What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain

Tosh, John

doi:10.1093/hwj/38.1.179

Cited by 178 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Nor is he interested in looking at forms of "masculine bonding" that is, different forms of connection and cooperation between men (clubs, pubs, sports communities, the army), although this theme has become unavoidably institutionalised in AngloSaxon social historiography (Tosh, 1994).…”

Section: Puts Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tricky ’True Object’: Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Historicity

Hadas

2016

mcs

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Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination was published in English in 2001, three years after the appearance of the French version. In order to deconstruct in vivo the working of sociological paradigm-alchemy, a close reading of the Bourdieusian argument is offered. After summing up the main thesis of the book, Bourdieu’s statements will be intended to be questioned, according to which the school, the family, the state and the church would reproduce, in the long run, masculine domination. The paper will also seek to identify the methodological trick of the Bourdieusian vision on history, namely that, metaphorically speaking, he compares the streaming river to the riverside cliffs. It will be argued that when Bourdieu discusses ‘the constancy of habitus’, the ‘permanence in and through change’, or the ‘strength of the structure’, he extends his paradigm about the displacement of the social structure to the displacement of the men/women relationship. Hence, it will be suggested that, in opposition to Bourdieu’s thesis, masculine domination is not of universal validity but its structural weight and character have fundamentally changed in the long run, i.e. the masculine habitual centre gradually shifted from a social practice governed by the drives of physical violence to symbolic violence.

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Section: Puts Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tricky ’True Object’: Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Historicity

Hadas

2016

mcs

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“…Despite some continuing resistance from defenders of the canon of subject orthodoxy, the study of gender has successfully infiltrated, if not the mainstream, then the borderlands of a range of academic disciplines. This genre of scholarship can also bring new layers of analysis and reconceptions of established subjects as John Tosh (1994), in calling for historians to 'take masculinity seriously', argues. In the present article a gendered approach to deviance and its construction and contestation seeks to revisit the fertile terrain of the 1914-18 war and reexamine the way in which COs were depicted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in the Great War

Bibbings

2003

Social & Legal Studies

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This article analyses constructions of English manhood during the First World War. As such, it focuses upon cultural representations of masculinity rather the lived experiences of particular men. Such portrayals can have great social power when they gain a widespread cultural currency -not least in the impact they can have upon the lives of individuals. The central purpose is to consider the depiction of the conscientious objector to military service. Once conscription was introduced, objectors became a legally recognized category of men and special statutory provision was made for those who were deemed to be 'genuine'. Despite the legitimacy that this might have granted, all objectors (whether recognized as genuine or not), along with those who defended their stance, came to be despised and rejected as deviant. Their story, as presented here, is a study of the construction and contestation of deviance (in terms of both gender and Englishness), yet in this version of the deviant the role of law is a relatively minor one.

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“…9 The focus, rightly at the time, was on the ways in which Victorian science characterised and caricatured the female intellect. Yet even at the height of the Victorian debate, the most far-reaching commentators were aware that 'the woman's question is essentially also a man's question'.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian ‘Sex in Brain’ Debate

Boddice¹

2011

Gender &Amp; History

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Historians in the 1970s and 1980s explored the ways in which Victorian science characterised and caricatured the female intellect. As a core element of debates on the extension of the franchise, and on women in higher education, the scientific literature on the mental differences between men and women has been thoroughly explored. A key part of this literature dealt with the relative weights of male and female brains, and the assertions of evolutionists and anatomists that fundamental physiological differences explained any observable differences in psychology by natural law. The paper revisits this material with a new set of questions. To what extent did scientific discourse not only subordinate women, but also serve to reinforce a social hierarchy of men? How was manliness, as a natural mental quality, defined, and who did it exclude? Exploring the ways in which scientific literature mirrored discourses of racial, political and citizenship exclusions, substantial revisions to the existing historiography are suggested. The paper concludes by proposing a turn towards the image of the ‘animal’ as a fundamental category of analysis in Victorian thought, upon which constructions of gender, race and social hierarchy were constructed.

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What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain

Cited by 178 publications

References 28 publications

The Tricky ’True Object’: Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Historicity

The Tricky ’True Object’: Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Historicity

Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in the Great War

The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian ‘Sex in Brain’ Debate

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