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Open Access (free)
Histories, historians, and the politics of masculinity
Lucy Delap
and
John Tosh

This expansive and open conversation between John Tosh, Lucy Delap, and the book’s editors brings together a pioneering historian of masculinity, whose work grew out of his involvement in men’s groups in the 1980s, and a leading feminist historian (and historian of feminism) who has worked on that moment. What unfurls is a striking and provocative reflection on what histories of masculinity have been and where they might go next. Tosh and Delap do not always agree, but their shared vision emphasises the importance of rediscovering the progressive orientation points that defined the emergence of the field. From this vantage point, the distance between the optimism of the first generation of histories of masculinity and where we are today underscores the vital importance of politically engaged histories that seize on the proliferation of ‘crisis talk’ around masculinity to understand its genealogies and imagine alternative ways of living as men.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Reading Blackness and the disabled soldier body in the First World War
Hilary Buxton

Hilary Buxton focuses on the experience of Black disabled soldiers from the British West Indies Regiment to show how ideas of military service were refracted through pervasive associations between whiteness and Britishness after the Great War. The soldier hero was an exclusive category, and Black men were often unable to mobilise the idea that their disabilities were markers of heroic sacrifice and national service. Buxton’s version of embodiment shows how medical treatment and rehabilitation sought to remake injured men’s bodies around the ideal of the breadwinner, just as disability pensions sought to restore a proper manly independence. Despite their claims to imperial citizenship, West Indian servicemen’s difficulties in securing these entitlements had far-reaching material stakes. Economic and physical independence were frustrated through unequal access to necessary prostheses and wheelchairs. These exclusions were shaped through both the colonial state and the interactions between men and racialised masculinities. Buxton’s analysis of tensions within a Liverpool auxiliary hospital shows how ‘Black embodiment’ was refracted through interactions with white servicemen, patients, and hospital staff.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Men and pornography in the 1970s
Ben Mechen

Ben Mechen analyses the extraordinary letters written by self-defined ‘ordinary’ men to the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship – the Williams Committee – in 1977–1978. This material allows him to move from exploring pornographic texts, markets, and regulation to more challenging questions around the relationship between the consumption of porn and men’s lives and identities. Both defensive and assertive, men’s letters challenged pejorative notions that pornography was damaging, exploitative, or manifested patriarchal sexual violence against women. Instead, they drew on emerging ideas of well-being and sexual fulfilment to articulate a ‘liberal sexual subject’. For Mechen, this figure embodied ‘a new idea of normative masculinity’ in which the sexual self was ‘individualist, free of so-called “hang-ups”, and something to be … realised as part of a “sex life” and a “sexual career”’. Embedded in this position, however, was a ‘new narrative of male victimhood’, mobilised against an increasingly assertive feminist politics, which anticipated the more strident ideas associated with the worst excesses of contemporary men’s rights activism.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Richard Hall

Richard Hall addresses questions of subjectivity and emotion in men’s lives. Exploring how individual men understood the world and their place in it, Hall uses interviews with fathers and sons to consider the intergenerational articulation of selfhood and masculinity within families. Fathers and sons made sense of their lives as men at the same time as they navigated an intimate relationship and fast-changing world. That masculinity was a relational category was a foundational assumption of gender history. What Hall does differently is show how relationality was also inter-subjective. This move sustains a radical transformation of histories of masculinity and selfhood. Narrating one’s life to an interviewer becomes a proxy for the process of self-making men undertook throughout their lives. For younger generations, Hall argues, that process was increasingly directed at securing a distinctive individuality rather than the ordinariness emphasised by fathers. Sons’ testimony ‘was more inclined towards narratives of self-fulfilment, reflecting the greater educational, economic, work and socio-cultural opportunities … available to them’. When masculinity was reworked as interiority, being ordinary was more of a problem.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Jessica Meyer

Jessica Meyer’s ground-breaking work on the Ministry of Pensions files of disabled Great War veterans challenges the idea that the war was a turning point in histories of masculinity. Confronting the tendency to define ex-servicemen entirely through short-lived military experience Meyer argues for a biographical approach that follows individual men over the life cycle, rather than isolating one fragment of a life. In so doing, she argues, we can more fully appreciate how the interplay between historical and biographical change shaped men’s lives. Often stretching over decades, pension files provided fragmented life stories through which to explore experiences of disability, work, and family and the negotiations between individuals, families, the state, and employers.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Revisiting masculinities in the Liverpool docklands, 1900–1939
Pat Ayers

Pat Ayers revisits her work on Liverpool’s docklands to show how along the Mersey, distinctive cultures of work, leisure, and domesticity shaped diverging ideas of masculinity, despite enduring male dominance and the ‘infinite adaptability of patriarchy’. Towards the south of the city, everyday lives were shaped by differences of race, growth of new housing estates, and existence of employment opportunities outside the docks. There were fewer sectarian tensions, a stronger union, and class solidarities had greater power. Companies like Bryant and May, whose match factory employed women, were particularly important in disrupting the segregated labour markets that characterised Liverpool’s North End. One result was a less acute gendered division of domestic labour and childcare. For Ayers’s interviewees, conditions of work and housing played out in their reflections on the centrality of children and family to their identities as men.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Open Access (free)
Histories for the present
Matt Houlbrook
,
Katie Jones
, and
Ben Mechen

This chapter provides an engaging, accessible, and provocative introduction to histories of masculinity for all readers interested in contemporary gender politics. It offers a critical overview of ongoing historiographical debates and the historical making of men’s lives and identities and ideas of masculinity between the 1890s and the present day. In setting out a new agenda for the field, it makes an ambitious argument for the importance of writing histories which are present-centred and politically engaged. This means that the introduction engages directly with ferocious debates about men’s social position and the status of masculinity in contemporary public life. In establishing a critical genealogy for the proliferation of this crisis talk, it sets out new ways of understanding how men’s lives and ideas of masculinity have changed over time while patriarchy and male power have persisted.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Gay masculinities, safer sex, and Project SIGMA, 1987–1996
Katie Jones

Katie Jones focuses on the questionnaires and sexual diaries completed by men who participated in Project SIGMA (Socio-sexual Investigations of Gay Men and AIDS) between 1987 and 1996. Rich qualitative social research data allows Jones to explore men’s decisions around safer sex during the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Challenging pejorative notions of hyper-sexual gay men – not least by revealing the assumptions embedded in SIGMA’s research methods – respondents articulated a more conflicted relationship between sex and masculinity. Emotion and intimacy, as well as perceived risks of transmission, were integral to the decisions men made about their sexual encounters with long-term and casual partners. Far from irrational or pathological, dispensing with condom use in an ongoing relationship could reflect understandings of anal sex as a physical symbol of emotional closeness and commitment, or followed mutual negative HIV tests. Such decisions often rested on explicit or implicit negotiations with partners about the importance of safe sex outside a relationship. It is on this basis that Jones develops a powerful argument for the importance of affect and intimacy in gay sexual cultures and, by extension, queer masculinities that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
Trans men and the welfare state, 1954–1970
Adrian Kane-Galbraith

Focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, Adrian Kane-Galbraith shows how the bureaucratic apparatus of citizenship could be a productive space for trans men. While the law could be punitive – criminalising those who made a false statement on a marriage licence –new forms of state welfare gave men opportunities for remaking their lives and identities. Masculinity might be claimed at home and work. It could also be secured through material cultures of identification. Processes of ‘state registration and recognition’ prioritised ‘social performance rather than male embodiment’ in issuing National Insurance cards. If this was a pragmatic recognition of trans men’s economic contribution, the breadwinner state ironically afforded new opportunities for self-making. The result was a short-lived window in which trans men could effectively self-identify. Identity documents conferred powerful ‘recognition of lived identity’. Those opportunities remained contingent. A National Insurance card and birth certificate might jar; concerns over sexual impropriety could derail opportunities for self-definition. And this was ultimately a story of loss rather than gain: computer systems could only process sex as binary, so automated processes of identification removed the ambiguities that afforded trans men opportunities a decade earlier.

in Men and masculinities in modern Britain
A history for the present

This book offers a striking and pointed reflection on what histories of masculinity in modern Britain have been and where they might go next. Addressing the constant contemporary talk of crisis around men’s lives, Men and Masculinities argues powerfully that we need histories of masculinity which are present-centred and politically engaged. In so doing, it sets out a new agenda for the field. Ranging over the past 130 years, a series of engaging and original essays trace how men, like masculinity, were made. In exploring that process, contributors demonstrate the radically different ways in which men made sense of the world and their place in it. The book provides compelling evidence of how individual life stories can transform how we think about the time- and place-specific formation of men’s experiences and ideas of masculinity. Through vivid case studies that include trans men’s encounters with the welfare state, the experience of wounded Jamaican servicemen, and the social world of the public librarian, the volume interweaves histories of masculinity with wider histories of society, culture, economy, and politics. It is on that basis that the work shows how thinking critically about histories of masculinity also provides new ways of understanding the making and remaking of modern Britain. Men and Masculinities both provides a critical genealogy for contemporary gender politics and the persistence of patriarchy and male power and establishes new ways of understanding how men’s lives and ideas of masculinity have (and have not) changed in modern Britain.