Western masculinities in war and peace

American Historical Review

Volumn 112, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 417-438

  Nye, Robert A ^a,b  

^a Department of Humanities ^*

^b OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249977589     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.2.417     Document Type: Review

References (156)

1. Speech on June 26, 1775, to New York State Provincial Congress, George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 3c Transcripts.
2. On the evolution of colonial manhood in the American colonies, see Anne S. Lombard, Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
3. See the comparative essays on this matter in John Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997):
4. Leonard V. Smith, "Remobilizing the Citizen-Soldier through the French Army Mutinies of 1917," 144-159;
5. Wilhelm Diest, "The German Army, the Authoritarian Nation-State and Total War," 160-172;
6. John Home, "Remobilizing for Total War: France and Britain, 1917-1918," 195-211;
7. Richard Beisel, "Mobilization and Demobilization in Germany, 1916-1919," 212-222.
8. In particular, Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988);
9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990);
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985);
11. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, 2nd ed. (London, 1997).
12. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, Calif., 1995);
13. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley, Calif., 2000);
14. Connell, Gender (London, 2002). In his many works on masculinity, Michael S. Kimmel uses an analytic concept similar to Connell's, in which he distinguishes between "superordinate" and "subordinate" masculinities.
15. See Kimmel, Manhood: The American Quest (New York, 1994);
16. Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays in the History of American and British Masculinities (Albany, N. Y., 2005).
17. See also Robert A. Nye, "Locating Masculinities: Some Recent Work on Men," Signs 30, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1937-1962.
18. Bourdieu's chief works on embodiment are Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977);
19. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif., 1990);
20. and La domination masculine (Paris, 1998).
21. See on the applications of his work Richard Shusterman, ed., Bourdieu:A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1999);
22. Craig Calhoun et al., eds., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Oxford, 1993);
23. Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman, eds., Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (New York, 2000);
24. Deborah Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu (Bloomington, Ind., 2005).
25. Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York, 2003), xvii.
26. For an interdisciplinary study that considers many of these themes, see Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, 2001).
27. Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), 11-12.
28. Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Columbus, Ohio, 1998), 9.
29. Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Oxford, 1995);
30. Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1994);
31. Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993);
32. Steven Hughes, "Men of Steel: Dueling, Honor, and Politics in Liberal Italy," in Spierenburg, Men and Violence, 64-81;
33. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford, 1982).
34. This is the general sense of the introduction by Stefan Dudink and Karen Hagemann, "Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, 1750-1850," in Dudink, Hagemann, and John Tosh, eds., Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester, 2004), 3-21.
35. Glenda Sluga, "Masculinities, Nations, and the New World Order: Peacemaking and Nationality in Britain, France, and the United States after the First World War," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, 240;
36. see also Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000).
37. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb, Ill., 2003), 132-143;
38. Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modem Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society, trans. Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus (Oxford, 2004), 182;
39. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 6.
40. William Ian Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 179.
41. For a confirmation of this fear, see the study of Civil War memoirs by David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst, Mass., 2002), 55-61.
42. Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 379.
43. Joan Landes, "Republican Citizenship and Heterosexual Desire: Concepts of Masculinity in Revolutionary France," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Peace and War, 103, 111,
44. See also Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
45. Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago, 2004), 51-96.
46. Ibid., 264-265.
47. Karen Hagemann, "German Heroes: The Cult of the Death for the Fatherland in Nineteenth-Century Germany," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, 120-124.
48. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 202-205.
49. Ibid., 216-223;
50. Marcus Funck, "Ready For War? Conceptions of Military Manliness in the Prusso-German Officer Corps Prior to WWI," in Karen Hagemann and Stephanie Schüler-Springorum, eds., Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York, 2002), 43-68;
51. for the U.S., see Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
52. Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (DeKalb, Ill., 2004), 56-85.
53. See also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996).
54. Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 86-118.
55. The classic texts on conceptualizations of the male body as hard and sealed up and women's bodies as leaking and penetrable are Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, Ind., 1994);
56. and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis, Minn., 1987).
57. Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 119-155.
58. On the gay experience in medical examinations and the military effort to expel and segregate gay men, see Alan Béruhé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York, 1990), 8-33, 149-174.
59. Sonya O. Rose, "Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, 192-193.
60. Ibid., 182-189. See also Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, "The Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War: Uncertain Masculinities?" in Paul R. Higate, Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, Conn., 2003), 57-70.
61. Sabine Kienitz, "Body Damage: War Disability and Constructions of Masculinity in Weimar Germany," in Hagemann and Schuler-Springorum, Home/Front, 189.
62. Ibid., 190;
63. Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 86-118.
64. See on this point Paul R. Higate, " 'Soft Clerks' and 'Hard Civvies': Pluralizing Military Masculinities," in Higate, Military Masculinities, 27-42.
65. An excellent example of this spontaneity can be found in the numerous ways that various masculine practices-from dueling to homosocial emotional bonds-flourished in the nineteenth-century Russian universities despite the best efforts of Nicholaevan bureaucrats to contain them. See Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804-1863 (New York, 2005).
66. Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York, 2005), 18-53, 231-268.
67. Greenberg discusses the ways this "comradeship" pointedly excluded white women and black men; ibid., 44-47.
68. The term refers to Benedict Anderson's description of the gender dynamics of nationalism in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991).
69. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994), 23.
70. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 272-282.
71. See in particular the work of J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Cambridge, 1981);
72. Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford, 1989).
73. For a brilliant burlesque of manliness and Hughes's invention of the games ethic, see the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser, based on Rugby's school bully Harry Flashman, as portrayed in Tom Brown 's School Days, and in particular Flashman: From the Flashman Papers, 1839-42 (London, 1969).
74. Axel Bundgaard, Muscle and Manliness: The Rise of Span in American Boarding Schools (Syracuse, N.Y., 2005), 32.
75. Patrick F. McDevitt, "May the Best Man Win ": Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880-1935 (New York, 2004), 3-9.
76. Bundgaard, Muscle and Manliness, 152-163;
77. see also Putney, Muscular Christianity.
78. See Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago, 2003).
79. Bundgaard, Muscle and Manliness, 109.
80. For American colleges and emerging professional sports, see Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), 189-276.
81. Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 2005), 5.
82. John Tosh, A Man 's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1999).
83. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, 132-138, 154-178.
84. On the rise of a competitive examination and games culture at Cambridge, see Andrew Warrick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago, 2003).
85. McDevitt, "May the Best Man Win, " 81-137.
86. Ibid., 14-36.
87. Christopher S. Thompson, The Tour de France: A Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 2006).
88. See also Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-garde and the Emergence of the Modern Intellectual (Albany, N.Y., 1999).
89. Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, Md., 2004), 70-81.
90. Ibid., 67-70.
91. Ibid., 235.
92. Mosse, The Image of Man.
93. Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore, Md., 2005), 43.
94. On this phenomenon, see Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 31-50;
95. Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics In Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 50-85;
96. Ruth Harris, " 'The Child of the Barbarian': Rape, Race and Nationalism during the First World War," Past and Present 141 (October 1993): 170-206.
97. Maureen Healy, "Civilizing the Soldier in Postwar Austria," in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington, Ind., 2006), 47;
98. Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life, in World War I (Cambridge, 2004), 258-262, 272;
99. Healy, "Civilizing the Soldier in Postwar Austria," 49. A caveat is in order here: Maureen Healy is a colleague at Oregon State University.
100. Deborah Harrison, "Violence in the Military Community," in Higate, Military Masculinities, 79.
101. Michael Roper, "Maternal Relations: Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home during the First World War," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, 296.
102. Roper refers particularly to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1977)
103. and Eric J. Leed's No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979).
104. Pat Barker, Regeneration (London, 1991),
105. The Eye in the Door (London, 1993),
106. and The Ghost Road (London, 1995). Historical interest in combat trauma has followed.
107. See Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (London, 2000);
108. Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (London, 2002);
109. Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003).
110. Kent, Making Peace;
111. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996);
112. Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000);
113. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War,
114. Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire.
115. Roper, "Maternal Relations"; on the epistolary tradition in France, see Martha Hanna, "A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I," AHR 108, no. 5 (December 2003): 1338-1361,
116. and Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
117. Robert L. Nelson, "German Comrades-Slavic Whores," in Hagemann and Schüler-Springorum, Home/Front, 72-73, 81.
118. Thomas Kühne, "Comradeship: Gender Confusion and Gender Order in the German Military, 1918-1945," in Hagemann and Schüler- Springorum, Home/Front, 236.
119. Ibid., 245-249.
120. Alon Rachamimov has recently explored the sexual and gender liminality of World War I prisoners of war: "The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914-1920," AHR 111, no. 2 (April 2006): 362-382.
121. See Melissa K. Stockdale, " 'My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness': Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia's Great War, 1914-1917," AHR 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 78-116.
122. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 251-252;
123. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, "The Alienated Body: Gender and Identity and the Memory of the Siege of Leningrad," in Wingfield and Bucur, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, 221-223;
124. Rose, "Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, 177-198.
125. See also Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-48 (London, 1999).
126. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War, 245-246.
127. Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur, "Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe," in Wingfield and Bucur, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, 10;
128. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990);
129. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J., 1994);
130. Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999).
131. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 42, 163.
132. Omer Bartov, Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 26.
133. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 247-250.
134. Ibid., 263-276.
135. Ute Poiger, "A New 'Western Hero': The Reconstruction of German Masculinity in the 1950s," in Hanna Schissler, ed., The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1945-1968 (Princeton, N.J., 2001), 412-413.
136. Frank Biess, "Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and the Reconstruction of Masculine Citizenship in West Germany, 1945-1955," in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 63-72.
137. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York, 2005), 226.
138. On the worries about marriage, see Miriam Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 131-142.
139. James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago, 2005), 34-80.
140. Ibid., 106-134.
141. John Hoberman, Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 7-12, 17.
142. Gilbert, Men in the Middle, 81-105;
143. see also Reumann, American Sexual Character, 54-85, 165-198;
144. and Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
145. Patricia Vettel-Becker, Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America (Minneapolis, Minn., 2005), 122.
146. Gilbert, Men in the Middle, 26.
147. Ibid., 199-214.
148. Vettel-Becker, Shooting from the Hip, 109.
149. Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 35-37.
150. Ibid., 83.
151. Ibid., 124.
152. Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, Mass., 2001), 6-7.
153. Ibid., 67.
154. See also on this matter David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 2004), 53-55, 62.
155. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, as quoted on 169.
156. Ibid., 210-240.