Humanitarian Masculinity: Desire, Character and Heroics, 1876–2018

Taithe, Bertrand

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-44630-7_2

Bertrand Taithe⁶

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series ((PMSTH))

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Abstract

Humanitarian organisations have been shaken in recent years by a number of scandals associated with masculine behaviour and deportment. These scandals have been interpreted in different ways as the expression of predatory or hypermasculine behaviour. While the gender politics and long-term consequences of these scandals remain contentious, this chapter argues that one has to engage with the cultural history of masculinity in humanitarian endeavours to appreciate the strength of the cultural tropes and myths of character, heroics and risk-taking that have underpinned and sustained specific behaviours in situations of exception. This chapter builds on an analysis of a corpus of early and more recent self-narratives of humanitarian work in order to argue that recent “issues with masculinity” require fundamental debates that acknowledge this cultural legacy.

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Notes

1.
Rekha Mehra and Geeta Rao Gupta, “Gender Mainstreaming: Making it Happen,” International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), (2006).
2.
Hypermasculinity is defined by callous sexual attitudes, the perception of violence as manly and of danger as exciting. This framework was the basis of an index defined by Mosher and Sirkin in 1984 and revised since. Donald L. Mosher and Mark Sirkin, “Measuring a Macho Personality Constellation,” Journal of Research in Personality 18, no. 2 (1984), 150–163; Jay Peters et al., “Development and Testing of a New Version of the Hypermasculinity Index,” Social Work Research 31, no. 3 (2007), 171–182.
3.
https://promundoglobal.org/about/ (last accessed 17.08.2018).
4.
Sonke Gender Justice, “How Do We Prevent Violence Against Women? 5 Prevention+ Case Studies Show Engaging Men and Boys is Key,” http://genderjustice.org.za/article/how-do-we-prevent-violence-against-women-5-prevention-case-studies-show-engaging-men-and-boys-is-key/ (last accessed 17.08.2018).
5.
https://men-care.org/about-mencare/ (last accessed 17.08.2018).
6.
See for instance the 2007 conference in Dakar and the proceedings published in 2012: Andrea Cornwall et al., Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities (London: Zed Books, 2011).
7.
Since 2017 Ni Aolain has been appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism. On time of exception, see Fionnuala Ni Aolain, “Women, Vulnerability and Humanitarian Emergencies,” Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 18, no. 1 (2011), 1–23, here 15.
8.
This is a theme that has been explored in relation to wartime brutality and the theory of brutalisation inspired by George Mosse. See Antoine Prost, “Les limites de la brutalisation. Tuer sur le front occidental, 1914–1918,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 81, no. 1 (2004), 5–20.
9.
There is a very considerable literature on character in Victorian Britain and Europe. Much of the literature builds on Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985), 29–50.
10.
Though characteristically Liisa Malkki’s work tends to be gender biased towards women. See Liisa H. Malkki, The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
11.
Jamie R. Abrams, “Debunking the Myth of Universal Male Privilege,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 49 (2016), 303–333, here 311. The concept of hypermasculinity is taken here as a critical concept which needs contextualising.
12.
See on this, Michael Neuman, “Dying for Humanitarian Ideas: Using Images and Statistics to Manufacture Humanitarian Martyrdom,” 15.02.2017, https://www.msf-crash.org/en/publications/humanitarian-actors-and-practices/dying-humanitarian-ideas-using-images-and-statistics (last accessed 10.10.2018) and Bertrand Taithe, “Mourir pour des Idées Humanitaires: Sacrifice, Témoignage et Travail Humanitaire, 1870–1990,” in Caroline Cazanave and France Marchal-Ninosque, eds., Mourir pour des Idées (Besançon: Presses Universitaire de Franche-Comté, 2009), 239–254.
13.
Meghan O’Malley, “All is not Fair in Love and War: An Exploration of the Military Masculinity Myth,” DePaul Journal of Women, Gender & Law (2015), http://via.1ibrary.depaul.edu/jwgl/vol5/iss1/4 (last accessed 10.10.2018), 3–5.
14.
Abrams, “Debunking the Myth,” 308.
15.
Rosemary Jaji, “Masculinity on Unstable Ground: Young Refugee Men in Nairobi, Kenya,” Journal of Refugee Studies 22, no. 1 (2009), 177–194.
16.
Abrams, “Debunking the Myth,” 314. Abrams argues for a historical perspective which tends to see this tethering of masculinity to military service as “outdated”, a position which tends to undermine his more important contention that the tethering itself is a form of myth-making.
17.
Dyan Mazurana and Phoebe Donnelly, “Stop the Sexual Assault against Humanitarian and Development Aid Workers,” May 2017, fic.tufts.edu/assets/SAAW-report_5-23.pdf (last accessed 15.06.2018).
18.
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2016/12/05/time-confront-sexual-abuse-and-harassment-aid-sector (last accessed 28.08.2019). IRIN was a news agency devoted to the humanitarian sector; its new name is The New Humanitarian.
19.
Mazurana and Donnelly, 29–30.
20.
The Times and Sunday Times, 17.02.2018 and 18.02.2018.
21.
OXFAM (Oxford Famine Relief Committee) is the leading British development and emergency relief agency; Merlin (Medical Emergency Relief International) now absorbed within Save the Children was the leading British medical NGO in the 1990s and 2000s.
22.
Kristi M. Kirby and Claude D’Estree, “Peacekeepers, the Military and Human Trafficking: Protecting Whom,” University of St. Thomas Law Journal 6, no. 1 (2008), 221–246.
23.
See the reporting of Mines Advisory Group in Sunday Times 25.02.2018.
24.
Priti Patel’s interview was widely covered, for example https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/11/government-threatens-withdraw-funding-oxfam-faces-fresh-allegations/ (last accessed 02.03.2018).
25.
The concept originally coined by Stuart Hall is explored by David Garland, “On the Concept of Moral Panic,” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 4, no. 1 (2018), 9–30.
26.
OXFAM, founded in 1942, in opposition to the Greek Blockade has long maintained a critical identity towards British foreign policy which has made it a bête noire of the British right. More recently, the debates have taken a specific nature which helps contextualise the controversies of 2018. For examples, see the editorials in the Daily Telegraph and the influential right wing blog “Guido Fawkes” of Paul Delaire Staines: https://order-order.com/2018/01/22/oxfam-go-full-corbynista/ (last accessed 02.03.2018); https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/25/charities-like-oxfam-have-alienated-government-left-wing-bias/ (last accessed 02.03.2018).
27.
The notion of a humanitarian sector is itself a projection of an idealised set of power relations between donors, international actors and beneficiaries. See for instance the report https://www.alnap.org/our-topics/the-state-of-the-humanitarian-system published every two years by the think tank ALNAP (last accessed 15.06.2018).
28.
Sir Vincent Kennett-Barrington, The Times, 14.07.1903, 11. Kennett-Barrington spent half his life known as Barrington-Kennett.
29.
See Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe, The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870–1912 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), Chapter 5.
30.
Peter Morris, First Aid to the Battlefront: Life and Letters of Sir Vincent Kennett-Barrington (1844–1903) (Stroud: Sutton, 1992).
31.
Even the humanitarian league—devoted to the abolition of all forms of cruelty—including the denunciation of blood sports found the issue of sport difficult to engage with—such was its central position in defining upper middle-class masculinity. Dan Weinbren, “Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891–1919,” History Workshop 38 (1994), 86–105.
32.
J. A. Mangan, “Manufactured” Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism (London: Routledge, 2012).
33.
Patrick A. Dunae, “Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Empire, 1870–1914,” Victorian Studies 24, no. 1 (1980), 105–121; Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Also see Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997).
34.
Morris, First Aid to the Battlefront, 128, Written to his wife from Sofia about Nisch, 26.12.1876.
35.
Ibid., 129–130.
36.
J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
37.
Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: ICRC, 1939).
38.
Ibid., 80–81.
39.
Ibid., 86.
40.
R. B. Macpherson, Under the Red Crescent, or Ambulance Adventures in the Russo Turkish War of 1877–78, (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co, 1885), 45.
41.
Ibid., 55.
42.
Archibald Forbes and Sydney P. Hall, Czar and Sultan: The Adventures of a British Lad in the Russo Turkish War of 1877–1878 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894).
43.
Ibid., 283.
44.
Macpherson, Under the Red Crescent, 77. On imperial masculinity, see Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism, rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). On effeminate “others”, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
45.
Macpherson, Under the Red Crescent, 111.
46.
Ibid., 120.
47.
Ibid., 137.
48.
Morris, First Aid to the Battlefront, 212; his correspondence, much of it to be published, was also found in the Staffordshire County Archives, Duke of Sutherland papers, D593/P/26/2/1/1, Report and records of the Stafford House Committee, Report and record of the committee.
49.
Macpherson, Under the Red Crescent, 136.
50.
Antony Taylor, Lords of Misrule (London: Springer, 2004), 17–44; Frank Jastrzembski, Valentine Baker’s Heroic Stand at Tashkessen 1877 (Barnsley: Sword and Pen, 2017).
51.
Macpherson, Under the Red Crescent, 194.
52.
Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, “Masculinity, ‘Race’, and Family in the Colonies: Protecting Aborigines in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Gender, Place & Culture 16, no. 1 (2009), 63–75.
53.
Roger Sawyer, Roger Casement’s Diaries (London: Pimlico, 2010), 33.
54.
Kevin Grant, “The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Photography in the Congo Reform Campaign,” in Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, eds., Humanitarian Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 64–88; Christina Twomey, “Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism,” History of Photography 36, no. 3 (2012), 255–264.
55.
Roger Casement, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, edited by Angus Mitchell (Dublin: Lilliput press, 1997).
56.
The evidence was dubious and the trial papers show the extent of the bias against Casement: Roger Casement, The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, edited by G. H. Knott (Glasgow: Hodge and Co., 1917), xiii–xv.
57.
Casement, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement.
58.
Ibid., 77.
59.
Ibid., 101.
60.
Ibid., 169.
61.
Richard A. Wilson and Richard D. Brown, Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu and Christian Delporte, L’Indignation: Histoire d’une Émotion Politique et Morale, XIXe-XXe Siècles (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2008).
62.
Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
63.
Andrew Porter, “Sir Roger Casement and the International Humanitarian Movement,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29, no. 2 (2001), 59–74.
64.
Angus Mitchell, “‘An Irish Putumayo’: Roger Casement’s Humanitarian Relief Campaign among the Connemara Islanders 1913–14,” Irish Economic and Social History 31 (2004), 41–60.
65.
Dean Pavlakis, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896–1913 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), Chapter 7.
66.
See on this point Chapter 4 of Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
67.
This is an issue raised by Holly Furneaux when she points out that the Crimean War was the site of a shift in military masculinity. See Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
68.
Bertrand Taithe, Defeated Flesh (Manchester University Press, 1999), Chapter 3.
69.
A more emollient and emotional humanitarianism can be found in the work of the humanist and leading British humanitarian Edward Carpenter, The Need of a Rational and Humane Science: A Lecture Delivered Before the Humanitarian League (London: Humanitarian League, 1901); Henry S. Salt, Humanitarianism: Its General Principles and Progress (London: W. Reeves, 1901). In France, see the Association Médicale Humanitaire which edited the journal Revue Médico-Sociale from 1910 until 1939. Dan Weinbren, “Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891–1919,” History Workshop Journal 38 (1998), 86–105.
70.
Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde [Agathon], Les Jeunes Gens d’Aujourd’hui, edited by Jacques Becker (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale [1913], 1995). This survey was elite-focused and concerned with the top percentile of young men reaching university and high-school education. Historians have regarded this text as a complex but nevertheless precious document on pre-war intellectual life. Similar views were expressed around Europe at the same period. See Jean-Jacques Becker’s introduction to the 1995 edition.
71.
In this they fitted with an international drive towards fitter and masculine Christian boyhood, see inter alia: David Macleod, Building Character in American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Christopher E. Forth and Bertrand Taithe, eds. French Masculinities: History, Politics and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Fitness for Modernity? The YMCA and Physical-Education Schemes in Late-Colonial South Asia (circa 1900–40),” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (2019), 512–59.
72.
See Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013).
73.
Arfor T. Davies, Friends Ambulance Unit: The Story of the F.A.U in the Second World War 1939–1946 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1947), 5.
74.
On UNRRA see W. Arnold-Forster, “UNRRA’s Work for Displaced Persons in Germany,” International Affairs 22, no. 1 (1946), 1–13; Jessica Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA,” Past and Present, Suppl. 6 (2011), 258–289; Silvia Salvatici, “‘Help the People to Help Themselves’: UNRRA Relief Workers and European Displaced Persons,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25, no. 3 (2012), 428–451; Johannes-Dieter Steinert, “British Humanitarian Assistance: Wartime Planning and Post-War Realities,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008), 421–435; G. Daniel Cohen, “Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarianism in Occupied Germany 1945–46,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008), 437–449.
75.
Perry Biddiscombe, “Dangerous Liaisons: The Anti-Fraternization Movement in the U.S. Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1948,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 3 (2001), 611–647.
76.
Grigor McClelland, Embers of War: Letters from a Quaker Relief Worker in War-Torn Germany (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 45.
77.
Marcel Junod, Le Troisième Combattant (Geneva: Payot, 1947).
78.
For instance, see James Orbinski, Le Cauchemar Humanitaire (Marne La Vallée: Music and Entertainment Books, 2010), 78, 99.
79.
The concept of burn out itself was coined in the 1970s in relation to aid workers. Herbert J. Freudenberger, “Staff burn-out,” Journal of Social Issues 30, no. 1 (1974), 159–165. See Bertrand Taithe, “Compassion Fatigue: The Changing Nature of Humanitarian Emotions,” in Dolores Martin Moruno and Beatriz Pichel, eds., Emotional Bodies. Studies on the Historical Performativity of Emotions (Urbana, ILL: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 242–262.
80.
Orbinski, Cauchemar, 148.
81.
Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 57.
82.
Richard Heinzl, Cambodia Calling: A Memoir from the Frontlines of Humanitarian Aid (Mississauga, ON: John Wiley, 2008), 164.
83.
See Bertrand Taithe, “Heroes of Charity? Between Memory and Hagiography: Colonial Medical Heroes in the Era of Decolonisation,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 5 (2014), 912–35.
84.
See for instance Sibylle Scheipers, ed., Heroism and the Changing Character of War: Toward Post-heroic Warfare? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The concept originates from Edward Luttwak’s work, “Towards Post-Heroic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 74 (1995), 109–122.
85.
Stephen Robinson, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3671840/Samantha-Power-on-Sergio-Vieira-de-Mello.html (last accessed 27.06.2017).

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments and feedback colleagues have provided on ideas and versions of this chapter. In particular I thank the participants and organisers of the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz, Gender and Humanitarian History workshop of June 2017, Michael Neuman of CRASH, Roísín Read and other colleagues from the University of Manchester.

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Humanitarian and Conclift Response Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Bertrand Taithe

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Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, Germany
Esther Möller
Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, Germany
Johannes Paulmann
University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany
Katharina Stornig

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Taithe, B. (2020). Humanitarian Masculinity: Desire, Character and Heroics, 1876–2018. In: Möller, E., Paulmann, J., Stornig, K. (eds) Gendering Global Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44630-7_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44630-7_2
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