Search Results

In Australia and New Zealand, the official recognition of tribes occurs alongside the settlement of land claims. This chapter investigates the scope of tribal autonomy in membership governance in Australia and New Zealand, based on the membership rules contained in institutions established to manage tribal rights to land and territory: New Zealand Treaty Settlement Entities (TSEs) and Australian Registered Native Title Bodies Corporate (PBCs). Claims settlement processes impact on tribal membership governance by requiring a legal definition of the class of beneficiaries, and by prescribing formal membership criteria. Thereafter tribes have the capacity (within certain limitations) to alter their membership criteria to exclude legal beneficiaries from tribal membership. The result is a distinction between the class of people entitled to benefit from a settlement or determination, and persons entitled, as a matter of tribal law and custom, to be recognized as members of the tribe. The categories are imperfectly aligned. This chapter examines the strategies used by tribes and states to overcome the resulting impasses.

This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this work to understand how bodies, emotions, and materiality helped construct masculinities in the long nineteenth century. It shows that a queer history approach, combined with theories of emotional bodies and emotional objects, offers a new way to think about manliness and unmanliness. The introduction is divided into three sections. It summarises histories relating to ‘being’ a man, focusing on the embodied qualities of manliness and on self-control, the primary means by which men were supposed to achieve idealised manly behaviour. It then assesses the scholarship relating to three domains in which manliness was understood to be performed and tested: war, home, and work. (135 words)

This chapter reveals how manliness was conveyed through beautiful, virile, male bodies. Such appealing male figures and faces were associated with positive emotions that were coded as both manly and moral. This chapter explores their changing forms over time, shaped by modernity, sport, anthropometry and physiognomy, but also addresses the role of male beauty in disseminating ideals of manliness. It takes a queer history approach which deliberately makes strange the conjunction between physical beauty and masculine values. It rejects assumptions about normative masculinities and how they were created and circulated and instead adopts the techniques of scholarship that queers sexual constructions. Overall, it proposes that beautiful male forms and appearances were intended to arouse desire for the gender that these bodies bore. This nuances our understanding of the gaze. It shows that the idealised manly body was active, since it was an agent of prized gender values. Yet, it was also passive, as the erotic object of a female and male desirous gaze, and subordinate, for although some of the descriptions of idealised male bodies in this chapter were elite, many manly and unmanly bodies were those of white working-class men. (191 words)

This chapter demonstrates that unmanliness was written onto ill-formed, unappealing bodies and faces, which prompted disgust, fear, and shame. It shows that adult men were instructed on how to avoid unmanliness through emotionalised bodies: failing, uncontrolled, unattractive bodies created by unchecked appetites and bad habits such as drunkenness, and sexual vices. Men were thus taught that the inability to master one’s self caused literal physical, mental, and moral disintegration. Lack of self-control became more dangerous in the nineteenth century as excessive passions, bodily appetites, and feelings were increasingly pathologised as causes of disease and insanity. Responsibility was placed upon the male individual for failing to exert enough moral control to avoid his illness. The discussion of the relationship between unmanliness, bodies, and emotions that follows reveals the inherent paradox of masculine identity, since many unmanly behaviours were also those which, in a managed form, were central to the performance of normative masculinity. Thus, men had to navigate considerable ambiguities in performing their gender. The chapter shows how unmanliness was especially complicated for those men whose bodies were lacking, due to disability, age, or infirmity. (184 words)

This chapter brings together bodies, emotions, and objects through the most desirable idealised man of all: the martial man. Fictional and real military men were imagined through emotionalised bodies, with material culture often acting as the point of entry for the cultural work they performed in producing and disseminating manliness. Drawing on the concept of emotional objects, three types of material culture are examined, which inspired feelings that reinforced ideas about idealised manliness. The first group are the artefacts of war and the military, including uniforms, weaponry, battle-field-objects, medals, ships, and regimental colours. The second are the objects encountered at the domestic level including toys, ceramics, and textiles, which depicted martial manliness or had intimate connections with soldiers and sailors. They appealed to all age groups, genders, and social classes, and had a domestic function or ornamental appeal. The third type considered consists of the material culture that celebrity military heroes generated, from consumable products that deployed their names and images, to the monuments that memorialised them, to the very stuff of their bodies. This irresistible nexus of emotionalised bodies and objects prompted affective responses, which disseminated, reinforced, and maintained civilian masculinities. (192 words)

This chapter examines representations of working men’s bodies. Section one explores the nobility assigned to the muscular body, interrogated through the imagined blacksmith and navvy. The second section addresses the role of heroism, another appealing quality, primarily through miners, firemen, and life-boat men. Such strong and appealing working-men offered a more comforting vision of working-class masculinity than that in which they were politically and socially dangerous. Kindness was attributed to both brawn and brave stereotypes, taming the muscular and reckless body. This was not their only function for a middle-class audience, since the same combination of alluring physical and emotional qualities also rendered the working-class male body desirable as a manly ideal. The chapter then shows that the working classes created and disseminated their own highly emotional and material manifestation of working-class manliness on the material culture of trades unions and friendly societies. However, the emotions associated with them were subtly different and deployed in different ways. For middle-class men, the attractive working man was reassuring and admirable, for working-class men he was a measure of their right to be included in the civic polity. (185 words)

This epilogue explores the continued resonances of emotionalised bodies and material culture for contemporary masculinities. It considers men’s ‘spectacular bodies’ in entertainment and advertising, along with their more sinister political associations and uses. Then it explores the imaginative conjunction of emotions, bodies, and material culture in formulations of military masculinity in recruitment drives, in the romanticised and politicised tropes of servicemen’s damaged bodies and minds, and in the creative projects seeking to materialise military men’s experiences. It shows how changed forms of male work, as well as unemployment, retirement, illness, and, more recently, paternal caring roles, are now configured through men’s uneasy presence in the home: an arena in which manhood is still presumed to be undermined or compromised. Finally, it shows how the emotionalised working-class male body has changed as radically as notions of class itself in the post-industrial economy of British society. There are no noble images of working-class men at their labours. Most images of working-class men are derogatory, whether they are perceived as a dangerous political threat or a redundant, residual form of masculinity. It concludes that the culture wars of late capitalism are fought over men’s bodies and emotions. (194 words)

This chapter begins with a contrast: between the language and action of Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., leader of Bacon's Rebellion (1676) and Herman Husband, a leader in the Whiskey Rebellion (1794). Bacon claimed to be a true representative of the King, over and against the Colony of Virginia's appointed governor. Husband preached millenarian visions of the perfect democratic republic. To understand the contrast, one needs to understand the pragmatic deployment of the King's Two Bodies—the king's mortal, natural body and his ethereal, sacred "second body," represented on coins and seals, as well as at his funeral and in the next King's coronation—as a way to do politics in the first British Empire, and, more broadly, throughout the early modern Atlantic world. One effect of the three great Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century was to creatively destroy the King's Two Bodies as the cultural background with which long chains of power were built. Without the King's Two Bodies to solve agency problems, different cultural solutions to the recurrent problems of shoring up hierarchy were needed. This is how to understand Herman Husband's enchanted sermons, which were obsessed with delegation from the body of the people to the leader.

The Closing Notes are co-authored by Richa Nagar with Siddharth Iyengar and Sara Musaifer, two of the 27 participants who immersed themselves in the first two semesters of the teaching of 'Stories, Bodies, Movements' at the University of Minnesota. Iyengar is a doctoral candidate in Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior and Sara Musaifer is pursuing her Ph.D. in Comparative International Development Education. This co-authorship of the closing notes embodies the anti-disciplinary and anti-hierarchical vision and ongoing nature of the project of hungry translations. Through reflections on their own unlearning and relearning processes during the making of two plays in class, 'Re/telling Disappearing Tales' (Spring 2017) and 'Fractured Threads' (Fall 2017), the three authors collectively re-enact, in a radically vulnerable mode, the key arguments of the book.

According to Rudolf Arnheim, “much sculpture lacks the essential quality of life, namely, motion.” This is why, no doubt, marble statues and plaster casts played such an important role in the works of early photographers of the late 1830s and 1840s, who had to cope with long exposure times. Given this perspective, what can be said about the relation between sculpture and film, a medium often first and foremost characterized by motion? This book deals with a wide range of magical, mystical, cultural, historical, formal, and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Apart from the contrast between stillness and movement, sculpture and film can be seen as opposites in other ways. Whereas sculpture is an artistic practice that involves not only static but also material, three-dimensional, and durable objects, the cinema produces kinetic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images.

As sculpture is the classical art par excellence, statues abound in films set in Greek or Roman antiquity. Moreover, many of the mythological tropes involving sculptures that have persisted on the silver screen have their origins in classical antiquity: the Ovidian account of a Cypriot sculptor named Pygmalion who falls in love with his ivory creation and sees it bestowed with life by Venus, Hephaistos’s deadly automatons, the petrifying gaze of the Medusa, and divine sculptural manifestation, or agalmatophany, for instance. This chapter investigates the myths of the living statue as they originated in Greek and Roman literary art histories and found their way to the screen. It will do so by tracing the art-historical form and function of classical statuary to the cinematic representation of living statues in a broad conception of antiquity. The cinematic genre in which mythic sculptures thrive is that of the sword-and-sandal or peplum film, where a Greco-Roman or ersatz classical context provides the perfect backdrop for spectacular special effects, muscular heroes, and fantastic mythological creatures.

As a way of conclusion, the afterword comes back to Roland Barthes. His writings on photography and grief (Camera Lucida, 1993), and particularly his conception of the punctum as the element in the photograph that “pricks” you, illustrates how emotions do and undo the subject. Bringing together the main findings of the book, the afterword argues that the subject and its identity are, therefore, the result of the performative work of emotions. But this identity will be necessarily ephemeral, as it is only a particular configuration of a particular doing of emotions, which will be made and remade in each iteration.

This chapter focuses on corporeality and explores forms of cinematic ‘becomings’ and cinematic embodiment. It argues that the films evoke the uncertainty of identity through their exploration of the body’s vulnerability and the constant process of metamorphosis in which they are caught

This chapter focuses on post-war cinema, considering how an emerging extreme cinema deals with political conflicts and concerns about France's involvement in traumatic historical events in ways very different to the tradition of political, social realist filmmaking. It discusses the ‘sensory overload’ of the ‘cinema of sensation’ by comparing Agnès Varda's classic art film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (France, 1962) and Claire Denis's ‘blood-soaked gore opus’, Trouble Every Day (France, 2001). It explores how both films, though separated by forty years, work with categories emblematic of the post-war cultural shift identified by Kristin Ross in her important study of post-war French society, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1999). Through references to disease, both films evoke the legacy of French colonial history, and in doing so, each connects the individual and the filmic body with the national body and history's festering wounds.