His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture

Abstract

Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.     

大地湾地画和史前社会的男性同性爱型岩画

文章通过人类学、民俗学、考古学的多重视角对甘肃秦安大地湾遗址仰韶文化晚期地画进行了剖析;撩开大地湾地画的面纱,其与世界各地史前时代广泛存在的男性同性爱型岩画颇多相似之处。     

The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria , 27 January 2001

The article examines the first official, national Holocaust memorial day in Italy, the so-called Giorno della memoria (Day of memory), marked on the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 2001. It looks at the ways in which the day acted as a filter for issues of national collective memory and identity, in particular state and public negotiation of the legacy of Fascism, as well as addressing broader issues of Holocaust remembrance. The article looks first at the origins of the Giorno della memoria in political and in legislative terms. Then it sketches in the events of the day itself, at national and local levels, in political, educational and cultural terms. This is followed by an analysis of media coverage and contemporary commentary, showing how various lines of interpretation addressed general issues related to the Holocaust and specifically Italian historical, ideological and contemporary questions.     

Visions of visibility: LGBT communities in Turin

Recent anti-discrimination campaigns by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activists in Italy have increased the visibility of these communities and individuals, but have not resulted in the desired improvements to legislation. In light of this situation, this article analyses modalities of ‘visibility’ as defined and desired by the active LGBT community in Turin, host city for National Pride 2006. The Pride committee scheduled an unprecedentedly ‘visible’ year-long programme of consciousness-raising and cultural events that went far beyond the more usual one-day march. Drawing on a series of interviews with members of the committee and of the lesbian community conducted in Turin in March and June 2006, the discussion explores social, cultural and political visibility in this LGBT community as it hosted National Pride.

I think people live in a state of non-visibility, lacking self-acceptance; there are gay men and lesbians in Italy who are in hiding. (Andrea Benedino)1 1.?Interview conducted by the author, 31 March 2006.      

Female subjugation and political resistance: from literati to entrepreneurial masculinity in the globalizing era of postsocialist China

Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic research on karaoke bar hostesses and male clients, in this article I seek to illustrate the ways in which entrepreneurial masculinity is constructed, enacted and performed in the space of bars, in the location of Dalian, during the globalizing era of China. This article not only examines the historical processes that have helped produce the entrepreneurial masculinities in postsocialist China, but also the nuanced ways in which the place of Dalian, the Chinese state, and the space of bars have facilitated the production of entrepreneurial masculinities articulated in everyday activities. Such an exploration contributes to the literature on the spatial politics of geographic knowledge production and the geographical understandings of the salience of masculinities and femininities, the potency of place and the impact of the politics and the economy on social relationships.     

Men and the Desert: Contested masculinities In Ice Cold in Alex

This article explores the relationship between space, identity and film through the war film genre and in particular Ice Cold in Alex (1958). Although war films have suffered particular neglect by geographers, their appeal is enduring, helping to shape British national identity and popular constructions of masculinity. Through an analysis and critique of the film, this article makes two interconnected points. First, it highlights the value of film to geographers as a creative medium in which spaces and identities are imagined, (re)created, contested and negotiated. Second, it brings recent work on masculinities to bear on a detailed examination of Ice Cold to illustrate how war films have produced and sustained a specific unconventional form of heroic masculine British national identity through the passage of an ‘off-road’ movie. Here we demonstrate that masculinities are forged not only in the maelstrom of power interrelationships between men and other men and between men and women, but also importantly in relation to the landscape, in this example the desert as other. This glimpse allows us to challenge hegemonic norms as well as the construction of the desert as an active agent in the co-construction of the main characters' identities.     

Representations of the Chudes in Norwegian and Russian Folklore

Abstract

The objectives of this article are (1) to reveal the meaning (semantics) of the word “Chude” in Norwegian and Russian cultures; (2) to analyze Russian and Norwegian legends about the Chudes in order to define the main plot-constructing elements. When writing this article the authors used a synchronous and diachronous methods of analysis of material that was written down in a period that exceeds one and a half centuries. In etymological sense the word “Chude” (tsjude or Cud) can be derivative form from old Slavic form *tjudjo (strange, foreign) that can in its turn be borrowing from a Gothic or a German word that got the meaning “a nation” (folk). With the Sami the word “tshudde”/ “shutte” means an enemy, an adversary. The image of the Chudes has been preserved in Russian and Norwegian narrative traditions. Oral stories in Norway are called sagn. In Russian folkoristic narratives about the Chudes are traditionally called “predanie”.

The ethnonym “Chude” has a collective meaning in Russian and Norwegian folklore. In Norwegian culture it means plunderers of different ethnical belonging who came from the East to plunder the local population in the Northern Norway. As the undertaken research has shown, this name could have been applicable to Russian, Finns, Karelians, Kvens and peoples speaking Nordic languages (Swedes). In the Russian cultural tradition the name “Chude” was used to name different Finno-Ugric peoples living in the North-West Russia before the Russians came there and who later assimilated with the Russians. The Kola Sami called Swedes and Norwegians who came to them from the west to plunder the Chudes. The existence of a people in the same name in the old times is not excluded. The research carried out by place name scientists reveals that this people could be related to the Baltic-Finnish group of peoples.

The word Chude has historical and mythological aspects. Folk legends about the Chudes have “preserved” memories about the historical past of the northern region. Additionally this ethnonym contains conceptions of the world's binary character that are typical for archaic consciousness. Folk legends about the Chudes are widespread in the European North of Russia while plots about militant and plundering Chudes are localized in traditional Sami regions of Russia and Norway. In folk legends and sagn, the Russians and the Sami belong to one's “own” world, while the Chudes are associated with the concepts of the “strangers”. This nomination acquired the meaning “a stranger”, “a robber”.     

Marconi,masculinity and the heroic age of science: wireless telegraphy at the British Association meeting at Dover in 1899

Abstract

In September 1899, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Dover, Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system was used to transmit messages across the English Channel (and across a national border) for the first time. This achievement represented a highly effective performance of scientific masculinity and constitutes a key turning point in an important struggle between competing interpretations of invention and innovation as masculine practices within British science. The British Association tended to favor a narrative of scientific research as a collectivist, international, gentlemanly-amateur pursuit, largely confined to the laboratory. Marconi, by contrast, explained the development of wireless telegraphy as the achievement of his own genius. Appealing not only to the established scientific elite but to a range of non-traditional audiences, and stressing the possibilities or ‘imagined uses’ of his technology even more so than his actual results, he succeeded in commanding unprecedented influence.     

White migrant masculinities in Thailand and the paradoxes of Western privilege

This study examines the counter-paradigmatic migration of Westerners into Thailand, focusing on men in transnational intimate relationships in the northeastern region. We explore how the particular spaces in which they settled affected these migrants' capacities to perform what they saw as hegemonic masculinities over time. We find that they initially experienced an increase in status that they were able to convert into assets in romantic relationships, permitting them to position themselves as ‘providers’ and ‘real white men,’ drawing on masculine ideals from their home countries as well as a diffuse neocolonial imaginary. In the long run, however, these identity constructions were subject to internal contradictions and attrition. They were also place-bound, creating both financial and social obstacles to a return home, particularly for those without ties to transnational capital. The ways these patterns differ from those in existing scholarship underline how both the particular spaces of migrant settlement and temporal dimensions are critical for the analysis of migrant masculinities.     

Re-writing Protestant history in the novels of Glenn Patterson

This article considers the representation of the history of Belfast in Glenn Patterson's 2012 novel The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. It situates this novel within the context of Patterson's previous work and the history of the Northern Irish novel, as well as with the representation of maritime Belfast in the Titanic centenary year. This novel will be read as a recovery and rehabilitation of a Protestant history which could be problematic for Patterson, an avowedly liberal writer, but instead this context allows for an exploration of the uses of history in contemporary Northern Irish cultural and political discourse.     

On the service frontline: Israeli Arab-Palestinian men in a call-center

Intersectionality is applied to gender-occupation-minority inconsistent hierarchies, to as to explore the workplace-experience of Israeli Arab-Palestinian men service workers and unveil the multiple-geographies it contains. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 24 suchlike men emphasize complexity as the key feature of their intersectional experience. Whereas masculinity and Israeli-Palestinianess are forged against the feminine and Israeli-Jewishness Others, service work is de-feminized and restructured as a welcome modern development whose traditional Other is cherished. The disadvantages of their national-minority status are compensated by cross-national amity and routine occupational practices in the modern workplace, whereby some of their Othering markers are prized. The national difference appears as a multiple-discursive resource which mainly separates the ethnic component from the political one by which the effects of gender, modern work and class structure, weaken. Four geographies, periphery, home-work links, the sociability of the place of work and the MENA world-region are identified, suggesting that geography is integral to the intersectional experience.     

Watery masculinities: fly-fishing and the angling male in the South West of England

This article examines the masculinities evident through fly fishing for salmon and trout in the South West of England. It identifies the way that many accounts of rural masculinities focus on particularly macho traits such as strength, resilience and domination and particular relationships with nature and the environment. Such macho traits are evident in the masculinities of angling – the angler regularly discusses issues of competition and duelling with nature. The trophies of such encounters become significant as they are used to summon life to stories and become crucial in narrating masculinity. However alongside these macho traits are numerous additional masculinities which are in tension with the more macho elements. These ‘additional masculinities’ become evident in the watery landscapes of angling; as such these waterscapes can be considered as liminal spaces as they enable masculinities to slip and reform. Therefore what emerges is a cadence to masculinity with different subject positions becoming significant in different spaces.     

Masculinity and the mic: confronting the uneven geography of hip-hop

This article explores the uneven gendered geographies of rap music. It argues that Black men's blocked access to culturally dominant masculinity, vis-à-vis access to public space – and the resulting containment of Black men within Black communities – has produced an overly compensatory form of masculinity, for which access to and control of the public domain within Black communities is essential for access to hegemonic masculinity. Rapidly declining economic opportunity has meant that young Black men thrown out of work put their talents, time, and energy into an emerging youth culture brewing in parks, on street corners, train stations, and viaducts in places such as the South Bronx. The early innovators of the hip-hop movement used this new art form to remake the public space of the abandoned, segregated, and spatially disempowered Black neighborhoods they lived in. It was in this context that the link between masculinity and rap music was established. I conclude by providing an example of how Black women have found ways to break the link between masculinity and the mic by creating spaces where they can confront and remake the uneven geography of hip-hop, restoring hip-hop's radical spatial potential.     

To sexually perform or protect: masculine identity construction and perceptions of women's sexuality on a university campus in the Midwestern USA

Modern universities in the USA are places of recreation and leisure in addition to institutional spaces of education. Often characterized by alcohol-fueled socializing and sexualized interaction, university social life rivals the formal curriculum, and hooking up – or recreational sexual interaction outside of committed relationships – has become a defining feature. This article examines the spatiality of sexual and gender identities among heterosexual men at a 4-year residential university located in the Midwestern USA. Drawing on in-depth and focus group data, the article examines how men from contrasting peer cultures construct masculine identities in relation to casual sex and perceptions of women's sexuality. Particular attention is paid to how men negotiate senses of self in relation to the sexual practices, processes, and identities played out in the dominant party scene on campus.     

日本对外结盟视野中的中国

从20世纪初直至21世纪初的今天,日本长期对外结盟,历经日英、日俄、日德、日美同盟。在日本近百余年的结盟历程中,其结盟视野一直高度关注中国,中国往往被视为同盟构建前的牺牲品、同盟建立后的胜利品或者同盟的对抗对象,这对中国产生了巨大而深远的影响。面对日本对外结盟的长期性,中国崛起的现时性,中国应走出以结盟对抗结盟的困境,谋求从被动回应到积极面对,以参与机制来化解同盟机制,以实力促合作谋和谐。     

Party Ideologies and Regional Inequality: An Analysis of Party Manifestos in Japan

ABSTRACT

Regional inequality within Japan has been a key political issue in Japanese politics throughout the entire postwar period. In this analysis, we examine how Japanese parties have positioned themselves on the question of regional inequality, focusing on how the party system response has been shaped by ideas and ideologies. The article analyses two 15-year periods separated by a quarter of a century (1960–75 and 2000–15) during which regional inequalities became a particularly salient and pressing issue. We compare institutional and socioeconomic contexts, broader governing ideas, and policy responses to this issue by major parties in their election platforms (manifestos). We find that party ideology and broader paradigms continued to shape party responses to regional inequality during both periods.