The print depiction of King William III’s masculinity

This article examines both positive and negative print depictions of King William III, specifically how William’s masculine identity was produced and perceived in relation to readily accessible norms of manhood. That commentators invoked discourses of masculinity to both legitimate and denounce William’s regime suggests the importance of masculinity to kingly meaning. By discussing the ways in which William does or does not conform to gender ideals, commentators reveal that, although freighted differently, normative models of kingship and masculinity shared common expectations and overlapped in easily recognisable ways. As his critics reminded, William III neither achieved the supposed “hegemonic” patriarchal form of masculinity nor that of the ideal monarch because he remained childless. As such, William’s print portrayal sheds light on codes of masculinity in early modern Britain that were constructed in a variety of settings outside of the problematic paragon of patriarchal manhood.     

‘Bound from Either Side’: The Limits of Power in Carolingian Marriage Disputes, 840–870

The article discusses four marriage disputes in ninth‐century Francia which involved noblemen: Count Stephen of the Auvergne, Count Boso of Italy, Baldwin of Flanders and the royal vassal Falcric. All these men were affected by Carolingian reforming measures on consanguineous marriage, divorce and raptus (abduction). The article examines how gender and social status affected the forms of power and the strategies used by different parties in the cases: archbishops and popes, kings, the women involved and the noblemen themselves. A paradoxical situation is revealed: despite the patriarchal basis of Carolingian society, the power even of elite men over women and marriage was often highly contingent. Yet such restrictions on power did not imperil the gender order: the masculinity of the men involved in these marriage disputes was not questioned.     

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.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

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.     

Collecting Looerryminer's ‘Testimony’: Aboriginal Women,Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands

In 1832 British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ to the antipodean colonies on a mission sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends. This article examines Backhouse and Walker's mission to witness the ‘testimony’ of Looerryminer and other Aboriginal women who had lived with sealers in the Bass Strait Islands. It argues that this investigative journey is best comprehended in the context of the long tradition of Quaker transimperial travel ‘under concern’ and particularly their abolitionist witnessing undertaken from the late eighteenth century and its associated texts with their distinctive form, language and repertoire. Urging that we read ‘along the grain’ of the archive in line with Ann Stoler, the article explores the travel and curious translation of humanitarian abolitionist sentiment, text, and action across and between colonies of settlement, and the various ‘species of slavery’ that were imagined, constructed and examined by Quaker humanitarians in this Age of Reform.     

Pacifism and the Question of Responsibility

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between pacifism and responsibility through conversations with four white U.S. women formed in historic peace church traditions. The conversations resist the dominant tendency to present pacifism and responsibility as dichotomies. For these women, responsibility is not an absolute criterion to which a pacifist position must answer; nor is it a worldly commitment shunned by faithful adherence to the gospel. Rather, responsibility is a crucial yet highly contextual consideration in the pacifist life one cannot but live. This article concludes that it is a mistake to utilize responsibility as an external criterion by which to judge pacifism and a mistake to deny the importance of responsibility in a pacifist life. Both of these dichotomous arrangements mischaracterize the lived experience and moral reflection of the interviewees. The question of responsibility is not whether one should be a pacifist, but how to live nonviolently in a violent world.     

Performing masculinity in the Moroccan theatre: virility,sexuality and Spanish military culture from the African War to the Civil War

This article explores constructions of Spanish masculinity in the first decades of the twentieth century, as Spain engaged in colonialist wars in Morocco; memoirs and literary texts by travellers, soldiers and military leaders such as Francisco Franco and José Millán Astray are read alongside theoretical works. I argue that, like European Orientalism, Spanish Orientalism projects onto Moroccan men an image of fanaticism, barbaric violence and ultra‐virile yet ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexuality. However, that particular image of masculinity is just as often re‐assimilated into a Spanish national identity that can never quite manage to assert its fundamental difference from North Africa.     

The Irish Sandow school: physical culture competitions in fin-de-siècle Ireland

ABSTRACT

Beginning with an examination of Ireland’s turn of the century interest in physical culture, this article highlights the case of Eugen Sandow’s “Great Competition” and its Irish contestants. Seen as a precursor for today’s bodybuilding competitions, Sandow’s contest enjoyed submission photographs from hundreds of half-naked men – many of whom were Irish – posing in Greco-Roman pose. In studying this topic, the article addresses two pressing issues. In the first instance, the article examines how and why physical culture competitions became a competitive outlet for Irishmen in the first decade of the twentieth century. Secondly, it argues that these contests were often connected to broader societal ideals surrounding acceptable forms of masculinity. The article thus examines a previously unexplored but nevertheless important part of sporting and athletic behaviour in early twentieth-century Ireland.     

Slum Wars of the 21st Century: Gangs,Mano Dura and the New Urban Geography of Conflict in Central America

The political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from ‘political’ to ‘social’ violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is historically perhaps most paradigmatically associated with violence, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the changes that the regional landscape of violence has undergone. It suggests that these are better understood as a movement from ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ ( Wolf, 1969 ) to ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ ( Beall, 2006 ), thereby highlighting how present‐day urban violence can in many ways be seen as representing a structural continuation of past political conflicts, albeit in new spatial contexts. At the same time, however, there are certain key differences between past and present violence, as a result of which contemporary conflict has intensified. This is most visible in relation to the changing forms of urban spatial organization in Central American cities, the heavy‐handed mano dura response to gangs by governments, and the dystopian evolutionary trajectory of gangs. Taken together, these processes point to a critical shift in the balance of power between rich and poor in the region, as the new ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ are increasingly giving way to more circumscribed ‘slum wars’ that effectively signal the defeat of the poor.     

The Universal Principle of Grace: Feminism and Anti‐Calvinism in Two Seventeenth‐Century Women Writers

This article presents one of the theological contexts for early feminist thought in England in the late seventeenth century. It argues that an emerging universalist soteriology in Platonist and radical thought had a positive impact on discourses about sexual equality, and shows how two female writers (the Quaker Elizabeth Bathurst and the visionary M. Marsin) combined their critique of the doctrine of limited atonement – in other words, the idea of an exclusive elect – with a confident assertion of women's calling to preach and teach in the Church.     

Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century

This article analyses how public attention to marital violence in Sweden changed from a question of maintaining good order and ambitions to discipline self‐indulgent house tyrants into responsible masters of households in the seventeenth century, to the vanishing of the house tyrant as a cultural stereotype in favour of the female shrew in the eighteenth century, following the formal abolition of the husband's legal right to chastise his wife and an equalisation of liabilities and responsibilities. It also traces the beginnings of the social marginalisation and silencing of marital violence in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon associated with the lower classes and regulated by the law as a case for private action only when committed within the household circle.     

Number‐One Enemy: Police,Violence and the Location of Adversaries in a Papua New Guinean Prison.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I aim to explore how prisoners at Bomana in PNG, in the period I was there between 1994–1995, figured the violence of police. This includes an examination of what they understand to be state power and what they take to be their response to it, including the possibility of critique. Do inmates at Bomana recognize a scale shift between state and citizen, between law and violence? If so, when? How do they relate the actions of the Constabulary to their own violent behaviour and to the forceful or violent behaviour of others? These questions will be approached through the notion of enmity. In particular, by a discussion of what inmates mean when they label the police their ‘number‐one enemy’.     

Gendered meanings and everyday experiences of violence in urban Brazil

Violent acts are not random, but are infused with meaning: those intended by the perpetrators and those ascribed by others. This article explores how dominant gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro attempt to manipulate the meanings of violence to maintain their control of territory, presenting themselves as protectors of the community. Gangs impose violent punishment on residents who have breached their rules and behavioural norms. The messages they send out regarding the (un)acceptability of violence against women is highly ambiguous, however, which reduces women's options and increases levels of insecurity. Despite the ambiguity and unpredictability of gang rule, residents refrain from challenging gang control, preferring to moderate their own daily routines as a means to feel secure in the face of high levels of insecurity.     

From British mandate to post Anglo‐American invasion: Reproduction of ethno‐sectarian divides and the breakdown of social cohesion in Mosul

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 ushered in an era of great uncertainty and turbulence that left the country in an economically crippled, politically unstable, and socially desperate situation. While the built‐in ethno‐sectarian divides have been widely used as analytical categories to address the enduring violence in both Mosul and the rest of Iraq, little attention has been paid to the connection between the long‐term Anglo‐American invasion of Iraq and the ethno‐sectarian violence that currently characterizes Mosul. This study argues that while ethnic and sectarian loyalties have historically persisted in their social forms since the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the highly politicized and violent forms of ethno‐sectarian conflict are modern phenomena, produced and reproduced under the conditions of the decades‐long British and American interventions. The study retrospectively evaluates the current dynamics of ethno‐sectarian confrontations in Mosul through two stages in the long historiography of modern Iraq. The first section reveals how Britain’s mismanagement of colonial Iraq set the initial conditions for communal cleavages and instability in today’s Mosul. Later, the second section turns its attention toward the contemporary manifestation of ethno‐sectarian violence, particularly under the U.S.‐led occupation.     

Masculine hegemony,the state and the incorporation of gender equity discourse: The case of Australian sport

Although the impact of affirmative action, equal opportunity and gender equity programs on the lives of Australian women have been explored in a number of areas, state interventions related to sport have received scant attention from public policy analysts. This paper examines how the Australian Sports Commission has framed its gender equity policy in the mutually reinforcing hegemonic discourses of masculinity and corporate managerialism. It is argued that the Commission's articulation of gender equity policy in terms of ‘market‐oriented individualism’ is both constituted by, and constitutive of, the shift from a ‘patriarchal‐welfare state’ to a ‘patriarchal‐managerial state’ in Australia. The paper also provides an example of the tensions between bureaucratic and feminist discourses in the state sphere.     

Coming of Age: Law,Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India

This article revisits child‐marriage legislation in colonial India between 1891 and 1929 to re‐envision the ‘child’ as a subject constituted by laws governing sex, rather than as an a priori object requiring protection from patriarchal sexual norms. Focusing on the digital construction of the child in the twentieth century, this essay introduces a new angle from which to examine recent conclusions regarding child‐marriage reform in India. By drawing attention to an understudied figure, this article demonstrates the ways in which the problem of the child might transform understandings of the nation and its women; the universe of rights and the location of culture and the place of age as number in the formulation of legal subjectivities, colonial governmentality and humanitarian accounting in late colonial India.     

Moral Spaces and Sexual Transgression: Understanding Rape in War and Post Conflict

When it comes to rape in war, evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace. Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual violence can be misleading. Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’ sexual relationships — or as part of a continuum of gendered violence. This article shows how, even in war, norms are not suspended; nor do they simply continue. War changes the moral landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research over 10 years in northern Uganda, this article argues for a re‐sexualization of understandings of rape. It posits that sexual mores are central to explaining sexual violence, and that sexual norms — and hence transgressions — vary depending on the moral spaces in which they occur. In Acholi, moral spaces have temporal dimensions (‘olden times’, the ‘time of fighting’ and ‘these days’) and associated spatial dimensions (home, camp, bush, village, town). The dynamics of each help to explain the occurrence of some forms of sexual violence and the rarity of others. By reflecting on sexual norms and transgressions in these moral spaces, the article sheds light on the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘ordinary’, rape and war.     

Finding mobility: women negotiating fear and violence in Mexico City’s public transit system

Feminists have long known that a woman’s confidence, sense of possibility, aspirations, and personal growth depend on their ability to be mobile. Yet gender-based violence and sexual harassment against women commuters greatly limit those freedoms. How then should cities adapt in order increase women’s equal access to mobility? To address this question, this article looks at the case of Mexico City, investigating how women pursue mobility despite hostile and violent conditions that immobilize them. Based on women’s testimonies, comments made on online debate forums, and surveys among women commuters in Mexico City, this article maps the ways women cope with violence and harassment on public transportation. The analysis also pays particular attention to how women’s coping strategies are restructured through state interventions, including women-only transportation. The data reveals that gender-based violence in Mexico City’s public transportation limits women’s mobility and reinforces gender inequality. It also shows, however, that under the right circumstances women-only transportation can be used as a place to create a rights-based movement. The article concludes that Mexico City is an example where women-only transportation has played a role in changing the traditional gender norms which have reinforced violence against women commuters.