Introduction

Abstract

Describing gender relations has become more complex since a man could confidently assert that women’s hair grows longer because it waves and screens the delicate shoulders from injuries ‘which might be sustained by free exposure to air’ (Rowland 10). Yet the study of masculinity in the late twentieth century had a hard time when it came to finding critical acceptance. Initially it was frequently understood as an antifeminist backlash, a typical joke being ‘Why study masculinity now? We haven’t been doing anything else for centuries!’ For some, the concept of masculinity itself was an irrelevant joke: in 1994, Private Eye condemned one of the editors to ‘Pseuds’ Corner’ for daring to instigate a conference on the topic, presumably because of the advertised desire to explore homoerotic triangles in Renaissance literature and yoghurt. Yet the common observation that what is pervasive in society and culture often remains invisible also holds true for masculinity. As John McLeod has argued, until recently, the cultural critic was faced with blankness ‘when interrogating the abstractions of masculinity’ (218). In this volume, Gerald Siegmund explores this paradox of masculinity being both everywhere and nowhere in relation to Romantic ballet: he focuses on the gradual uncovering of the semiotics of the male dancer on stage, and the contradiction between the requirement for male dancers in classical ballet and their relegation to the background.

Rainer Emig, Antony Rowland

1. Touching Byron: Masculinity and the Celebrity Body in the Romantic Period

Abstract

If Byron’s contemporaries were entranced by his poetry and personal myth, many of those who met him for the first time also invariably recorded their impressions of his body. ‘That beautiful pale face is my fate,’ said Lady Caroline Lamb. Contemporary accounts often contained depictions of Byron’s physique, which sought to capture the peculiarities of his face, eyes, voice and gait. As these features stimulated the inquisitive gaze of onlookers and admirers, Byron became a body to observe and scrutinize; a spectacular body inspiring curiosity and fascination. However, Byron’s was also a body that repeatedly eluded decodification and exceeded cultural norms at a time when conservative gender codes were increasingly linking masculinity to notions of productivity, domesticity, reserve and probity, an image promoted by such powerful advocates of Evangelical values as Hannah More and William Wilberforce. In contrast with this prescriptive discourse, Byron’s body functions in Romantic culture as the opposite of, and an antidote to, this conventionally regulated male body and masculine identity. Specifically, the desire for the irregular, excessive body of Byron (and, indeed, that of his fictional heroes) emerges powerfully in a number of accounts which hint at the possibility of breaking verbal, visual and social barriers in order to touch Byron. Inviting scrutiny and attracting physical contact, Byron-as-body is a flagrantly non-normative object, a magnetic physique that, moreover, does not lose its cultural power after the poet’s death in 1824. In fact, its persistent relevance may be gauged through its influence on the silver-fork and dandy novelists of the 1820s and 1830s, a generation of writers who looked back to Regency society as the moment of origination of dandyism and a time when aristocratic codes of behavior were still relatively unchallenged. Yet, for the silver-fork novelists the Byronic body proves too much. Their narratives, in particular Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham and Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, ultimately deflect its subversive potential, just as they neutralize the eccentricity of the dandy code and realign their dandy heroes with established conventions. If, in the earlier period, touching Byron’s body implied a brush with disturbing celebrity, touching it in the silver-fork implies an initial recovery of its subversive value and the eventual neutralization of its disturbing potential. These narratives effect a move from the Byronic to the normative body which enables the dandy hero to be reintegrated as a fully-fledged and active member of society. Nonetheless, although the silver-fork novels reduce its eccentric and excessive import within their normalizing conclusions, the Byronic body remains tantalizingly enigmatic and unavailable to the desire to touch it, a differential mode of masculinity that stands its ground as an alternative to the influential conservative models emerging in the Romantic period.

… when we think of Byron, the first thing that comes before our eyes is a physical presence, a profile. (Praz 147)

Diego Saglia

2. Turning into Subjects: The Male Dancer in Romantic Ballet

Abstract

This essay starts from the observation that in the course of the nineteenth century male dancers were, at least in the Paris Opera, gradually removed from ballets. As becomes apparent in Théophile Gautier’s writings on ballet, men had to define their physicality against both the old aristocracy and the laboring classes — and moreover against the bodies of women with their distinguishing feature, the womb, and the emotional and social codes in which the female body was conceptualized. Masculinity in nineteenth-century ballet is not an essence but relational. This chapter argues that, as in La Sylphide (1832), the male dancer is the representation of the male gaze lurking in the shadows and yet organizing the whole field of vision according to its principles. While the male body in the Romantic ballet phantasmatically becomes one with the detached gaze, it nonetheless remains an abstract entity that is inscribed in the geometrical ordering of the dancing bodies in space. In order to be the dominant structure, any claim to a positively defined masculine identity must be abandoned. With Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le spectre de la rose (1911) the male dancer enters the frame of representation, thus becoming a subject by being an object of female desire. Like the sylph he acquires a body only in the process of becoming a disembodied thing that is always on the verge of turning into an image. Thus, unlike the male gaze in La Sylphide, once the male dancer has entered the picture, his modern gaze is split. There is something he can no longer control from his newly gained position: the gaze of the other that gives him a body.

Gerald Siegmund

3. Industrial Heroes: Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë’s Constructions of the Masculine

Abstract

The associations of masculinity with industrialization are explored in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South in the present essay. It demonstrates that control of the self and of others is essential to the Victorian understanding of masculinity and class structure. Yet the frequent use of violence in connection with this (self-)control simultaneously props up and undermines mastery — by making it morally and socially dubious. Masculinity is therefore most unstable when it is most physically present. Hard and unyielding men, furthermore, need tempering by feminine influence to turn pure mercantile thinking into socially acceptable care. This also turns them from newfangled captains of industry into the recognizable equivalent of the traditional paternalistic squire. Masculinity in Victorian industrial novels is therefore a project, a goal, a case of redemption of a degraded and contradictory structure rather than the simple assertion of an unproblematic norm.

Jessica L. Malay

4. Low on Assurance: The Troubled Masculinity of Victorian Comedy

Abstract

Victorianism is often associated with a monolithic patriarchy that oppresses women but gives men almost unlimited power. The present essay challenges this assumption and shows that men and the masculinity that is supposed to shape them are also subjected to the great ideologies that rule the nineteenth century: class and wealth. Men have price-tags on the marriage market, rise or fall according to their changing market value and are ultimately as hollow as that which supposedly gives them an identity: money. The discussed plays by the successful Victorian playwrights Dion Boucicault and Edward Bulwer-Lytton display this nexus between their supposed display of the gentleman ideal and their underlying materialism even in their titles. In them, assurances and money come to dominate any trace of what might be a ‘natural,’ ‘normal,’ or ‘ideal’ masculinity and replace it by a vacuous and often comical, though nonetheless seductive, blueprint.

Rainer Emig

5. Performing Imperial Masculinities: The Discourse and Practice of Cricket

Abstract

Cricket is one of the mainstays of Englishness. The present essay shows that it is also crucial in defining a kind of national masculinity in performance. This is all the more important as cricket is a nostalgic celebration of ‘white’ rural Englishness, yet has from its beginnings also been used to educate young males for service in the colonies. Moreover, it has been instrumental in integrating players and teams from the former British colonies in British national culture. Inside the discourse of sports, issues of masculinity, race, ethnicity, and nationality are therefore enacted, all of which have an impact on and are projected onto the bodies of the players. The ideal elegance of the proficient player is, in keeping with the ideal of a healthy mind inside a healthy body, meant to represent both moral virtue and race and class superiority. The West Indies cricketer Learie Constantine and his style of play provided a first historic challenge to such established thinking.

Anthony Bateman

6. ‘A Stoat Came to Tea’: Camp Poetics and Masculinity

Abstract

While poetry has traditionally been regarded as the highest of literary genres and therefore frequently been associated with idealized male poets and their assumed gravitas, self-subverting forms of ‘camp’ poetics can be traced all the way to the Renaissance. The present essay takes camp poetics as a necessary corrective and self-criticism within a male poetic tradition and explores it in works by poets ranging from Donne to W. H. Auden and John Ashbery. In their works, excess, exaggeration, and strategic extravagance go side by side with often very serious concerns. A camp poetics provides masculinity with a kind of double vision inside which it performs itself while looking quizzically and critically at its own performance at the same time.

Antony Rowland

7. Lethal Enclosure: Masculinity under Fire in James Jones’s The Thin Red Line

Abstract

War and masculinity have traditionally been intimately entangled — to the degree that the warrior ideal has become one of the crucial concepts of Masculinity Studies. The present essay looks at modern depictions of masculinity in war literature, especially at James Jones’s novel The Thin Red Line (1962). In it, both the typical ‘hypermasculinity’ of war scenarios and crucial cracks inside traditional norms of masculinity are traced. Among those are instances of effeminizing characters, homoeroticism and extravagant, excessive and irresponsible behavior, all the way to counterfeiting masculinity. Yet these ’paradoxes in thinking’ of heroic masculinity are not averse to the creation of a mythic American self that bears a strong resemblance to that created in connection with the American West. Indeed they are part and parcel of such a performative creation in which they provide a necessary outlet within structures of containment and enforcement that would otherwise be unliveable. They are moreover responses to historical crises of such a mythical American selfhood. The presumed crisis of masculinity thereby joins a larger arrangement of supposed crises that nonetheless stabilize ideology.

David Boulting

8. In their Fathers’ Footsteps: Performing Masculinity and Fatherhood in the Work of Les Murray and Michael Ondaatje

Abstract

The performance of masculinity is always rife with contradictions and conflicts. However, as theorists such as Hazel V. Carby, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and, more recently, Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett have suggested, in a postcolonial context this performance is even more precarious and political. This chapter considers the implications of performing masculinity in the work of Australian poet, Les Murray and that of Sri Lankan-Canadian writer, Michael Ondaatje. It will engage, for the most part, with Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998) and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987). These texts explore performances of masculinity against the backdrop of twentieth-century histories that are characterized by complicated cultural and social exchanges. In both novels, all identity is transnational and the writers’ representations of race and nationality also have implications for the performance of gender. These works deal with post-colonial histories, although they are not radical discussions of race, or focussed on black masculinities. Yet, both writers seek to dismantle a secure sense of white Western masculinity and question the patriarchal paradigm of the nation-state. As they reveal the unstable performance of masculinity, other forms of self-identification are also demonstrated to be similarly insubstantial. This is most overtly shown through the novels’ focus on the physical performance of masculinity and its lack of sustainability, as the protagonists’ male bodies become signifiers of gender that are aged, numbed, emasculated, damaged, or exploited. Not only is this focus on the physical a direct reference to the corporeality of any performance of masculinity, but these symbols of manliness are also tied into a construction of identity that is predicated on the physical attributes of race. This problematic masculinity is refracted into the discussion of nationality through both texts’ centralization of the father and son relationship. The homosocial families that Murray and Ondaatje envisage reconceptualize the family unit and abandon the restrictive binaries of gender. If, as has been suggested by Anne McClintock (1997) and David H. I. Morgan (2001), the nuclear family is an iconic representation of national identity that upholds the patriarchal ideal, these texts abandon the female part of this model and thereby demonstrate its restrictions. The potentially patriarchal remains of the family unit is destabilized through the unreliable performance of masculinity, as the masculine identity that is inherited and relearned from generation to generation is revealed to be an empty performance. In this context, this chapter will argue that in Murray and Ondaatje’s work, to follow in ones father’s footsteps is to perform a paradoxical masculinity that unmasks the stereotypes of maleness, and disrupts a patriarchal sense of nationhood.

Katharine Burkitt

9. Seeding Asian Masculinities in the US Landscape: Representations of Men’s Lives in Asian American Literature

Abstract

Asian American masculinities emerge out of the everyday realities of men’s embodied lives and thus should be understood as organically growing out of the intersections of local and global contexts. The literary texts of David Mas Masumoto, a Japanese American writer and peach farmer, who lives in the San Joaquin Valley in California, portray work, family, community, and the environment in a nuanced ecological and ethnic framework, yet also the multiple tensions faced by Asian American men as they negotiate notions of masculinity across diverse geopolitical borders, social and cultural formations, and networks in diasporic communities. They display transformative formations of masculinity that move away from the aggressive, martial cultural nationalist models of the 1960s and 1970s that were being constructed in the ferment of Asian American cultural and literary politics and calls for social justice and recognition. Land and the care of the environment as well as the cultivation and sustainability of families and communities are the embodied heart of his narrative and practice. His is a self-reflexive attentiveness, respect, and sensoriality that savor the minutiae of daily life and work, the fluctuating rhythms of actively inhabiting and engaging with a bio-diverse world.

Wendy Ho

10. From Glam Rock to Cock Rock: Revis(it)ing Rock Masculinities in Recent Feature Films

Abstract

After a brief general outline of the depiction of rock in film, this essay investigates the constructions of rock masculinities in the feature films Rock Star, Almost Famous, Still Crazy, and Velvet Goldmine. The essay reads the first three films as representative of the dominant strategies of representing male rock stardom in streamlined independent cinema. Despite the pretence of (comically) debunking the discourses of authenticity, rebelliousness, and gender prevalent in various forms of ‘cock rock’ through a representation of masculinities in crisis and a moralistic guidance of sympathy, these films actually rely on and support a construction of rock as a male cosmos streaked by homophobia, misogyny and a gendered conception of fandom. Velvet Goldmine, in contrast, is marked by a narrative structure and a discussion of ideas that deliberately uphold ambivalences and uncertainties on the topics of art, stardom, theatricality, love, and sexuality. Despite these differences all four films share a celebratory attitude toward rock music and, through a technique of historical distancing, convey nostalgia for an idealized state of rock. This nostalgia, however, refers to the spirit of rebelliousness and authenticity rather than the gender conceptions in the glam and cock rock spheres of the 1970s and 1980s.

Lucia Krämer

11. Histories of Violence — Fairytales of Identity and Masculinity in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman

Abstract

By looking at two recent plays by one of contemporary Britain’s most influential playwrights, this chapter attempts to retrace a shift in the configuration of male gender identities, a shift which is not restricted to Martin McDonagh’s work only, but which could be read as symbolic for a larger transformation in the understanding of gender roles in general.

Wolfgang Funk

12. ‘Ghosts of Sparta’: Performing the God of War’s Virtual Masculinity

Abstract

Computer games, especially in their action-driven violent variety, are often associated with an unthinking attachment to traditional clichés of masculinity. The present essay shows that this assessment is far too simplistic. It explores in particular an adventure game franchise entitled God of War to demonstrate that within chauvinist structures there is also evidence of often very radical subversions of traditional masculine norms. Patriarchy in the game is upheld as well as challenged. Macho sexual fantasies are acted out as well as evaded. Even the simulated bodies of the players’ avatars do not simply correspond to clear-cutgender identities. Using a complex Lacanian model of analysis, the essay demonstrates that in the interaction of the game with the body and psyche of its player through the use of game technology, interesting gender revisions occur that resemble the concept of the cyborg identity famously proposed by Donna Haraway.

Sven Schmalfuß

Springer Professional

Performing Masculinity

About this book

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Introduction

1. Touching Byron: Masculinity and the Celebrity Body in the Romantic Period

2. Turning into Subjects: The Male Dancer in Romantic Ballet

3. Industrial Heroes: Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë’s Constructions of the Masculine

4. Low on Assurance: The Troubled Masculinity of Victorian Comedy

5. Performing Imperial Masculinities: The Discourse and Practice of Cricket

6. ‘A Stoat Came to Tea’: Camp Poetics and Masculinity

7. Lethal Enclosure: Masculinity under Fire in James Jones’s The Thin Red Line

8. In their Fathers’ Footsteps: Performing Masculinity and Fatherhood in the Work of Les Murray and Michael Ondaatje

9. Seeding Asian Masculinities in the US Landscape: Representations of Men’s Lives in Asian American Literature

10. From Glam Rock to Cock Rock: Revis(it)ing Rock Masculinities in Recent Feature Films

11. Histories of Violence — Fairytales of Identity and Masculinity in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman

12. ‘Ghosts of Sparta’: Performing the God of War’s Virtual Masculinity

Backmatter