Manoeuvring men: masculinity as spatially defined readability at the grandes manoeuvres of the Belgian army, 1882–1883

This article uses the case study of the Belgian grandes manoeuvres of 1882 and 1883 to explore the ways in which self-defined ‘all male’ spaces can contribute to the study and deconstruction of historical masculinities. Using the manoeuvres of the Belgian army at the end of the nineteenth century as a theatre of (military as well as civilian) corporeal and discursive practices, the simultaneous enactment of masculinity and nation is analysed. The material spaces in which these military exercises took place are understood as contingent creators instead of passive containers of masculinity: that is, rather than as a passive background to soldiers' movements, the champ de manoeuvres appears as an active stage, aiding the construction of a gendered military identity, but also challenging dichotomous understandings of gender. Likewise, the gaze upon both landscape and soldiers by different audiences plays an active part in the story of the construction of masculinity and nation: the act of recognition, performed by male and female civilians, during and after the manoeuvres was crucial for the continuous repetition of the discourse that created and upheld notions of ‘man’ and of ‘Belgium’.     

Practical Hagiography: James of Voragine’s Sermones and Vita on St Margaret of Antioch

Abstract

In addition to his exceedingly popular Legenda Aurea, James of Voragine wrote in another hagiographical genre: sermons on the saints. The Sermones de sanctis likewise became immediately popular, as his Dominican brothers used James’s model sermons to learn to preach about the saints in a format that would provide the laity with intelligible and practical theological instruction. James’s corpus gives us a rather unusual opportunity to compare the ways in which a single author manipulates multiple hagiographical genres, and his writings on St Margaret of Antioch allow us to explore how a medieval preacher used a historically disputed saint — a dragon-fighter — to provide a practical model of sanctity to his lay audience. I compare the representations of Margaret in James’s sermones and vita, arguing that James adapted certain features of Margaret’s saintly example in the vita to instruct the audience of his sermons about proper Christian virtues and actions. As a point of comparison, I explore a sermon by Évrard of Val des Écoliers in which the Augustinian teaches his audience a practical skill — how to pray — through Margaret’s example.     

Representations of the Masculine in Tagame Gengoroh's Ero SM Manga

Tagame Gengoroh (1964–) is a Japanese manga writer who specialises in erotic gay male SM themed comics. Though prolific and having a substantial cult following in his native Japan, parts of the US and Europe, his work has not received the academic attention it deserves. This essay explores how Tagame constructs masculinity in three stories set in the context of wartime Japan. By drawing on several interdisciplinary areas to inform my reading of these narratives, I argue that, while on one level Tagame presents stories as graphic cartoon porn, on another level he weaves into the images and wording a much deeper sense of how homosociality can easily transform into homosexuality, despite his male characters being positioned as examples of hegemonic masculinity. The essay comments on how Tagame deterritorialises characters associated with wartime Japan such as the soldier, the POW and the kenpeitai by requiring them to engage in acts not typical of any definition of hegemonic masculinity, and then reterritorialises them into creating equally complex and horror-filled homosexual utopias.     

Eric Sevareid and the Emotional Registers of Liberal Masculinity

A major broadcaster on both radio and television, Eric Sevareid published a memoir of his youth and wartime experiences in 1946. Not So Wild a Dream devoted considerable attention to the complicated emotional registers of male identity. The tensions between physical and mental labour, the revelation or concealment of personal feelings and the relationship between individual autonomy and community responsibility suffused Sevareid's recollections of youth and early manhood. The situational quality of his masculinity and the confessional imperative of his life writing contributes to the complex hermeneutics and intersectionalities of gender and history.     

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.     

Emasculation as empowerment: lessons of beaver lore for two Italian humanists

In the sixteenth century, two Italian humanists, Paolo Giovio and Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, included in their imprese (personalised emblems) a portrayal of a beaver gnawing off its testicles. Since the impresa was intended to express something distinctive about its bearer, their choice of the beaver suggests that they conceived of their own masculinity in ways that seem counterintuitive. The present essay traces the story of the beaver's sacrifice to Antiquity, both classical and early Christian, and surveys the diverse interpretations of it up through the early-modern period. It details the wide constellation of meanings attached to the beaver in influential compendia of knowledge written around the time that Giovio and Bonifacio flourished, including Conrad Gesner's History of Quadrupeds and Pierio Valeriano's Hieroglyphica. Finally, it assesses how the appropriation of the beaver may have made particular sense, for different reasons, to Giovio and to Bonifacio. While these cases exemplify how animals served as enabling devices for portraying one's masculinity, the appropriation of the beaver in particular challenges historians today to reconsider what constituted acceptable masculine performance in early-modern Europe. It also serves as a caution against attributing a constant gendered meaning to even the most quintessentially male of organs.     

Resistance and Negotiation: “Herbivorous Men” and Murakami Haruki’s Gender and Political Ambiguity

In recent years, both Japanese and Western media have devoted a great deal of attention to a new type of Japanese man, so-called sōshoku-kei danshi (“herbivorous men”), as an example of a new, “softened” masculinity. In this paper, I draw a parallel between the growing number of “herbivores” and the increasing popularity of Japanese contemporary author Murakami Haruki, and in particular of the young male protagonists of his novels. Apart from the apparent similarities in the personalities of Murakami’s characters and the herbivores, a significant commonality can be found in their way of relating to their representation, especially their rebellious image constructed by society. Through an analysis of the formation of such an image, we will find that their popularity is closely associated with the history of Japanese masculinity, and more importantly with their astute distancing from society and their complicity with the capitalist system. In this article I examine Murakami’s and the herbivores’ ways of positioning themselves in Japanese society in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of both types of men.     

Point Chev boys and the landscapes of suburban memory: autobiographies of Auckland childhoods

This article uses a comparative analysis of two autobiographical texts to consider the ways in which the emotions and the imagination inform a sense of place. These autobiographies recount boyhoods in Point Chevalier, an Auckland suburb which embodies much that is emblematic of the mythology of early- to mid-twentieth-century childhoods in New Zealand. Both a modern suburb in a fast-growing city, and a richly particular coastal environment, it makes itself available as the setting for a childhood of the national imaginary. But as each of these narratives crosses the suburban terrain it produces a different understanding of what it meant to grow up as a male then, and there: in Halfway Round the Harbour Keith Sinclair never questions the fit between boy and place, or the certainty of his belonging and his identity; Peter Wells in Long Loop Home recalls a tumultuous boyhood increasingly marked by the threat of exclusion and intense family conflict. Between the two opposing trajectories of these texts, other possibilities are glimpsed. Place is created here by gender, sexuality and class; and masculinity is shaped and positioned differently for each of these boyhoods and the men who reflect on them. The affect of place marks the difference between these two Point Chevs.     

The flight of Carthach (Mochuda) from Rahan to Lismore: lineage and identity in early medieval Ireland

This paper explores the different ways in which the career of Carthach – Carthagus in Latin, also known as Mochuda or Mo‐Chutu – was remembered in both Latin and Irish accounts, in particular his expulsion from Rahan, where he was abbot for forty years, and his re‐establishing that community at Lismore, where he died c.637. It argues that the Life of Carthach legitimizes his foundation at Lismore, by celebrating its initial establishment at Rahan, and by connecting him through a chain of prophecies to Íte, Brendan, Comgall, and above all Colum Cille. In this Life, Patrick is never mentioned, quite unlike the Life of Declán, which claimed Ardmore as the original bishopric of the Déise region. Carthach's expulsion from Rahan, provoked by loss of political support from local princes, took place just as other abbots of the region were hesitating to adopt the Roman date of Easter, in the manner of much of southern Ireland. Carthach, part of a group sympathetic to Gregory the Great and Roman practice, was perceived by his admirers as being connected to a line of saints that helped define the particular identity of the church at Lismore.     

On the path to oblivion: The pilgrims' declining role in the St. Christopher plays of early and early modern Spain

This article examines the representation of the pilgrim in the corpus of St. Christopher dramas of early and early modern Iberia. The importance of the character's supporting role varies according to the era in which each play is written. At first, in the medieval religious dramas of the Crown of Aragon, the pilgrim not only celebrates St. Christopher's piety and anticipates his meeting with Jesus Christ, but also embodies the sanctity and devotion necessitated of pilgrimage. The pilgrims undergo a transformation in the sixteenth century as they become comic and serve as foils to the protagonist's gravity. On the seventeenth-century secular stage, the representations diverge: they begin with a traditional representation of the pilgrim, but then the figure ultimately disappears as the comedias focus on the later period of St. Christopher's life, the result of a Tridentine directive that refocused the general worship of saints and hagiographical literature.     

Handmaids of God: Images of Service in the Lives of Merovingian Female Saints

Merovingian hagiographies make extensive use of the metaphor of service to demonstrate the sanctity of their subjects. These religious images emerged from a society in which slaves and servants were both ubiquitous and demeaned, and the metaphors were embedded in the social realities of service. This article examines the Lives of three elite female saints who were depicted as slaves, or engaged in acts of servitude: Radegund, Balthild, and Austreberta. It argues that although service as a religious motif was central to each of these texts, the authors engaged with the image in strikingly different ways and to quite different ends, depending on the social world of the text.     

‘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.     

Conversational Modernism: Talking Czech Men into Being Gentlemen by Way of The Gentleman, 1924–30

The article provides a profile of the Czech life-style magazine Gentleman (The Gentleman), published in Prague from 1924 to 1930. The gendered nature of the magazine is stressed and discursive mechanisms effective in the formation of modern masculinity are discussed. Issues of ‘democratic aristocratism’, male fashion, gender identity, but also traces of a local inflection (T. G. Masaryk as a modern man) are among the select points of attention. While some aspects of the magazine may appear instructional, the analysis draws attention to the fact that The Gentleman actually moves between the instructional and the represented, thus leaving ample space for the reader to negotiate his position on the map of masculine modernity. Other instances of media (e.g., the nineteenth-century Konversationslexikon) and authors (Karel ?apek, Milena Jesenská) are adduced to broaden the context and to explicate the meaning of ‘conversational modernity’, that is, a negotiated representation of modernity.     

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.     

The Gender of Grace: Impotence,Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth‐Century West

This essay attempts to stage an encounter between post‐Foucauldian approaches to masculinity in the ancient world on the one hand, and the reading of Augustine of Hippo's idea of Original Sin as a disjunction of the will, put forward in Robert Markus's Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine. Emphasis is placed on Book XIV of the City of God, where Augustine emblematises the result of Original Sin not –pace Foucault – through an image of irrepressible lust, but rather through that of the impotent male, humiliated by his inability to embody his desire.     

‘Time of Troubles’: Arnold J. Toynbee's twentieth century

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) has long been neglected or discounted by scholars of international relations and historians of international thought. Yet his contributions to International Affairs, as well as his Surveys of international affairs and his A study of history demonstrate both his capacity for acute interpretation of contemporary events and the depth of his learning about past international societies. This article examines his analysis of mid‐twentieth century international relations, that ‘Time of Troubles’ which he believed would only be escaped through a recovery of ‘creativity’ and profound change in the ways in which world politics were practised. It explores the foundations of his approach to the field, demonstrated both in his Surveys of international affairs and his twelve volume magnum opus, A study of history, as well as his essays in journals. It analyses his diagnosis of the causes of our contemporary ‘Time of Troubles’, in the light of past episodes in world history Toynbee thought analogous to that present condition of international relations. And it traces his retreat from political solutions to the challenges faced in the twentieth century and his movement towards religious responses as a putative alternative. It concludes by arguing that Toynbee deserves recognition, not simply as a pioneering world historian or a controversial interpreter of the politics of the Middle East, but as an acute commentator on the international relations of a troubled age.     

Chastity Models in the Legenda Aurea and in the Sermones de Sanctis of Jacobus de Voragine

Abstract

The Sermones de sanctis of Jacobus de Voragine is not an independent text but the last written link of a communicative chain that starts with the holy figurae of the Legenda aurea and is completed with a final speech from a preacher to his audience. Chastity is represented in this hagiographical material, which is closely connected to the most important saints of the Dominican calendar, through absolute models that are removed from everyday experience: these models need to be interpreted by a preacher's spoken words and to be illustrated with a choice of exempla to reach laypeople effectively.     

On the Degeneration of Public Philosophy in America: Problems and Prospects

Abstract

Mark Blitz’s Plato’s Political Philosophy is reviewed in this article with special attention to two recurring themes. The first is the relation of parts to wholes and, especially, how the knowledge of parts and wholes in general and of political parts and wholes in particular relate to the philosophic attempt to know the whole itself. The second theme is that of philosophy’s relation to piety and, in particular, how the attempt to know the whole, as understood by Blitz, relates to the fundamental opposition between piety and philosophy. Attention to these themes, the author argues, helps to explain peculiarities of Blitz’s approach, especially his greater emphasis on articulating the entire “realm of political philosophy” than on explicating individual dialogues and his tendency to connect and divide Platonic thoughts, themes, and problems rather than to bore into individual Socratic problems.