A Hero's Many Faces – Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments

Patriarchy and gendered power relations have been the focus of scholars of masculinity, but fatherhood, one of the most intimate aspects of masculine identity and an essential element in men's social roles, has gained relatively little attention among medievalists. Elements of being a father, like emotional ties, caregiving and commitment to one's family, form the core of this article. The focus is on the contestants of the traditional concepts linked with masculinity and patriarchy: domination, competition and aggression. The main question is how gendered identity was constructed within lived religion, or, how fatherhood and masculinity were linked. The author argues that collaboration between spouses, commitment to one's children and devotion were important elements in constructing adult lay masculinity in the depositions of canonization processes carried out in late-medieval Sweden. The most important element in being an adult man was not the separation from women but the separation from immature boys. To invoke a saint for one's offspring, even if it required inversion of traditional modes of manifestation of manliness, was a statement of masculine identity: an assurance of respectability, responsibility and commitment.     

‘The rainha is the boss!’: On Masculinities,Time and Precolonial Women of Authority in Northern Mozambique

This article focuses on the oral historical narratives about precolonial women of authority (or rainhas in Portuguese) to explore the deeper history of gendered power in northern Mozambique. History-telling is a gendered practice, and nowadays male elders are usually the ones most knowledgeable in these narratives. Moreover, telling these tales - which in interview situations involves personal interpretations and comments - the men also story gendered temporal worlds. This article looks more closely at two seemingly clashing (and incompatible) storylines that emerge in the oral history material. One tells of women's spiritual-political power in the Yaawo chieftaincies in precolonial times, while the other tells a narrative of masculinised power and woman's subordinate position in relation to male leaders. The article focus's especially on how the male narrators talk about masculinity and how different models of masculinity in turn shape the historical narratives they tell. As the author's analysis demonstrates, these models have different temporal origins; yet they intertwine in present time-space, interacting also with newer notions (e.g. the ‘new man’ of the socialist period). The article thus shows how various models of masculinity linked to different temporalities and different imaginings of the relationality between femininity and masculinity coexist and shape male gendered identities as well as the histories men tell about the past and gendered power.     

Gender in Polar Air: Roald Amundsen and his Aeronautics

Abstract

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.     

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

This paper reflects on the impact of gender in the writing of history by considering the reception of Creating A Nation, the first gendered history of Australia. It argues that while there has emerged an impressive volume of feminist history and with it has come an important acceptance of women's historical experience, the reception of ‘gender’ within the historical profession has paradoxically been ambivalent and ambiguous. This is the case because of an unease about feminist theory and its relevance to history. There also remains a prevailing belief that a gendered neutral historical place exists, to which historians can retreat.     

Friedrich Sunder and the boundaries of gender

The article explores the gendered imaginary in the Gnadenleben of Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328) and the formation of clerical masculinity in the context of feminine devotional life. Friedrich Sunder worked as a convent chaplain for a Dominican female community and lived within the convent's area. In his book Sunder employs language, images and devotional practices that can be considered in medieval culture to have been feminine. Almost simultaneously, however, he applied masculine roles and emphasised his own manliness. Although Sunder accepted female forms of religiosity and wrote on practices that were considered especially suitable for women, at the same time his priestly masculinity was defined by the physical boundary the cloister created between the enclosed feminine religiosity and that of a pastoral masculine priesthood. His discussion of gender within the mystical frame defined the boundaries of his own masculinity in the web of different traditions of both the proper way of life and the gendered nature of religious practices.     

'Hard and Heavy': Gender and Power in a heavy metal music subculture

This article analyses gendered structures of power in a heavy metal (HM) music club. Although both male and female HM devotees often declare that they are engaged in a rebellious activity, this romantic conviction sits uneasily alongside the HM scene's reinforcement of conventional gender relations and identities. Although many women gravitated toward the HM setting in order to escape stifling adolescent situations, they wound up in another oppressive context. Both the forceful corporeal practices of men and the highly gendered structures of power meant that women 'did' gender on men's terms. HM texts, narratives, identities, and corporeal practices constituted a complex and contradictory gender regime that literally kept women 'in their place'.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

Responding to the ‘crisis of masculinity’: the perspectives of young Muslim men from Glasgow and Edinburgh,Scotland

Debates about the so-called crisis of masculinity have tended to focus on the experiences of white working class young men and black young men to the exclusion of other groups of men. This article seeks to redress this omission by exploring young Muslim men's knowledge and understanding of the crisis of masculinity and the ways in which they respond to such discourses. Using qualitative data collected during interviews and focus groups with young Muslim men – mainly of Pakistani heritage – living in Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, I demonstrate that young Muslim men's responses to the crisis of masculinity debate are informed by a complex range of issues including their own class position, familial and related gendered expectations alongside the young men's interests in sport and leisure activities.     

Proving One's Manliness: Masculine Self‐perceptions of Austrian Deserters in the Second World War

While important work has been produced on discourses of masculinity and the normative masculine ideals in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Europe we know very little about the actual experiences and self‐images of individual men. This article, largely based on oral history interviews with former deserters, analyses the gendered identities of Austrian men who were recruited to serve in the Wehrmacht and who later deserted. Deserters were brutally persecuted in the Third Reich and denounced as ‘traitors’ and ‘cowards’. The glorification of martial masculinity in Nazi Germany played a crucial role in the defamation of deserters, whose manliness was called into question. Based on Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity, the article aims to establish the actual influence of dominant ideals of masculinity. It investigates how these deserters perceived themselves as men and how they negotiated their gendered identities in interaction with their surroundings. The analysis reveals the considerable influence of the hegemonic ideal of ‘hard’ masculinity, which was far greater than the impact of the rather short‐lived ideal of martial masculinity. But it also demonstrates the contradictory nature of gendered identities and gives valuable insights into the selective appropriation of masculine values.     

Manliness,Male Virtue and History Writing at the Seventeenth‐Century Ottoman Court

When one compares Ottoman chronicles written in the wake of the failed Vienna campaign of 1683 to those composed prior to 1682 and finally to those completed in 1658 one finds, first, that gendered conceptions were central to the authors' depictions of the era and, second, that the model of manliness and male virtue that the authors conceived changed greatly. To authors writing during the first decade of Mehmed IV's reign (1648–58), male virtue was expressed in self‐mastery, the mastery of subordinates, particularly women, and the control of financial resources. Authors in the period between 1658 and 1682 imagined manliness in terms of bravery – manifested in hunting and waging war, labelled interchangeably ghaza or jihad – and Islamic zeal. After 1682, writers again returned to an understanding of male virtue and manliness centred on self‐control. This article explains the reasons for this change in conceptions of manliness and male virtue by relating it to the dynamic competition between courtly factions patronising literary production. The need to curry favour with these factions was reflected in the writers' choice of literary genre, which intervened discursively to offer different images of the sultan and valide sultan (queen mother).     

Visions of Statesmanship Across The Atlantic: Presidential Masculinity and the American Response to Benito Mussolini

This article explores how hegemonic masculinity forged discourses of modern statesmanship in the United States and Italy in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It unpacks the ‘presidential masculinity’ of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and compares these gendered performances of political leadership in the United States to Benito Mussolini's Fascist rule in Italy during the 1920s. In doing so, this article contends that the manliness of these three modern leaders rested on a contrasting of pairs: if Roosevelt embodied the hegemonic ideal of the ‘frontiersman-as-president’, Wilson personified its ‘unmanly’, bourgeois-liberal countertype and thereby engendered the initially hospitable view of Mussolini's Fascist masculinity in the United States during the Jazz Age. The article covers the publications in The Atlantic Monthly to reveal how the American disillusion with Wilson's liberal internationalism transformed the Duce into a Fascist surrogate for Roosevelt. In a decade of political, economic and social upheaval, the transatlantic ‘public relations state’ in both the United States and Italy discursively positioned Mussolini as the personification of the masculine ideals of acumen, willpower and virility for the American public; a ‘Doctor-Dictator’ who, akin to Roosevelt, became a symbol of modern manliness that signified stability, progress and reform. In the process, the Duce's Fascist manhood shaped hegemonic ideals of statesmanship across the Atlantic while hinting at the paltry support for the liberal democracies of the West.     

Women's Cotton and the Spaces of Gender Politics in Northern Cote d'Ivoire

This article seeks to contribute to the gender and 'development' literature by showing how gender struggles over women's economic autonomy from cotton growing are played out at multiple geographical scales. The main argument is that 'men' and 'women' do not simply negotiate over cash cropping within the household. Women in particular find it necessary to 'jump' the scale of the household in order to secure productive resources for cash cropping. Drawing upon the notion of 'scalar politics,' this article illuminates the multiple processes and scaled spaces in which women's economic autonomy expands and contracts around the cultivation of cotton. It is inspired by feminist political ecological approaches to examine how the micro-politics of gender interact with meso- and macro-level agroecological and political economic processes affecting women's poverty and empowerment. Based on longitudinal research in northern Côte d'Ivoire, it shows how women of different sociocultural and economic standing negotiate access to productive resources at multiple scales, and how some men seek to restrict these initiatives. As women search for solutions to contradictions in gendered social relations of production, at different geographical scales, they have simultaneously dispersed the site of gender struggles to other locations (the marketplace and women's personal fields). Male household heads now find it necessary to contest women's cotton growing in these gendered spaces in their attempt to control their wives' labor.     

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.     

Relaxed Bodies and Comfortable Clothes: Reframing Masculinity in Post-War Australia

As Australia's Second World War servicemen began returning home, many anticipated the pleasure of stepping out of their uniforms for the last time. Yet scholarship on the role clothing played in repatriation and post-war rehabilitation in Australia remains scarce. Exploring the post-war swing towards sportswear, the article considers the growing idea of relaxed bodies and the language of comfort that underpinned it. It argues that being attentive to men's dress allows us to engage with a reframing of attractive, able, white, heterosexual bodies that combined two icons of Australian masculinity – the Anzac and the athlete – into a more relaxed vision of manliness.     

Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India

Contemporary historiography, especially in North American, European and Australian history, now includes a fairly respectable body of literature on men and masculinity. While this literature has produced important contributions to the usefulness of gender as a category of historical analysis, there has also been some wariness within feminist scholarship on the grounds that the issue of the gendered organisation may be evaded. Reflecting on the question ‘what is involved in writing a history of masculinity?’, this article considers the potential contribution that the historiography of colonial India offers to the study of masculinity     

Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland

In much of Nigerian Hausaland the prevailing religio-cultural ideology of female seclusion (if not always the practice) impinges on married Muslim Hausa women to a greater, or lesser, degree. This article examines the intimate relationships between space, gender and ideology in contemporary rural Hausa society, showing the social construction (and connectedness) of gender identities and associated spatial identities, thus illustrating how spatial praxis is based on hegemonic patriarchal gender ideology. Observations and interview material gathered from a village case study in Kano State demonstrate how gender divisions correspond with the ideology and contemporary practice of wife seclusion. Intersecting patterns of gender, space and time are revealed by detailed analyses of time- and space-use data, which scrutinise men's and women's daily activities and mobility patterns. The cross-cutting of gender with class, age and marital status is shown to be highly significant in determining everyday experiences of spatial praxis, especially for women. A materialist feminist theoretical framework is used to explain this gendered geography of Nigerian Hausaland in which men's and women's worlds are spatially segregated, yet complexly interlocked and interdependent beyond simple public‐private divisions of ‘female’ household compounds (private space) and ‘male’ public space. For this peasant society, aspects of the rural economy and ideology emerge as powerful factors in determining the nature of seclusion as part of gender praxis. It is argued that due to various cultural and religious factors socio-economic development in Northern Nigeria has not been translated into improved autonomy for Hausa women.     

Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea

This paper contributes to the ethnography of masculinity and the media in PNG. I outline some changes in Kamula men's understandings of masculinity as they are registered in accounts of conflicts between state security services, the Kamula, Rambo and other actors. Outlining this history shows how Kamula men are increasingly entangled in forms of state power and violence that are partially defined by new myths of masculinity expressed in Melanesian readings of Rambo. The paper describes how some of the power effects linked to Rambo are transferred to Kamula men. I argue that in their accounts of Rambo the Kamula are also exploring different models of sovereignty and state power.     

What's Missing? Gender,Reason and the Post-Secular

Abstract

This article considers whether contemporary debate about the "post-secular" has overlooked the extent to which, as a concept or epoch, it may be "gendered." Jürgen Habermas has suggested that there is something "missing" from secular reason in the shape of transcendental and metaphysical values; but I will contend that the debate is in danger of neglecting the central role of gender—so integral to the conceptual and political formation of modernity—in any rethinking of the symbolic of the post-secular. As feminist theorists have long been reminding us, many of the same processes that gave birth to modernity's elevation of public reason, impartial and non-contingent subjectivity, and models of the free, self-actualizing autonomous agent facilitated by the formation of liberal democracy, were not actually neutral or universal; but highly gendered. They rested on binary representations of women and men's differential nature; and they conceived of differential and gendered division of labour which often precluded women's claiming full humanity, let alone full and active citizenship. So gender, and women, are also in danger of disappearing from this new post-secular chapter in the debate about religion, politics and identity. This article examines how this omission might be corrected, and will outline what might be some of the most significant issues at stake.     

Constructing Masculinity and Women's Fear in Public Space in Irvine,California

Fear in public spaces negatively impacts women's lives. Even when danger is low, the idea of women as endangered in public space endures—due, in part, to its centrality in the construction of gender identity for men and women. In this article, the author examines the construction of contemporary, masculine gender identities and men's perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in public space. Through interviews with 82 male students in Irvine, California, USA, the author examines how men's construction of masculine identities builds upon perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in Irvine public spaces. Though they regard Irvine as safe, men see women as vulnerable there. The author investigates this apparent inconsistency in light of men's performances of two masculine identities—the youthful 'badass' and the chivalrous man—which depend for their construction on opposition with women as fearful. Recommendations include suggestions for continued research on the spatial construction of masculine identities.     

Suit of power: fashion,politics, and hegemonic masculinity in Australia

In 2010 the Australian Labor Party selected Julia Gillard as leader, making her Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Between 2010 and 2015 there was a renewed focus on issues of gender inequality in the way that women politicians have been treated in Parliament and in the media. Specifically, women in positions of political and institutional power such as Julia Gillard, Julie Bishop, and Quentin Bryce, were critiqued on their clothing choices in the Australian media. In this article, I argue that the Australian media’s attention to the fashion choices of women in politics is problematically gendered, because it subordinates aesthetic features that do not conform to hegemonic masculinity. I argue that in response to the dominant masculine aesthetic norm in politics, women politicians are using their sartorial choices to challenge this marginalisation of femininity in the political sphere.