What Is Gender History? by Rose Sonya O.;

Author:Rose, Sonya O.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2011-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to introduce the reader to how gender historians have approached the topic of manhood. It has presented three approaches to the subject. One focuses on the cultural codes that informed how men should be men as they lived their lives in different periods. From studies using this approach we have learned that for medieval and early modern men to be manly men or to attain the status of manhood, they had to test their manliness against other men or they had to achieve the status of manhood through marriage and becoming head of a household. We have seen that there were competing codes of manliness and different kinds of men might assert themselves as men, at times coming into open conflict, as in Bacon’s Rebellion in Colonial Virginia. We have seen how violence between men and its use against children, wives, and slaves unsettled patriarchal masculinity, and conjectured that the very association of manhood (and men) with power might be at the basis of what some have referred to as a “crisis of masculinity.”

Research focused on codes of masculinity and their performance by men illustrates how these codes change historically and investigates the history of men as gendered social actors. But as Mrinalini Sinha has pointed out with regard to her work on colonial masculinities discussed above, another approach to the history of masculinity or manhood understands masculinity as detached from male bodies.70 Such an approach to codes of masculinity enables the historian to see how the meanings of masculinity are deployed to reproduce or contest particular relations of power in specific historical circumstances. Thus Sinha’s analysis of colonial masculinities in British India shows how the idea of the “manly Englishman” and the “effeminate Bengali” was derived from and was used in the politics of colonial rule. Her approach is similar to that of Kristin Hoganson’s research on the politics of masculinity as it played out in the debates leading to the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars in the turn-of-the-century United States. Hoganson argued that the participants in the debate (who most likely were men) used different versions of manhood rhetorically because a convergence of factors made particular notions of masculinity especially relevant to American diplomacy.

While this chapter has focused primarily on the cultural constructions of masculinity or manliness, it has presented, however briefly, a third approach to the topic of masculinity – one that raises questions of the emotional lives of male historical actors and how cultural constructs of masculinity have been lived. This approach returns masculinity to men’s bodies and concerns itself with gender subjectivity, a topic which we shall revisit in the final chapter of this book. The next chapter, meanwhile, will explore some of the research illuminating how gender has been a significant factor in processes that have been of central concern to historians, such as revolution, war, and nation formation.

Notes

1 Michael S. Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays in the History of American and British Masculinities, Albany: SUNY Press, 2005: ix.

2 Gail

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