Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Masculinity
Kinds of Masculinity Selected AbstractsEarly Modem Masculinities and The Faerie QueeneENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2005LISA CELOVSKY First page of article [source] British Masculinities on Trial in the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2008Louise Carter 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. [source] Competing Masculinities: Fraternities, Gender and Nationality in the German Confederation, 1815,30GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2008Karin Breuer Immediately after the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon (1815), university students, particularly the nationalist fraternity, the Burschenschaft, sought to connect the German nation with martial values. They practised gymnastics, duelled and commemorated veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The era after the Wars also illustrates greater mediation in the discourse of masculinity than has generally been acknowledged, however. University students never achieved consensus on what masculine identity or German identity entailed. By applying enlightened principles to notions of honour and the practice of the duel, Burschenschafter also articulated a new, more moral vision of the German man, one based more on rationality and self-discipline than on martial values. [source] Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary LawsGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 1 2007Kim M. Phillips First page of article [source] Post-Apartheid Disgrace: Guilty Masculinities in White South African WritingLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2005Georgie Horrell In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa J. M. Coetzee writes of the ,system' of guilt and shame, debt and retribution which operates throughout society. He and writers like André Brink, Michiel Heyns and Troy Blacklaws tell stories which traverse and explore the paths tracked by society's quest for healing and restitution. This article considers a selection of transitional, contemporary white novels in South Africa in order to gesture towards discourses of both particular and global postcolonial significance, referring particularly to gender and representations of white masculinity in the post-apartheid era. [source] Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of New Reproductive Technologies: Male Infertility and Stigma in Egypt and LebanonMEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2004MARCIA C. INHORNArticle first published online: 8 JAN 200 Worldwide, male infertility contributes to more than half of all cases of childlessness; yet, it is a reproductive health problem that is poorly studied and understood. This article examines the problem of male infertility in two Middle Eastern locales, Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon, where men may be at increased risk of male infertility because of environmental and behavioral factors. It is argued that male infertility may be particularly problematic for Middle Eastern men in their pronatalist societies; there, both virility and fertility are typically tied to manhood. Thus, male infertility is a potentially emasculating condition, surrounded by secrecy and stigma. Furthermore, the new reproductive technology called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), designed specifically to overcome male infertility, may paradoxically create additional layers of stigma and secrecy, due to the complex moral and marital dilemmas associated with Islamic restrictions on third-party donation of gametes. [male infertility, masculinity, new reproductive technologies, stigma, Egypt, Lebanon] [source] Masculinities go to community college: Understanding male identity socialization and gender role conflictNEW DIRECTIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES, Issue 142 2008Frank Harris III Previous research has neglected to explore identities and development among male students at community colleges. This chapter provides some insight into who these men are, their precollege gender socialization experiences, and conflicts that impede the development of productive masculinities. [source] Masculinities in Aotearoa/New ZealandNEW ZEALAND GEOGRAPHER, Issue 1 2000Camilla Cockerton No abstract is available for this article. [source] Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities by Simon J. Bronner, with an Afterword by Alan Dundes, EditorsTHE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE, Issue 3 2006Ray B. Browne No abstract is available for this article. [source] From ,Relief' to ,Justice and Protection': The Maintenance of Deserted Wives, British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870,1920GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2010Marjorie Levine-Clark In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians' concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife. [source] Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914,1930: A Study of ,Unconquerable Manhood' by Gabriel KoureasGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 1 2010JOHN BAXENDALE No abstract is available for this article. [source] Corporate Domesticity and Idealised Masculinity: Royal Naval Officers and their Shipboard Homes, 1918,39GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2009Quintin Colville This article explores the interrelationship of masculine identity and corporate domesticity through the example of Royal Naval officers and the quarters they occupied on board ship during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a case study of a surviving warship, it establishes the linkages of this environment to a wider upper-middle-class world of public school common rooms, gentlemen's clubs and family homes. It analyses the role of this shipboard domesticity in defining the idealised and class-specific persona of the naval officer: constructed through foregrounding approved qualities (such as dutifulness, restraint and self-discipline), and suppressing characteristics considered problematic (for instance, introspection, individualism and intellectualism). The article also evaluates the tensions generated by these impersonal and unreachable standards, and the simultaneous ability of the naval home to support corporate and individual behaviours at odds with the officer ideal. The final section explores the gendered nature of these spaces. It argues that while the shipboard home was essentially a male one, the dynamic it engineered between rival ,male' and ,female' domesticities was invariably relational. Officers' communal quarters were routinely used to support and intensify oppositional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Nonetheless, attempts to dispute these boundaries and to internalise feminised qualities of sentiment, attachment and dependency can be detected in the privatised domesticity of the cabin. [source] Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century BritainGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2009Karen Harvey Eighteenth-century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ,home' became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth-century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ,home' came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi-faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ,oeconomy', which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi-faceted eighteenth-century ,home' was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ,outside' and public world. [source] Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ,Houseboys'GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2009Julia Martínez In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ,houseboy' as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ,houseboys' in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so-called ,half-caste' women who, in acknowledgment of their ,white blood', received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ,breadwinning' wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia. [source] Rioting for Dignity: Masculinity, National Identity and Anti-US Resistance in PanamaGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2007Alan McPherson First page of article [source] ,Are You Going to be MISS (or MR) Africa?'Contesting Masculinity in Drum Magazine 1951,1953GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 1 2001Lindsay Clowes DrumDrum magazine was first published in March 1951. Like other magazines, it both reflected and shaped the society from which its audience emerged. During 1951, its audience, mainly urban black readers, was able to push the publication away from its original rural focus towards an urban emphasis. Town living, however, meant different things to different people. Thus, while readers were successful in shifting the focus of the magazine, they were less successful in influencing the way the publication presented urban life. This paper explores the struggle between readers, journalists and editors over the Miss Africa beauty contest announced at the beginning of 1952. Although the magazine reluctantly admitted men to the contest, it discriminated against male entrants in a variety of ways over the course of the year, and subsequent competitions barred male contestants entirely. Despite opposition from male readers who wished to be considered beautiful, the men of Drum were largely successful in asserting their own deeply gendered cultural vision of urban life. [source] ,I Can't Put a Smiley Face On': Working-Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ,New Economy'GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 3 2009Darren Nixon The growth of the ,service economy' has coincided with the large-scale detachment from the labour market of low-skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low-skilled men, this article explores the men's attitudes to entry-level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working-class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low-skilled service work as a future source of employment. [source] Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing, Estate Agency and FirefightingGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 6 2007Alex Hall Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ,scenes of constraint' that gendered identities are both ,done' and ,undone'. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ,masculine' or ,feminine' (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ,the body' need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts. [source] Frontier Masculinity in the Oil Industry: The Experience of Women EngineersGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2004Gloria E. Miller This study contributes to the empirical evidence in the area of gendered organizations (Martin and Collinson, 2002) and their effects on the women who work in them through an interpretive, ethnographic analysis of the oil industry in Canada, specifically Alberta. The study combines data from interviews with women professionals who have extensive employment experience in the industry, a historical analysis of the industry's development in the area and the personal contextual experience of the author. It is suggested that there are three primary processes which structure the masculinity of the industry: everyday interactions which exclude women; values and beliefs specific to the dominant occupation of engineering which reinforce gender divisions; and a consciousness derived from the powerful symbols of the frontier myth and the romanticized cowboy hero. In this dense cultural web of masculinities, the strategies that the women developed to survive, and, up to a point, to thrive, are double-edged in that they also reinforced the masculine system, resulting in short-term individual gains and an apparently long-term failure to change the masculine values of the industry. [source] Masculinity and the Biographical Meanings of Management Theory: Lyndall Urwick and the Making of Scientific Management in Inter-war BritainGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 2 2001Michael Roper This article explores the biographical shaping of management theory. Using the British management theorist Lyndall Urwick (1891,1983) as a case study, it argues that existing understandings of the history of management studies are limited by their lack of attention to the emotional a priori of theory production. For men such as Frederick Taylor or Urwick, the work of composing management theory for a public audience was intimately connected to events and experiences in the private life. Theorizing addressed emotional dilemmas even while it strove to construct a separation between the personal and the organizational. Management theories are not only historically, socially or discursively constructed, but can be read in terms of the evidence they provide about individual subjectivity. Psychoanalytic concepts can help illuminate such relations. Theorizing can be seen as a form of play: as something which, in D.W. Winnicott's terms, takes place in the space between the psychic reality of the ,me' and the external world of the ,not me'. The ,classical' administrative theory represented by Taylor, Fayol and Urwick sought to create organizational structures which could stand apart from, and allow the management of, individual personalities. It simultaneously insisted on the status of theory as the ,not me'; that is, as a product which was not shaped by personal experience, but which constituted objective knowledge. The illusion of theory as a largely external, social product persists in much management and organization studies today. This article challenges that social determinism, first, by showing how Urwick's theories addressed issues of separation and intimacy, and second, by placing Urwick's work in the context of his relations with women. [source] Violence, Masculinity and Self: Killing in Joseph Roth's 1920s FictionGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2000Jon Hughes This essay focuses upon a little considered aspect of Joseph Roth's 1920s fiction , the depiction of the act of killing. I argue that this act should be viewed as central in Roth's portrayal of the damaged psyche of young war veterans, whose strategies of self-denial and self-transformation have terrible consequences for themselves and others. With this in mind, I examine the actions and motives of the fascistic protagonist of Das Spinnennetz (1923), and the revolutionaries in Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927) and Rechts und Links (1929), in their historical and cultural context. The continuities between their actions reflect, I suggest, an awareness on Roth's part of the continuum of male psychology. Drawing on concepts from the work of such cultural critics as Theweleit, Foucault, and Lacan, I discuss the significance of military training, the experience of combat, and political instability in displacing the masculine ego and creating the necessary conditions for violence. The essay concludes by challenging the assumption that Roth only intended to criticise his explicitly fascistic character, for all the texts considered close with personal misery for their characters: inability to relate to others, and dislocation from society. [source] "He lives as a Master": Seventeenth-Century Masculinity, Gendered Teaching, and Careers of New England SchoolmastersHISTORY OF EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2003Jo Anne Preston You that are men and thoughts of manhood know, Be Just now to the Man who made you so. Martyr'd by Scholars the stabbed Cassian dies, And falls to cursed Lads a Sacrafice. Not so my Cheever, Not by Scholars slain, But Praised and Lov'd, and wished to Life again. Cotton Mather, 17081 [source] Competitive Examinations and the Culture of Masculinity in Oxbridge Undergraduate Life, 1850,1920HISTORY OF EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2002Paul R. Deslandes First page of article [source] Choosing the Student Body: Masculinity, Culture, and the Crisis of Medical School Admissions, 1920,1950HISTORY OF EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2002Charlotte G. Borst First page of article [source] Engendering a Therapeutic Ethos: Modernity, Masculinity & NervousnessJOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009KATIE WRIGHT This article considers discourses of "nervousness" as an important historical dimension of the "therapeutic turn". By tracing an emerging therapeutic sensibility through Australian medical literature and the popular print media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it provides an Antipodean perspective on the discursive and cultural terrain receptive to Freudian ideas and psychology, which were central to the ascendancy of a psychotherapeutic ethos. Through a particular focus on concerns about "nervous men", the article explores how perceived problems of "nervousness" destabilized masculine ideals and helped engender a greater concern with personal distress, factors significant for the florescence of therapeutic culture. [source] "I Read the Nikkei, Too": Crafting Positions of Authority and Masculinity in a Japanese ConversationJOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2006Cindi L. SturtzSreetharan This article investigates how Japanese men use terms of address and sentence-final particles to create ongoing positions of superiority, seniority, and masculinity in their conversations. Data are drawn from conversations by all-male groups who are speakers of the Hanshinkan dialect of western Japan. An examination of real linguistic practices shows deft use of multiple linguistic features, including first-person pronouns, address terms, and sentence-final particles, to carve out particular identities vis-ŕ-vis specific interlocutors. These forms and their subsequent stances are interpreted by other speakers in ways that indicate their access to larger discourses of ideological gender and hierarchy relations. [source] Breaking the Mold of Contemporary Working-Class Mexican Masculinity: The Rock Urbano Music of Tex TexJOURNAL OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES, Issue 1 2008Mark A. Hernández [source] "Workin' Hard, Hardly Workin'/Hey Man, You Know Me": Tom Waits, Sound, and the Theatrics of MasculinityJOURNAL OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES, Issue 1 2007Gabriel Solis [source] Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life WritingLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2007Valerie Sanders Author's Introduction The Victorian period was one of the great ages for life-writing. Though traditionally renowned for its monumental ,lives and letters', mainly of great men, this was also a time of self-conscious anxiety about the genre. Critics and practitioners alike were unsure who should be writing autobiography, and whether its inherent assertiveness ruled out all but public men as appropriate subjects. It was also a period of experimentation in the different genres of life-writing , whether autobiography, journals, letters, autobiographical novels, and narratives of lives combined with extracts from correspondence and diaries. Victorian life-writing therefore provides rich and complex insights into the relationship between narrative, identity, and the definition of the self. Recent advances in criticism have highlighted the more radical and non-canonical aspects of life-writing. Already a latecomer to the literary-critical tradition (life-writing was for a long time the ,poor relation' of critical theory), auto/biography stresses the hidden and silent as much as the mainstream and vocal. For that reason, study of Victorian life-writing appeals to those with an interest in gender issues, postcolonialism, ethnicity, working-class culture, the history of religion, and family and childhood studies , to name but a few of the fields with which the genre has a natural connection. Author Recommends A good place to start is the two canonical texts for Victorian life-writing: George P. Landow's edited collection, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979) and Avrom Fleishman's Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983). These two re-ignited interest in Victorian life-writing and in effect opened the debate about extending the canon, though both focus on the firmly canonical Ruskin and Newman, among others. By contrast, David Amigoni's recently edited collection of essays, Life-Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) shows how far the canon has exploded and expanded: it begins with a useful overview of the relationship between lives, life-writing, and literary genres, while subsequent chapters by different authors focus on a particular individual or family and their cultural interaction with the tensions of life-writing. As this volume is fairly male-dominated, readers with an interest in women's life-writing might prefer to start with Linda Peterson's chapter, ,Women Writers and Self-Writing' in Women and Literature in Britain 1800,1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209,230. This examines the shift from the eighteenth-century tradition of the chroniques scandaleuses to the professional artist's life, domestic memoir, and spiritual autobiography. Mary Jean Corbett's Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992) begins with material on Wordsworth and Carlyle, but ,aims to contest the boundaries of genre, gender, and the autobiographical tradition by piecing together a partial history of middle-class women's subjectivities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' (3). Corbett is particularly interested in the life-writing of actresses and suffragettes as well as Martineau and Oliphant, the first two women autobiographers to be welcomed into the canon in the 1980s and 90s. Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994) revises and updates the theoretical approaches to the study of life-writing, stressing both the genre's hybrid qualities, and its inherent instability: in her view, it ,comes into being as a category to be questioned' (37). Another of her fruitful suggestions is that autobiography functions as a ,site of struggle' (9), an idea that can be applied to aesthetic or ideological issues. Her book is divided between specific textual examples (such as the debate about autobiography in Victorian periodicals), and an overview of developments in critical approaches to life-writing. Her second chapter includes material on Leslie Stephen, who is also the first subject of Trev Lynn Broughton's Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) , her other being Froude's controversial Life of Carlyle. With the advent of gender studies and masculinities, there is now a return to male forms of life-writing, of which Martin A. Danahay's A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993) is a good example. Danahay argues that nineteenth-century male autobiographers present themselves as ,autonomous individuals' free of the constraints of social and familial contexts, thus emphasizing the autonomy of the self at the expense of family and community. Online Materials My impression is that Victorian life-writing is currently better served by books than by online resources. There seem to be few general Web sites other than University module outlines and reading lists; for specific authors, on the other hand, there are too many to list here. So the only site I'd recommend is The Victorian Web: http://.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html This Web site has a section called ,Autobiography Overview', which begins with an essay, ,Autobiography, Autobiographicality and Self-Representation', by George P. Landow. There are sections on other aspects of Victorian autobiography, including ,Childhood as a Personal Myth', autobiography in Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a list of ,Suggested Readings'. Each section is quite short, but summarizes the core issues succinctly. Sample Syllabus This sample syllabus takes students through the landmarks of Victorian life-writing, and demonstrates the development of a counter-culture away from the mainstream ,classic male life' (if there ever was such a thing) , culminating in the paired diaries of Arthur Munby (civil servant) and Hannah Cullwick (servant). Numerous other examples could have been chosen, but for those new to the genre, this is a fairly classic syllabus. One week only could be spent on the ,classic male texts' if students are more interested in pursuing other areas. Opening Session Open debate about the definition of Victorian ,life-writing' and its many varieties; differences between autobiography, autobiographical fiction, diary, letters, biography, collective biography, and memoir; the class could discuss samples of selected types, such as David Copperfield, Father and Son, Ruskin's Praeterita, and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Alternatively, why not just begin with Stave Two of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the First Spirit takes Scrooge back through his childhood and youth? This is a pretty unique type of life-writing, with Scrooge ,laughing and crying' as his childhood and youth are revealed to him in a series of flashbacks (a Victorian version of ,This is Your Life?'). The dual emotions are important to note at this stage and will prompt subsequent discussions of sentimentality and writing for comic effect later in the course. Week 2 Critical landmarks: discussion of important stages in the evolution of critical approaches to life-writing, including classics such as Georges Gusdorf's ,Conditions and Limits of Autobiography', in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28,47; Philippe Lejeune's ,The Autobiographical Pact', in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (original essay 1973; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3,30; and Paul De Man's ,Autobiography as De-Facement', Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919,30. This will provide a critical framework for the rest of the course. Weeks 3,4 Extracts from the ,male classics' of Victorian life-writing: J. S. Mill's Autobiography (1873), Ruskin's Praeterita (1885,89), and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). What do they think is important and what do they miss out? How open or otherwise are they about their family and personal lives? Are these essentially ,lives of the mind'? How self-aware are they of autobiographical structures? Are there already signs that the ,classic male life' is fissured and unconventional? An option here would be to spend the first week focusing on male childhoods, and the second on career trajectories. Perhaps use Martin Danahay's theory of the ,autonomous individual' (see above) to provide a critical framework here: how is the ,Other' (parents, Harriet Taylor) treated in these texts? Weeks 5,6 Victorian women's autobiography: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877) and Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography (1899): in many ways these are completely unalike, Martineau's being ordered around the idea of steady mental growth and public recognition, while Oliphant's is deeply emotional and disordered. Can we therefore generalize about ,women's autobiography'? What impact did they have on Victorian theories of life-writing? Students might like to reconsider Jane Eyre as an ,autobiography' alongside these and compare scenes of outright rebellion. The way each text handles time and chronology is also fascinating: Martineau's arranged to highlight stages of philosophical development, while Oliphant's switches back and forth in a series of ,flashbacks' to her happier youth as her surviving two sons die ,in the text', interrupting her story. Week 7 Black women's autobiography: how does Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) differ from the Martineau and Oliphant autobiographies? What new issues and genre influences are introduced by a Caribbean/travelogue perspective? Another key text would be Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861). How representative and how individual are these texts? Do these authors see themselves as representing their race as well as their class and sex? Week 8 Working-class autobiography: Possible texts here could be John Burnett's Useful Toil (Allen Lane, 1974, Penguin reprint); Carolyn Steedman's edition of John Pearman's The Radical Soldier's Tale (Routledge, 1988) and the mini oral biographies in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861,62) (e.g., the Water-Cress Seller). There is also a new Broadview edition of Factory Lives (2007) edited by James R. Simmons, with an introduction by Janice Carlisle. This contains four substantial autobiographical texts (three male, one female) from the mid-nineteenth century, with supportive materials. Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839,42; 1844) and Early Days (1847,48) are further options. Students should also read Regenia Gagnier's Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832,1910 (Oxford University Press, 1991). Week 9 Biography: Victorian Scandal: focus on two scandals emerging from Victorian life-writing: Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) (the Branwell Brontë/Lady Scott adultery scandal), and Froude's allegations of impotence in his Life of Carlyle (1884). See Trev Broughton's ,Impotence, Biography, and the Froude-Carlyle Controversy: ,Revelations on Ticklish Topics', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.4 (Apr. 1997): 502,36 (in addition to her Men of Letters cited above). The biographies of the Benson family written about and by each other, especially E. F. Benson's Our Family Affairs 1867,1896 (London: Cassell, 1920) reveal the domestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone's Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extent homosexual or lesbian. Another option would be Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) in which the son's critical stance towards his father is uneasy and complex in its mixture of comedy, pity, shame, and resentment. Week 10 Diaries: Arthur Munby's and Hannah Cullwick's relationship (they were secretly married, but lived as master and servant) and diaries, Munby: Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur Munby, ed. Derek Hudson (John Murray, 1972), and The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984): issues of gender and class identity; the idealization of the working woman; the two diaries compared. Half the class could read one diary and half the other and engage in a debate about the social and sexual fantasies adopted by each diarist. It would also be sensible to leave time for an overview debate about the key issues of Victorian life-writing which have emerged from this module, future directions for research, and current critical developments. Focus Questions 1To what extent does Victorian autobiography tell an individual success story? Discuss with reference to two or three contrasting examples. 2,All life writing is time writing' (Jens Brockmeier). Examine the way in which Victorian life-writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time. 3To what extent do you agree with the view that Victorian life-writing was ,a form of communication that appeared intimate and confessional, but which was in fact distant and controlled' (Donna Loftus)? 4,Bamford was an autobiographer who did not write an autobiography' (Martin Hewitt). If autobiography is unshaped and uninterpreted, what alternative purposes does it have in narrating a life to the reader? 5,Victorian life-writing is essentially experimental, unstable, and unpredictable.' How helpful is this comment in helping you to understand the genre? [source] What to do with the "Tubby Hubby"?"Obesity," the Crisis of Masculinity, and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War CanadaANTIPODE, Issue 5 2009Deborah McPhail Abstract:, Despite current insistence that obesity is a new problem, obesity and fat were discussed frequently in the medical and popular presses and by state officials during the early Cold War in Canada. Using Kristeva's (1982,,Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) concept of abjection, I argue that Cold War anxieties about fat, and specifically the obesity of white, middle-class men, had less to do with the growing girth of bodies than it did with a post-war crisis in masculinity related to the collapse of the public and private spheres. Through an analysis of fitness regimes and female-administered diets for men, I argue that anti-obesity rhetoric served to assuage dominant worries about degenerating masculinity by reasserting both the gendered division of labour and the white, middle-class, nuclear family as Canadian norms. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||