Abstract
As R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt have pointed out in their critical reevaluation of “hegemonic masculinity” as an analytical category, the term has tended to rely heavily, especially within psychoanalytic scholarship, on “the notion of masculinity as an assemblage of traits” or “trait terminology.” According to Connell and Messerschmidt, it is the “trait approach” that results in fixed conceptualizations of masculinity.1 Connell and Messerschmidt’s observation draws attention to the problem of essentializing approaches to masculinity. Yet at the same time, I would argue, trait terminology has a very special relevance for historians of gender and nation. In her review of theoretical approaches to the subject, Joane Nagel points out the importance of attending to how “the value of and adherence to… normative manly traits vary by time and place.”2 Similarly, George L. Mosse presents “normative masculinity” as an assemblage of manly traits that can be harnessed in the service of nation-states.3 Thus, methodologically speaking, the historical study of masculinity and the nation must necessarily involve examining which traits become manly at specific historical junctures, and how discourses on such manly traits become interwoven with discourses on nation building.
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Notes
R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender &; Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 847.
Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 245.
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See, for example, Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008);
Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1999);
Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006);
Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 204.
See Ben Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 1972): 45–74;
Lisa Jean Moore, Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 21.
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79–82.
C. H. Melville, “Eugenics and Military Service,” Eugenics Review 2, no. 1 (1910): 54.
Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Tensions of Empire Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 89.
Paul Dubois, The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders: The Psychoneuroses and Their Moral Treatment (New York: Funk &; Wagnalls, 1909), 48.
Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Biopolitics’—Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 190–207.
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 30–31.
Ruth Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 151–152. Emphasis mine.
Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 170.
Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8. For some of the difficulties encountered with the eighteenth-century somatic model of mental illness, see also Kevles’s discussion of the medical causes of insanity in twentieth-century legal circles, Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 49.
George M. Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences (New York, Putnam, 1881).
Brian Dillon, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (London: Penguin, 2010), 87.
Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 152. See also Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97.
Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Asylum,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 150.
In 1881, men had been admitted to a new outpatient clinic at the Salpêtrière asylum-turned hospital in Paris, followed by the famous proclamation of the Salpêtrière neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot that “hysteria in the male is not as rare as is thought.” Georges Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 80.
W. H. R. Rivers, “War-Neurosis and Military Training,” in Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 205–228. See also Dubois, Psychic Treatment, 19.
George L. Mosse, “Shell-Shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (January 2000): 103–104.
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© 2015 Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
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Loutfi, A. (2015). Eugenic Nationalism, Biopolitics, and the Masculinization of Hysteria: Historical and Theoretical Reflections. In: Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (eds) Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_4
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