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.     

Privileging masculinity in the social construction of Basque identity

Following a framework developed by Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (1995), this article illustrates how Basque‐medium schools promulgate an androcentric vision of the Basque nation. First, male privilege is upheld in textbooks through the erasure of women's contributions to Basque language and culture, so that men appear as the quintessential Basque speakers and cultural agents. Secondly, language ideologies about Spanish and Basque recursively construct Basque ethnic identity is such a way that it centres on vernacular Basque, whose primary marker is a second person pronoun, ‘hi’, which indirectly indexes male speakers and masculinity. An iconic relationship is thereby created between authentic Basque identity, Basque culture, Basque linguistic forms and masculinity. However, I also show that women have challenged this male privilege in various domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a Basque nation that embraces its female as well as its male members.     

Cold War Orientalism

Books reviewed:
Christina Klein. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination , 1945 – 1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv + 316 pp. Notes, Index, Illustrations. $55.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper).     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

Spain violated: foreign men in Spain's heartland

The process of colonial expansion in the sixteenth century fundamentally changed Spanish culture. Along with race, religion, ethnicity, status and honour, definitions of proper gendered and sexual behaviour changed as well. This article argues that Spanish communities and institutions came to define foreign men as examples of a subordinate and dangerous masculinity. The threat that foreign male sexuality posed to Spanish women and thus Spanish patriarchy – not only in the colonies, but within Spain itself – led institutions to prosecute foreign men. This essay draws on the language used in Inquisition and ecclesiastical court cases against foreign men as well as in Spanish literature of the period.     

The Origins of British Military Psychiatry Before the First World War

Abstract

This article discusses the military role of the Moorish units deployed by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and assesses their impact in cultural, social, and religious terms, especially given the image of Muslim troops going back to the Reconquista.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.     

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Repudiation of Protestant German War Theology

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a revolutionary in two senses. Obviously, his role in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, when it was discovered, stamped him as a political revolutionary. Beyond that, however, Bonhoeffer was a theological revolutionary in that he repudiated and refuted the prevailing Lutheran‐Hegelian‐Rankean Geschichtsbild, i.e., image of German history, that had become paradigmatic for his class, the so‐called Bildungsbürgertum, the highly educated upper middle class. Central to this image was the idea of the Creator God as essentially a “warrior” God who realized the history of salvation via the power struggles of nation states. Bonhoeffer, in his confrontation with the Third Reich, came to the conclusion that its evil triumph had a great deal to do with the image of history that underpinned it. This article traces the evolution of the doctrine of the Power State rooted as it was in Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms or realms, and shows how Bonhoeffer via his reflections expressed in the fragments known as Ethics, overturned that doctrine and thereby wrought an intellectual‐historical achievement of immense significance not only for Germany, but also for the modern world.     

Sadists and Sissies: Anti‐pornography Campaigns in Cold War America

Examination of anti‐obscenity campaigns in the post‐war years suggests that the ideals of masculinity mandated by cold war politics troubled Americans in ways more complex than historians have recognised. Psychiatrists, politicians and clubwomen focused on the graphic depiction of an aggressive, even violent, male heterosexuality in comic books and erotica to suggest that American men had become too hard and undomesticated, unable to sustain the institution so central to the American way of life – the family. Framed as a defence of beleaguered mothers and their children against male sadists, these campaigns expressed the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting demands on gender and family ideologies required by the domestic and foreign policies of the cold war.     

‘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.     

British Masculinities on Trial in the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820

This article uses the deluge of pamphlets, public addresses, newspaper articles and sermons addressing the Queen Caroline Affair to construct a case study of the opposing constructions of British masculinity vying for dominance in 1820. The literature surrounding the attempted royal divorce reveals a contest between the libertine example of manhood characterised by George IV and the more sober, chivalrous and respectable image of masculinity increasingly espoused as the British ideal. This episode, therefore, offers an unusually rich insight into contemporary constructions of masculinity and the way in which they were utilised within the public sphere. Moreover, this article argues that such gendered concerns were not only as crucial to motivating opposition to the king's actions as political issues, but that gender concerns and political issues were indivisible, as appropriate manly behaviour in both public and private increasingly came to be seen as a core component of a man's overall reputation and fitness to exercise authority.     

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.     

Politicians,Merchants, and Colonial Maritime War: The Political and Economic Background of the American Act of 1708

During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), there were attempts to support colonial maritime war by legislation, and the American Act of 1708 can be seen as their culmination. Historians who study privateering or colonial history have referred to this act in several contexts, such as reform in prize administration, naval impressment in American colonies, and Spanish‐American trade. However, the political and economic interests behind this act have not been fully investigated. By examining the process of the enactment of the American Act together with antecedent attempts to promote colonial maritime war in parliament, this article reveals the political and vested interests involved in the act, the relations between them, and the influence they had on the content of the act. This analysis will show the complex interaction between politics, trade, and colonial maritime war in the early‐18th‐century American colonies.     

Black male: Advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity

During the 1980s, men's bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising. The advertisers’ preferred image of masculinity has generally been young, white, able‐bodied and staunchly heterosexual. This paper explores a partial exception to these generalisations: Ogilvy & Mather's highly successful relaunch of the soft drink, Lucozade. By using selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess, Lucozade was able to shake off its long‐established associations with sickness and convalescence, becoming a popular ‘in‐health’ drink with a revitalised and revitalising image. The paper places contemporary representations of black men in British advertising in relation to wider changes in attitudes towards gender, sexuality and ‘race’, arguing that the success of the Lucozade campaign depended not so much on general associations between sport and ‘race’, manliness and muscularity, as on the reader's (socially constructed) knowledge of the particular personalities represented. This assumed knowledge effectively suppresses the more threatening aspects of a stereotypically anonymous and rapacious black male sexuality, provoking desire without evoking dread.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Inevitability,masculinity, and the American military tradition: the committee on the conduct of the war investigates the American Civil War

This essay examines the work of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, a joint select committee of investigation formed by Congress during the American Civil War. During its tenure in the 37^th and 38^th sessions of Congress, the Committee investigated almost every aspect of Union military operations; however, its principal concern was the examination of Union military defeats. Members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War were influenced by the notion of inevitable Union victory. As self‐made men who had achieved a degree of success in the emerging market economy of nineteenth‐century America, Committee members exemplified the period's predominate concept of masculinity. Also skeptical of military science and distrustful of the United States military academy at West Point, the Committee showed a marked preference for volunteer soldiers and officers throughout the war. Believing that West Point generals who endorsed strategic maneuver were cowardly and disloyal, Committee members were frequently critical of regular army officers in their investigations. Confusing the rhetoric of ‘hard war’ with military competence, the Committee's disdain for military education caused it to endorse incompetent military leadership and advocate mediocre generals for high command.     

War and city size: The asymmetric effects of the Spanish Civil War

Populations are affected by shocks of different kinds, and wars, a priori, may be among the most prominent. This article studies the effect of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) shock on the distribution of population, especially on cities. One of the main contributions of this study is that it underlines the importance of distinguishing between winning and losing sides, an aspect which until now has been largely overlooked. While previous research on war shocks has also tended to be concerned with inter-state wars, this paper concentrates on a civil war. We take advantage of a new, long-term, annual data set. Our results show that, overall, the Spanish Civil War did not have a significant effect on city growth. However, we also find a significant and negative effect in the growth of cities that aligned themselves with the losing side. These results are robust to heterogeneity in the effect of the war shock, measured as war severity and duration. Although short lived, the temporary effect on growth results in a permanent effect on the size of cities on the losing side.     

Images of Muslims in Western Scholarship and Media after 9/11

This article endeavors to trace changes in the images of the Muslim of the Orient, a product of Orientalism, to contemporary images of the Muslim post 9/11, marking a transition from classical Orientalism to a new Orientalism or Islamism. The study demonstrates how most Western scholarship and media, through the construction of so‐called Islamophobia, have portrayed Muslims in terms of global terrorism, Islamic jihadism, fanatic Islamism, fundamentalism, fascism, and Islamic authoritarianism. Much of the scholarship and media dealing with Islam and Muslims require critical assessment and revision. The article also addresses ways through which Muslims in academia and the media have opposed negative images of Muslims. For instance, in response to the irrational acts of extremists that have fostered negative stereotypes of Islam, public lectures, sermons, conferences, and media programs have recently and abundantly been made by Muslim scholars and media activists to present Muslims positively at both the national and global levels.     

Gendering Palestinian Dispossession: Evaluating Land Loss in the West Bank

Despite increasing attention to Palestinian territorial dispossession, there is inadequate attention paid to how this dispossession is gendered in its legitimising discourses and practices. Inattention to gender results in a failure to understand the power relations at play in the processes through which Palestinians are dispossessed of their land, the discourses that serve to support that dispossession and the impacts of that dispossession. This article examines the roles of Israeli hegemonic militarised masculinity as deployed in discourses and practices of “security” as well as idealised Zionist femininity and idealised Zionist masculinity as deployed in discourses and practices of “God‐given Righteousness”. It finds that both are effective means of dispossessing Palestinians of their land, and that in settlements in the West Bank, the hegemonic militarised masculinity is often subsumed under idealised Zionist femininity and masculinity when it comes to settlement expansion and the violent dispossession of Palestinian land.     

Hunting in Currier and Ives's America

Currier and Ives were the most prolific producers of inexpensive lithographs in nineteenth‐century America, their prints designed to be mirrors of national tastes and attitudes. They never intended to create fine art, but rather to produce images that would be attractive to their largely middle‐class clientele. As people gathered in cities in increasingly large numbers and had their work hours regulated, they had the time, interest, and disposable income to engage in various sporting activities. Well‐off city dwellers took to hunting, both for enjoyment and as a symbolic, ritualistic expression of their place in society. Hunting came to reflect urban males’ preoccupation with pursuits that might liberate them from the growing regimentation of city life and gave visible form to the definition of masculinity in their newly adopted urban environment. Currier and Ives mirrored the development of that image in more than 100 lithographs on hunting.