecological masculinities represent a theoretical framework and plurality of practices reflective of a masculine ecologisation process. The authors encourage scholarly masculinities inquiries and practices towards broader, deeper and wider care for the ‘glocal’ (global and local) commons.

Od natury do kultury… i z powrotem? O książce Biopolityka męskości

From Nature to Culture… and Back? On the Book Biopolityka męskości The paper is a review of the co-authorship book entitled Biopolityka męskości [Biopolitics of Manhood]. The author notices that this scientific monograph locates the Polish masculinities studies on the new field of biopolitics, immunisation and tanatopolitics, giving a hope to elaborate an alternative methodology of studies on literature and culture of this range. The author appreciates researchers’ achievements and suggests a few contexts expanding their reflections. Both the prior conference and subjective publication, in author’s opinion, open the new chapter of the Polish men’s studies.

In the Wake of Lewis and Clark: The Expedition and the Making of Antebellum America by Larry E. Morris

102 OHQ vol. 121, no. 1 bodies, and disease. Restrained manhood of eastern climes held that hard work and application led to success and made one a man, and that one’s appearance was key to understanding one’s character. Both came into question in the chaotic atmosphere of the gold rushes. Accordingly , real manhood had to be recalibrated and often was done so at the expense of racial “others ,” namely Blacks, Indians, and Chinese, whom White men used for comparative purposes. Gold Rush Manliness is a welcome addition to the still nascent field of masculinity studies. Packed with useful observations about midnineteenth -century manliness, race history, and the relationship between different western rushes, the book is written in an engaging and jargon-free style and is useful to undergraduate and graduate students as well as lay readers. Future studies of manliness in other major nineteenth-century rushes, such as those in Colorado, Idaho, Alaska, Australia and even the earlier rush back East in Georgia, where some of California’s miners cut their teeth, may test some of Herbert’s major conclusions. Peter Boag Washington State University-Vancouver IN THE WAKE OF LEWIS AND CLARK: THE EXPEDITION AND THE MAKING OF ANTEBELLUM AMERICA by Larry E. Morris Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, 2019. Illustrations. notes, bibliography, index. 235 pages. $39.00 cloth. In 1931, Leslie M. Scott wrote an article for this journal that laid out an argument for the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s crucial and connective role in extending the nation into the Pacific Northwest. He quoted Elliot M. Coues’s dedication to his 1893 multi-volume overview of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: Jefferson gave you the country. Lewis and Clark showed you the way. The rest is your own course of empire. Honor the statesman who foresaw your west! Honor the brave men who first saw your west! May the recollection of their glorious achievements be your precious heritage (Coues, Lewis and Clark, I, iii). That triumphalist interpretation of the consequences of the Lewis and Clark Expedition has not survived recent scholarship, but it is true that the leaders of the Corps of Discovery and some expedition members contributed to the American penetration of the Trans-Mississippi West during the first half of the nineteenth century. In the Wake of Lewis and Clark author Larry E. Morris stays clear of Coues’s and Scott’s interpretations , but he underscores the significant baseline of knowledge about the American West the expedition rendered, perhaps best seen in William Clark’s extraordinary map of the Missouri and Columbia rivers he completed in 1810. He agrees with other historians who have emphasized the importance of the expedition’s role in revealing the landscape and the feasibility of travel across the continent from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific slope. Morris directs readers’ attention to the exploits of specific expedition personnel in developing economic and political structures in the Trans-Mississippi West. In six discursive chapters, the author details some of the consequences of the suicide of Meriwether Lewis in 1809, covers the overland expedition of John J. Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in 1811–1812, ties the outbreak of the War of 1812 and campaigns to the West, describes the organization and exploits of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1820s, and comments on the western adventure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in establishing their Zion in Utah. Readers familiar with these major developments in the history of the American West will recognize nearly all the individuals and events that Morris highlights. The connections to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, however, are often fleeting, and it is unclear how the expedition directly influenced the enumerated events and what should be made of the author’s suggested linkages. The author does not advance a singular interpretation or argue for a comprehensive explanation of the expedition’s contribution to western developments. What Morris provides is a granular review of key incidents in the four decades of exploration , extractive economic activities, and political expansion west of the Missouri River after Lewis Available at bookstores, online at wsupress.wsu.edu, or by phone at 800-354-7360 UNDENIABLY NORTHWEST...

ALEXTIMIA E MASCULINIDADES

Resumo: Os homens cresceram ouvindo expressões violentas tais como: ‘seja forte’, ‘não seja uma menininha’, ‘homem não chora’. Violência em forma de ideias; conceitos que formaram toda uma mentalidade, a cultura do machão. É este o cenário que persiste na sociedade: um jeito equivocado de como devem ser os homens. Homens que se constroem por meio da negação dos sentimentos. A negação de tudo o que não for considerado como “supostamente” masculino resulta na violência ao feminino, a fim de manter a virilidade e o padrão social de masculinidade. A “mitologia” por trás destas masculinidades é o macho, moldado num estereótipo tóxico, que produz posturas errôneas, inadequadas e agressivas. O macho, por exemplo, acredita que não pode dispensar mulher nenhuma, que deve estar sempre pronto ao sexo ou que tudo deve ser resolvido na brutalidade. Poder, controle e propriedade são aspectos hegemônicos que compõem um lugar ocupado pelos homens, mas, na realidade, revelam outra realidade, a da tristeza, solidão, abandono e medo. Muito embora o ideal masculino ainda seja perseguido pela maioria dos homens, a desconstrução deste tipo de masculinidade já está em curso, com a consequente saída de cena do macho. É neste contexto que apresentamos o conceito de Alexitimia, isto é, a dificuldade em reconhecer os sentimentos; e faremos isso nos debruçando sobre os estudos das masculinidades hegemônicas e tóxicas.
 Palavras-chave: Alexitimia; masculinidades; hegemonias; toxicidade.

Supermen and Sissies: Masculinities in Titus and 1 Timothy

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the question of gender scripts in the Pastoral Epistles from the point of view of masculinities studies. Two of the Pastoral Epistles will be studied in particular, Titus and 1 Timothy, given their high degree of comparability when it comes to the questions of (a) Pauline self-presentation and (b) the outline of various roles in the communities addressed through these epistles. By analyzing key aspects of the gender (and more specifically, masculinity) scripts in play, it will be shown that the Pastoral Epistles espouse a view of masculinity that suited the (dominant) contemporary ideals of what a “real man” looked like. This, it will be suggested, is in fact an expression of what may well be called “precarious” masculinity: masculinity that feels threatened and therefore establishes control over others, attempting to safeguard its own position and standing. This may shed light on the provenance of the Pastoral Epistles: out of a marginal milieu. Also, it will be argued that the agreement in gender scripts among these two pastorals would suggest that they stem from the same social milieu and may well have been considered as a corpus from a very early stage onward. Finally, a hermeneutical observation will be made concerning the reception of the views on masculinity in these two pastorals (and the Pastorals at large).

The Victorian Male Body, edited by Joanne E. Parsons and Ruth Heholt

Reviewed by: The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne E. Parsons, Ruth Heholt Irina Strout (bio) The Victorian Male Body, edited by Joanne E. Parsons and Ruth Heholt; pp. viii + 259. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $39.95 paper. The Victorian Male Body, edited by Joanne E. Parsons and Ruth Heholt, is a three-part collection of essays focusing on the role of the white, male body in Victorian England. The introduction to the anthology states that during this period, there were numerous limitations, restrictions, and contradictions placed on the white, middle-class male body. This anthology poses a few key questions regarding Victorian manhood and masculinity, specifically regarding the claim that masculinity is a myth that needs to be demystified. Men seem to fall into two categories: visibly present, powerful men of Christian morality and obscure, fragmented, almost invisible men. One point is clear, however: there is no perfect male body and notions of masculinity constantly change, adapt, shift, and survive [End Page 697] as do societal expectations and ideals. Masculinity is an ever- changing and evolving social construct that cannot be seen as a single unified concept. The editors of the anthology, Heholt and Parsons, demonstrate the ways in which Victorian masculinity was not limited to “rigid prescription[s] of manliness” but could include, by the end of the century, “flamboyant and extrovert celebrations of otherness.” Their survey of masculinity studies, emerging in the 1980s, suggests that “historically masculinity has not been a spectacle: everyone else formed the spectacle and white men have been the invisible, or at least less visible, powerful surveyors.” The editors note that white masculinity has remained “concealed” as a ruse of power: invisibility here is ideological, but it masquerades as universality, obscuring and at the same time normalizing itself (2). The male is estranged from a collective identity and suffers in solitude in an attempt to achieve a meaningful masculine identity, having to come to terms with the notion of what men are and what they should be. A few scholars suggest that, in many cases, within that invisibility lies the greater power; the body is a cultural discourse marker for a number of practices. Where white men have been associated with mind and spirit, and gross physicality allocated to other, usually racialized bodies, the Victorian male body is granted a “new physicality” (5) understood to be “chosen” rather than natural, displaying “strength of will and a negation of pain” and therefore in control of itself and its image: a “muscular body” that is both self-protective and seemingly impenetrable “to otherness” and to “the world” (6). H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) showcases the paradoxes of a “colonial world of men” (6) in which the whiteness and physicality of Allan Quatermain’s “colonial body matters and does not at the same time” (7). The white colonial male body is juxtaposed to the dark native body, yet it is also rooted in nature. Success in the colonies (and at home) came to depend on codes of masculinity that idealized a British combination of “virility, morality and civility” (12), or, in C. L. R. James’s words, “the British reticence, the British self-discipline, [and] the stiff upper-lips” that epitomized Muscular Christianity (qtd. in Heholt and Parsons 12). The white body is a norm that opposes the other; as a result, the authors wish to deconstruct the notion of a perfect male body because it simply did not exist. The anthology is thematically divided into three parts. Part 1 contains three essays and focuses on traditional masculinity. The first essay, “Violent Play and Regular Discipline: The Abuses of the Schoolboy Body in Victorian Fiction” by Alice Crossley, looks at the abused body of a boy and its aspects. Crossley does not focus on psychological or moral abuse but on physical pain and the body’s lack of agency. She claims that many boys had to endure physical pain and abuse in order to develop their character, using examples from such writers as Charles Dickens and George Meredith. The second essay, “Punishing the Unregulated Manly Body and Emotions in Early Victorian England” by Joanne...