A Case of Murderous Sensibility: James Hackman,Interiority and Masculine Agency in Late Eighteenth‐Century England

After murdering Martha Ray in April 1779, James Hackman enjoyed an improbable media celebrity that rested largely on his ability both to embody and complicate the performative conventions of the late eighteenth‐century discourse of sensibility, which tied virtue to its embodied visibility. Supporters who lauded Hackman, but wanted to conserve his and their own moral agency, disentangled his character from his crime by attributing to him an interior space in which that character resided. Thus, while spectators delighted in the way that Hackman's sensible body registered his anguish at Ray's death, they could also paradoxically insist that his true intentions were hidden inside that suffering body, uncoupled from his violent deed. Such attributions of interiority helped to conserve both Hackman's masculinity and his agency by distinguishing his body from feminine bodies whose lack of such interior space rendered them vulnerable to a disordered and hysterical sensibility. The rhetorical energy devoted to defending Hackman provides a valuable case study of the ways that reconciliation was sought in the late eighteenth century between masculinity and agency within the discourse of sensibility and suggests that the differential, gendered distribution of interiority helped assuage fears about feeling's feminising potential.     

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.     

Dusting Down Second Hand Rose: Gendered identities and the world of second-hand goods in the space of the car boot sale

This is concerned with the connections between second-hand exchange and consumption, and gendered identities, and draws on research conducted within car boot sales in Britain. The article demonstrates the highly gendered nature of patterns of exchange and consumption within the space of the car boot sale; connects this to the various gender identities found within conventional retail environments, notably the department store; and examines in depth the intricacies of what happens when both women and men buy from and sell to one another in the space of the car boot sale. For women, the world of the car boot sale is shown to require the negotiation of the multiple and frequently contradictory feminine subject positions embedded in exchange and consumption, notably woman as object of masculine heterosexual desire, woman as mother and woman as homemaker. For men, by contrast, the construct of masculinity to be negotiated is apparently homogeneous, utilitarian and instrumentalist-man the builder of domestic space. The article reflects on these differences and on the highly gendered pattern of exchange and consumption found within car boot sales, arguing that both are intricately connected to the expert gendered knowledges inscribed in particular commodities, knowledges which are argued to be at a premium in spaces of second-hand exchange and consumption.     

试论《山音》中的处女崇拜

川端康成晚年的代表作《山音》仍然表现出“处女性”崇拜这一主题。信吾精神饥渴和委顿,内心充溢着怅惘、空虚、失落、孤独和死亡的哀怨与恐惧,他希望获得解脱,希望得到精神的救赎。他在寻求一种精神上的归宿,寻找一种救赎的精神力量。信吾潜意识中所期待的能使之获得救赎的力量是通过女性来体现的,他探寻的目标也具体化为女性,尤其是女性美。以信吾为代表的男性形象在这种“处女”的爱中汲取无限的生命力量。川端康成作品中对“处女性”的崇拜也是一种对生命的憧憬。对“处女性”的崇拜源于川端康成的孤儿根性。也是作者对自己孤儿根性的一种解脱和拯救。     

Octavia Hill Women Housing Managers in South Africa: femininity and urban government

Women trained in a system of housing management developed by Octavia Hill in Victorian England were employed in South Africa's Coloured and European townships from the mid-1930s. They were also involved in training South African women in this tradition which emphasized the mutual responsibilities of landlords and tenants and rested upon the formation of trusting relationships or friendships between women housing managers and the tenants. Octavia Hill's followers worked hard to make a place for women in the field of housing management and claimed that their femininity gave them special expertise in this area, especially in terms of training housewives in domestic skills and in building up the relations of trust required by Octavia Hill's system. This paper describes the implementation of this system of management in South Africa and considers the implications of the role of women in housing management for our thinking about the gendered character of the state. My main argument is that rather than being a precedent for the value of incorporating femininity and women into the state, Octavia Hill's management tradition had already incorporated both historically masculine and historically feminine practices. In so far as she and her followers (and perhaps other female reformers) played a role in shaping the nature of the state, then it could be argued the state reflected a mediation of masculinity and femininity rather than a dominant masculinity and a subordinated or segregated femininity.     

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.     

‘There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad’: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth‐Century Home

From 1764 to her death in 1774, Deborah Franklin lived in ‘their’ new house without husband Benjamin. The correspondence between them reveals several ambiguously gendered constructions of that house – ideologically, materially, and architecturally. Deborah was ‘homeless’ legally and conceptually. Her household variously consisted of her mother, her adopted son, her daughter, relatives, guests, boarders and servants – she permanently assumed the role of head of the household. His household consisted of his landlady, Widow Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter Polly – he could not assume his role as head of household. Moreover, as Deborah wrote to her husband about turning the house into a fortress during a raid on it during Stamp Act crisis, he wrote to her about the household goods; as she talked about politics, he discussed familial matters. Their permeable, even ambiguous, masculine and feminine roles reconstructed the meaning – and thereby symbolised the gendered complexity – of the early American white middling and elite eighteenth‐century home.     

‘It can be dangerous for the uterus’: hegemonic masculinity and cooperative recycling in São Paulo,Brazil

This study examines performative social relations, specifically the role of hegemonic masculinity in shaping gendered space. First, by drawing on personal experiences and qualitative data from my research in São Paulo, Brazil, I examine the most salient aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the lives of female recyclers. Second, I suggest that masculine domination is not simply something established by men which aims to oppress women, but hegemonic masculinities can be (re)produced by women. I affirm this notion by exploring the ways in which hegemonic masculinity and common perceptions of social roles, abilities, and inabilities are discursively (re)produced by female recyclers. In particular, I argue that exploring the subordinate position of women is a productive means to gain a deeper understanding of hegemonic masculinity, while also, the concept of hegemonic masculinity is an effective tool for understanding the subordinate role of women. My experiences with the recyclers provide a context through which the fluid, complex, and dynamic nature of hegemonic masculinity can be further revealed.     

The Perpetually Wedded Wife of God: A Study of Shaykh Musa “Sadā Suhāg” as the Founder of Sadā Suhāgiyya Silsilah

Some of the sufis have conceptualised the relationship of human beings with God in gendered terms, and identified themselves with the feminine while imagining God in masculine terms. Such a characterisation can be found in sufi poetry, but it also finds manifestation in certain sufi practices as well, such as the male sufis dressing up as women. A fifteenth‐century South Asian sufi, Shaykh Musa “Sadā Suhāg” of Gujarat — the founder of Sadā Suhāgiyya Silsilah — dressed up like a married woman or a bride. His androgynous appearance, soubriquet, and the name of the sufi silsilah he founded, indicate that he ingeniously indigenised the sufi idea of God's bride keeping in view the Indian cultural ethos and social conventions.     

Gendered images of the German nation: the Romantic painter Friedrich Kersting and the patriotic‐national discourse during the Wars of Liberation

ABSTRACT. The article analyses the oeuvre of Friedrich Kersting (1875–1847), a now largely forgotten Romantic painter, and other gendered images of the German nation that were created among his circle of friends but also in the wider context of the patriotic‐national discourse during the Prussian Wars of Liberation. The paper combines the findings of art historical research with those of history and cultural studies. In so doing, it deconstructs gendered images of the nation in the patriotic‐national discourse during the Wars of Liberation and their political importance during that time. The main focus of the analysis is the interrelationship between visual imagery, discursively formed patriotic‐national concepts in the topical literature, cultural practices and individual experience.     

Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo‐Norman England

The use of castration as a punishment for treason and other forms of misdemeanour was a specific trait of the Norman realms of medieval Europe. In the post‐Carolingian kingdoms of France, Germany and Italy, it was rarely practised and only known as a punishment for sexual crimes. In Scandinavia, Normandy, Anglo‐Norman England and Norman Sicily, however, blinding and castration were regarded as an appropriate equivalent of the death penalty. The particular emphasis on masculinity implied in the Norman construction of noble honour, rendered the Norman warrior's body particularly vulnerable. Since his testicles were regarded as the prerequisite of his social existence, they became a legitimate point of attack whenever the ruler felt betrayed and decided to use force against his enemies. This gendered violence constituted a constantly renewed frame of reference, which defined political power as male and reinforced the notion that authority required a fully functional masculine body.     

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.     

Crowded kitchens: the ‘democratisation’ of domesticity?

Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, interviews and ethnographic observation of kitchen practices in South Yorkshire (UK), we suggest that men's entry into the kitchen has facilitated the expression of a more diverse range of masculine subjectivities, while also creating new anxieties for women. Specifically, our evidence suggests that family meals may be experienced as a site of domestic conflict as well as a celebration of family life; that convenience and shortcuts can be embraced by women without incurring feelings of guilt and imperfection; that cooking is being embraced as a lifestyle choice by an increasing numbers of men who use it as an opportunity to demonstrate competence and skill, while women are more pragmatic; and that kitchens may be experienced as ‘uncanny’ spaces by women as men increasingly assert their presence in this domain. Our analysis confirms that while the relationship between domestic practices and gendered subjectivities is changing, this does not amount to a fundamental ‘democratisation’ of domesticity with significantly greater equality between men and women.     

Flexing Femininity: Female body-builders refiguring 'the body'

This paper considers the built bodies of female body-builders and their training environments. Empirical findings suggest that place of training provides a material and discursive environment that reworks bodies in the feminine/masculine binary. However, the female body-builder works her body within this binary as well as beyond the acceptable feminine/masculine dualism. Three possible, non-exclusive, readings of female body-builders are offered. I argue that the specific materiality of female muscled (built) bodies provides the ground for contestation of the feminine/masculine binary as well as other binaries such as nature/culture, body/mind and sex/gender, thereby opening up new spaces to reconceptualise sexed bodies in geography. The ontological and socio-political status of female body-builders demands a refiguring of sexual difference.     

Male Saints and Devotional Masculinity in Late Medieval England

This article considers the ways in which the lives of male monastic saints circulating in late medieval England (and the cults of male saints more widely) were underpinned by certain ideas and ideals of masculinity and the functions which these performed. It argues for the significance of male saints serving as devotional models for the lay audience of these texts (both men and women). The two main sources are William Caxton's Golden Legend (published in 1483) and his Vitas Patrum (published after his death by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495). It therefore seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which piety was used to assess masculinity, but also the extent to which piety as a social identity (both public and private in nature) was informed by notions of manliness.     

Saving the Girls: Medical Colonialism and the HPV Programme

ABSTRACT

Mass immunisation is a central aspiration of global health programmes, such as in the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as a means of addressing the glaring inequalities in life expectancy that separate the Global North and South. A recent initiative, the Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) vaccine, is being rolled out in so-called developing countries to prevent a number of sexually transmitted diseases, including one of the rarer forms of cervical cancer. Despite its apparent good intentions, resistance to the vaccine has occurred, in developed as well as in developing countries, not least because it constitutes a largely gendered form of medical intervention which is promoted according to Western concepts of risk, biomedical knowledge and normative understandings of female sexual behaviour. As a major component of the MDG health strategy aimed at developing countries, the HPV vaccine initiative carries implicit tendencies towards ‘medical colonialism’ underpinned as it is by hegemonic scientific masculinity, in which gendered forms of structural violence are legitimised through the discursive affiliations of progress and global health. This paper will examine the intersecting themes of political economy, gendered structural violence and hegemonic medical masculinity underpinning HPV immunisation programmes within the context of development. It interrogates how masculine scientific narratives of disease prevention, which legitimises the state-endorsed (and increasingly mandated) pharmaceuticalised protection of young women as objects of patriarchal care and control, have become the new missionary voices, saving bodies rather than souls.     

Gendering pastoral power: masculinity,affective labour and competitive bonds of solidarity among Filipino migrant men in Saudi Arabia

This article draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to understand Filipino men’s care work and the making of migrant masculinities in Saudi Arabia. Feminist scholars have indicated the gendered nature of pastoral power and emphasized what Young refers to as the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that characterizes the contemporary security state. However, the notion of pastoral power invites further consideration of the taken for granted cultural assumptions about the way that hegemonic masculinity and forms of homosociality are characterized mainly by aggression, competition and dominance. Men’s talk about and practical involvement in assisting fellow migrants in diasporic settings foregrounds the way that an ethics of care runs up against and is entangled with the competitive bonds of masculine solidarities. While markers of material success are privileged in measuring migrant men’s accomplishments in country of origin, practices of care become central to men’s achievement of symbolic power and social legitimacy especially among their peers in the diaspora. That spatialization is also linked to temporally shifting models of masculinity and normative expectations about men over the life course.     

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.     

‘A Remarkably Patterned Life’: Domestic and Public in the Aztec Household City

This article argues that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan should be understood as a ‘household’, a structure that gave powerful significance to binary gendered ideologies at every level of city organisation. Male and female roles were configured around ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ spheres, but these concepts were perceived in a broader and more flexible way than traditional public/private dichotomies suggest and might helpfully be understood in political terms as distinguishing between exterior/foreign and interior/domestic realms. Building on understandings of parallelism and complementarity, the article demonstrates that gendered pairings, based on distinctive masculine/public and feminine/domestic spheres, mirrored the household not only in social, economic and political contexts, but also in religious settings, providing space for both male and female power at every level of urban life. Just as a married couple provided the basis to a successful and productive home, so the parallel responsibilities of men and women, structured according to concepts of ‘household’ and reflected throughout the institutions and activities of the city, were believed to form the foundations of a thriving Aztec city.