Women and Alcohol Consumption in Fascist Italy

This article examines discourses and practices around women's drinking in Fascist Italy. The history of alcohol production and consumption in Italy during the fascist dictatorship has only recently received attention; alcohol's gendered dimensions, especially women's drinking, have been hitherto overlooked. While the production of legislation, rhetoric and propaganda on alcohol consumption was dominated by men, women were identified as key constituents whose alcohol-related practices could make or break the causes of fascist propagandists, ‘anti-alcohol’ campaigners and alcohol industry associations. The article explains how Italian women were imagined and addressed by regime propagandists, alcohol industry producers and temperance campaigners as (a) simultaneously the principal victims of and responsibility bearers for male excess alcohol consumption, (b) potential ‘crisis-women’ whose unpatriotic drinking choices (whether English tea, French champagne or American cocktails) denoted their prioritising of fashion over fascist values and (c) gatekeepers of family alcohol consumer practices and consumers of alcohol in their own right. It then moves to examine sources left by interwar Italian women to explore what, how and when they drank. Ultimately, it argues that despite attempts to construct women's drinking in archly nationalistic terms, the discourses and actual practices of Italian women around alcohol consumption operated within profoundly transnational frames.     

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.     

Misogyny,Jest‐Books and Male Youth Culture in Seventeenth‐Century England

Over the past twenty years, patriarchy has become a vitally important analytical concept for historians of women, gender and masculinity. By contrast, misogyny has been under‐explored, despite being an equally prevalent historical phenomenon. This article offers a cultural history of seventeenth‐century masculinity based on an analysis of the humorous jokes and stories found in jest‐books, a genre that appealed in particular to male adolescents and young men in their twenties. It argues that patriarchy and misogyny should be treated as separate analytical concepts and cultural phenomena that appealed to different sorts of men. While patriarchy offered a code of manly behaviour for middling‐sort married males to aspire to, misogynistic humour appealed predominantly to youthful single males, who were as antagonistic towards patriarchs as they were towards women. In articulating such an argument, this article engages with debates about manhood, misogyny and the reception and creation of everyday culture in early modern society.     

‘Fit Only for the Scrap Heap’: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945

This paper examines the expert and popular discourses that sought to construct and disseminate the idea that Australia faced a masculinity crisis with the return of servicemen at the end of the Second World War. It explores how these discourses proposed a process of remasculinisation to ensure the successful reintegration of returning servicemen. These discourses were directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men. Doctors played an important role in producing this prevailing discourse on the looming post‐war masculinity crisis, identifying its symptoms and proposing solutions. This crisis discourse filtered into popular culture through many means, predominantly, however, advice literature and romance fiction. While some of these expert and popular discourses constructed a backward looking ideal of domesticity for women, romance fiction in particular explored more modern possibilities of companionate marriage. The dissemination of a discourse about an impending masculinity crisis created different possibilities for the reconstruction of relations between men and women. The remasculinisation project could look both backwards (through ideals of women's subservience to damaged men) and forwards (through notions of marriage as a partnership) in imagining post war gender relations.     

Masculinity and domesticity in 1930s South Wales: did unemployment change the domestic division of labour?

This article examines masculinity in an area suffering from sustained high unemployment and unremitting hardship during the 1930s: the South Wales coalfield had some of the highest rates of male unemployment and the lowest participation rates of married women in paid employment in Britain. Particular attention is drawn to power relations between husband and wife by looking at the domestic division of labour and whether male unemployment affected the split in domestic responsibilities. Personal testimonies are used to assess how men filled their time whilst unemployed and the meanings they attached to their activities and relationships. It will be shown that some unemployed men engaged more in the home and that many men were able to maintain existing power relations with their wives by finding or creating alternative manual work and maintaining an elastic relationship with the home by continuing to spend the majority of their time in the company of other men.     

‘Hollywood is a Woman's Town’: Masculinity and the Leading Man in American Fan Magazines of the 1930s

In their address to a predominantly female readership, fan magazines of the 1930s asserted that Hollywood was one place in which women were not subordinated to men as female stardom was superior to that of male stardom. The magazines’ representations of male actors were both compliant with, and resistant to, the tough-guy image of hegemonic masculinity. The personas of most ‘leading men’ who led the supporting casts of female stars were represented as softer forms of masculinity than that of the majority of male stars. The on-screen hard forms of masculinity of male stars were softened by the magazines’ reports of their off-screen personas, and the personas of some actors were presented as a bipolar masculinity that combined soft and hard forms.     

Genocide,masculinity and posttraumatic growth in Rwanda: reconstructing male identity through ndi umunyarwanda

While the experiences of Rwandan women during and after the 1994 genocide have been studied quite extensively, little attention has been paid to the lives of men. Through an analysis of their testimonies, this article explores how Tutsi men experienced the 1994 genocide and how it has affected their identities. The analysis identifies three time periods where different versions of masculinity are expressed: the early stages of the genocide, where a predominantly warrior/military identity persisted; later stages of the genocide, during which men became aware of their vulnerability and the extent of the genocide; and the post-genocide period, in which masculinity has been rebuilt through the ideology of ndi umunyarwanda, the notion of Rwandanness or Rwandicity. Post-genocide male identity draws heavily on precolonial military values such as patriotism, dignity, unity and the importance of a strong army; however, the idealism of warriorhood has been lost. The emphasis of masculinity post-1994 appears to be on a shared culture and language and collectively working for one's country, not fighting for it. Indeed, there appears to be a complete aversion to violence of any kind, which, it is argued, is a form of posttraumatic growth. Another positive aspect of the change in male identity is the rejection of former colonial influences and their ideas in exchange for more authentic cultural expression and self-acceptance. The form of ndi umunyarwanda adopted by the men in this study is distinct from the government's version of this ideology, however, as these men reject the idea of forced apologies and reconciliation. In light of these findings, the article discusses the practical implications for those engaged in social work with survivors, and also calls for a more nuanced discussion of post-genocide Rwanda and the concept of Rwandicity.     

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.     

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.     

‘A Rather Undefined Social Position and Public Recognition’: Professionalisation,Status and Masculinity in Provincial Museums,c.1870–1930

This article examines the background, careers and self-presentation of the first generation of British museum curators in local government-funded provincial museums, c.1900, to explore the issue of masculinity among the lower-middle classes. It argues that while such men were sometimes mocked for the lack of masculinity they showed in their domestic lives, a focus on their professional lives reveals a different set of problems facing them as they attempted to be manly men; curatorial roles, like others available to the lower-middle classes, involved a dependence on local elites, and required many of the skills and attributes which were being colonised by new women professionals. The study then examines the tactics used, with some success, by such men to assert a professional masculinity, focusing on their identification with their museum, their development of a professional body and their investment in manly physical activities.     

Is Androcentric Archaeology Really About Men?

The article starts with a discussion of the relation between feminist archaeology and gender archaeology followed by a short account of how androcentrism may influence on archaeological research. By exploring two representative examples I will argue that androcentric archaeology mainly reproduces stereotype images of men and do not provide much new or real knowledge about prehistoric men or understandings of masculinity. Consequently, there is a need to study prehistoric men as gendered and I will argue that to include studies in men and masculinity into a gender archaeology based on feminist theory might challenge androcentric archaeological studies just as much as to study women in prehistory.     

Gendered Socio-Spatial Practices in Public Eating and Drinking Establishments in the Midwest United States

Understanding how space is used in gendered social practice is crucial to gender constructionists' theorizing and research. Gendered socio-spatial practices help explain how power asymmetries between women and men carry over from one social setting to the next. In this article we integrate research on gender and space and on gender and practice in an examination of how female and male customers, employees and food and drink establishment owners structure, occupy, use and control physical and symbolic space in routine social practices in ‘public’ places. Gendered social practices, we argue, occur not only in space; they utilize, shape and, at times, obstruct, monopolize, give and give up space. Our findings, based on 76?hours of observations in 17 food and drink establishments in the Midwest United States, and interviews with the 17 women and men owners of those businesses, challenge oversimplified notions of separate private and public ‘spheres,’ and of the autonomy and power women and men experience in these arenas—as owners, managers, workers and as customers.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Bodies,beaches and bars: negotiating heterosexual masculinity in southern Thailand's tourism industry

This article explores the gender politics of heterosexual masculinity by detailing the practices of masculinity and heterosexuality among a group of Thai men working in the tourism industry in Thailand's south. The research is based on ethnographic data obtained during a number of field visits between October 2000 and January 2007 to Pha-ngan Island in southern Thailand. It is positioned within the geography literature on masculinities and heterosexuality, extending the current literature on cross-cultural negotiations of masculinity by exploring negotiations of heterosexual masculinity in a context where differing cultural notions of hegemonic masculinity come into dialogue. Specifically, I detail the articulation of heterosexual masculinity by Thai bar workers through their encounters with three key ‘Others’: Thai transgendered people; tourist women; and tourist men. These encounters provide a context through which the complexity and instability of both hegemonic and subordinated masculinity can be explored. In particular, I argue that the delineation of these masculinities is both contextually and culturally specific. The encounters also provide an opportunity to investigate the importance of spatiality to the performance of heterosexual identities.     

Homeschooled and Self-Cultured: The Gendering of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall

This article examines the gendering of the human mind by nineteenth-century Unitarians and Transcendentalists or, more specifically, the employment of the doctrine of “self-culture” to encourage girls and young women to cultivate traits that would lead themselves and others to gender their intellect “masculine,” even while many proponents of self-culture maintained a traditional understanding of woman's role: as wife and mother and the keeper of house and home. Beholden to nineteenth-century categories of masculinity and femininity, many Unitarian and Transcendentalist men — and women — were ambivalent about the practical results of self-culture for women. How could the people who promoted self-culture and self-reliance as the primary religious duties of the spiritually engaged person show only lukewarm support and occasionally outright opposition for the women who followed such advice? To answer this question, this article examines the early lives and educational experiences of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall, in their own words and through primary and secondary sources that highlight self-culture as a source of both empowerment and enervation. In doing so it tracks how both the process and effects of cultivating the “masculine mind” shaped these women and their respective understandings of what it meant to be whole in their own bodies.     

Pots,pens and ‘eating out the body’: cuisine and the gendering of African nations*

Whether cooking in a pot in the back yard, or in a modern kitchen, African women have generally prepared food for their men. More recently, they have collated and written cookery books both in the West and in Africa so that the ruling elites, mostly all men, have been able to display their new ‘national cuisines’ on their states’ official websites. This article reviews how ‘national cuisines’ have emerged recently in parts of Africa and then examines how these emerging cuisines might contribute to the gendering of African nations. It will also contrast Western notions of ‘the slender body’ with some African notions, of ‘eating out the body’, building a respectable but large body to construct an ‘authentic physical masculinity’ on the one hand, and a healthy and fertile wife and mother on the other. The article investigates how this might be reflected in African national cuisines.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

‘The Kite is Tied to You’: Custom,Christianity, and Organization among Kanak Women of Drueulu,Lifou, New Caledonia

This paper explores Drueulu women's engagement in an organized collectivity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I focus particularly on the Drueulu Women's Group, a group affiliated to the umbrella Catholic organization, mouvement féminin vers un Souriant Village Mélanésien (mfSVM), to illustrate how these women mobilized cultural elements, including customary bonds, religious affiliation, and maternal relations, to assert their agency and empowerment. To move beyond a given and unchanging representation of Lifouan men and women means bringing to the fore multiple changing identities which are negotiated in different times and places. This does not mean privileging localism over national commonalities. By examining a 1990 protest march against alcohol abuse by men, I attest to the various articulations of women's concerns, customary linkages, and denominational affiliation which informed women's agenda at the village level. I then consider how these configurations were articulated in the 1992 annual general assembly of the mfSVM when 200 women gathered in Drueulu from all over the country for the twentieth anniversary of the movement. In the wider social settings here examined, the ubiquitous metaphorical use of maternal tropes gained strategic efficacy.     

Friendly Relations: Situating Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, 1780–1830

Men and women who became friends in the early American republic struggled with societal worries about the purity and chastity of their friendships. More so than other pairs of friends, heterosocial friends had to attend to how their friendships appeared to those around them. One of the most important ways of doing so was positioning a friendship in relation to spouses. In an era when marriage was the central structure for relations between men and women and fears of seduction and ruin were rampant, friends of the opposite sex needed to integrate their friendships within their marriages. This paper examines how men and women did so through the lens of their correspondence. Navigating a society without clear boundaries or rules for conducting a friendship between a man and a woman, individual pairs of friends improvised to create safe friendships in person and in letters. The careful intertwining of marriages and friendships they created demonstrates the way intimate social relationships were embedded in the social fabric of the early American republic.