Search Results

John Bryce Jordan proposes that the linkage between the male dancer and the stigma of effeminacy began in the early 18th century, rather than in the 19th century, as other dance writers and scholars have proposed. Through an analysis of writings in the Spectator, one of the first modern English‐language periodicals (London, 1711–41), Jordan demonstrates how concepts related to masculinity emerged through satire and social commentary, illuminating period understandings of dance as a socially meaningful, gendered practice. Characters who are deemed “problem men” are critiqued by “Mr. Spectator” for wardrobe, manners, and style of country dancing, and include Mr. Shapley, the “beau” (a woman's man, such as Dick Crastin and Tom Tulip), John Trott, Mr. Fanfly, and Mr. Prim. Rather than a marginal activity, dance is shown to be a prominent site for the performance of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors for men in early 18th‐century England.

This chapter examines “Tithonus” in the context of Tennyson’s “Oenone,” and of his early poems representing Tithonus’s son, Memnon. In studying the phenomenon of masculine beauty in a cluster of related poems of Tennyson’s, Chapter Five also explores the problem of beauty in Tennyson’s poetics. Section one, “Trojan Aesthetics,” examines some of Tithonus’s familial, social, and literary contexts and their implications for Tennyson’s own poetic practice. Drawing on Arthur Henry Hallam’s conception of “sympathy,” as well as a range of Victorian aesthetic, poetic, and psycho-sexual theories (including Havelock Ellis’s theory of “eonism”), this chapter’s second section, “The Rapture of Tiresias,” explores the nature of identification and similitude in Tennyson’s dramatic monologue. Pearsall responds to the critical tradition of dismissing Tennyson’s poetry as “effeminate” and “ornamental,” suggesting that, through Tithonus’s efficacious speech, Tennyson demonstrates the utility of beauty.

The construction of masculinity and of woman as ‘the other’ are integral to an idealized self-identity in the ancient world. These take a distinctive form in Jewish writings when combined with Biblical images of sexual immorality and anxieties about intermarriage. Despite the emphasis on the body in the incarnation, many early Christian writings continue this pattern, combined with Graeco-Roman anxieties about the body. Although some have found traces of a greater egalitarianism in early Christianity, a developing ascetical tradition reflects a conviction of the importance of the body as a site of identity but a widespread ambiguity about its expression.

This chapter begins by reviewing a limited amount of evidence which suggests that the Anglo‐Saxons may have had a less well‐developed concept of ergi, and concludes that, even given the paucity of what material has survived, it is nevertheless probable that the Anglo‐Saxon assumption in secular circles was that it was normal to be the insertive partner in sex with both men and women but that passivity and effeminacy were strongly stigmatized. Noting the problems of correctly interpreting the significance of legal and ecclesiastical texts as evidence for the incidence of contemporary same‐sex acts and attitudes to them, this chapter emphasizes the fact that there are no extant secular legal penalties from Germanic societies, including Anglo‐Saxon England. It assesses the evidence of the Anglo‐Saxon penitentials, which penalize a range of same‐sex acts, and discusses the obscure term bædling and its implications for the concept of a distinct Anglo‐Saxon sexual identity.

Chapter 7 focuses on the construction of homosocial bonds, looking first at heroic male relations in Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. It argues that the Beowulf‐poet here as in other matters remains ambivalent, but that the Maldon‐poet opposes what he sees as correct homosocial bonds to a cowardice stigmatized by associations with effeminacy and sexual passivity. It then contrasts the radical revaluation of masculinity and heroic passivity in The Dream of the Rood, paving the way for the later chapters' further analyses of vernacular religious texts which re‐envision gender roles and homosocial bonds.

As a means of transition from the analysis of primarily Eddaic material to the textual dynamic of the sagas, this chapter takes a single saga as the basis for an analysis of the relationship between Edda and saga, and the use of the former by one saga author in connection with the dynamic he explores. In this dynamic, as we shall see, familial (and particularly sibling) relationships are pitted against (and violently implicated in) sexual ones. Of all the family sagas, Gísla saga makes most striking use of Eddaic motifs, particularly regarding the symbolic role of the Eddaic heroine Guðrún Giúkadóttir to represent the old way of vengeance. In Gísla saga this use of and relation to the past is bound up with the network of sexual themes which runs through the text, and the discussion focuses particularly on the concepts of níð, or the imputation of stigmatized effeminacy, and phallic aggression.

without jeopardizing his masculinity. Masculinity is constructed in opposition to effeminacy, a discourse connected to pederastic ideology and to the sexual behaviours of moicheia (adultery) and kinaideia (lewdness, including passivity); that discourse is represented by Gnathon and Thersander, but also by Cleitophon’s adultery and transvestism. The chapter argues that Xenophon and Longus should be viewed as part of the imperial debate on the merits of love of women and love of boys, and that alongside Achilles Tatius, Xenophon should be seen as a subverter of certain ideologies of sexual masculinity; he even seems to advocate, through the figure of Hippothous, a long-term, mutual same-sex love.

In the early Atlantic Protestant gendered hierarchy of beauty and power, political, social, spiritual, and imperial relationships were eroticized, and desire signaled effeminacy defined by recognition of power, influence, and the more virtuous, masculine body. The French Calvinists had hoped the Indigenous kings Saturiwa, Outina, and Houstaqua would recognize their beauty, fall in love, and so willingly subordinate themselves, coming to emulate Protestantism and French culture in a normative form of homoeroticism. Instead, critics of the French at Fort Caroline implied that the slippages of some Christian travelers (who lost control to their desires, became dependent on Indigenous hospitality, and sometimes assimilated into Indigenous societies) became idolatrous, which was akin to committing sodomy and amounting to sexual slavery.

Dionysus was, of all gods, the most closely associated with the phallus, the erect male member, at once the instrument and symbol of male sexuality. His myths and cults also refer to the liberation, if only temporary, of both women and men from social controls, including sexual controls, which in most cultures are among the most rigid. The god himself is represented to a surprising degree as detached and unconcerned with sex. One can refer to Dionysus's detachment as ‘asexuality’, but one might also speak of his bisexuality, the coexistence of elements of both genders that may, in effect, cancel each other out, or even of his transcendence of sexuality. There are frequent references to his effeminacy, such as Aeschylus's lost play Edoni. Is this paradox, the effeminate god of the phallus, the phallic god of women, illusory, trivial or quite central to the conception of the god and the nature of his cults? The subject can be examined under, roughly, three headings: iconography, myth and cult.

As Julian Eltinge settled into Edendale and the new phase of his career in the 1910s, he quickly found himself at the center of flurry of activity. Movie-making was a busy business. It was estimated that during this period, film industries in and around Los Angeles were already spending more than thirty million dollars a year. It was Eltinge’s specialty to play challenging roles. This chapter discusses the quest for identity, and focuses on the relationship between sexual desire and identity, particularly gender identity. It seeks to answer whether gendered behavior is an expression of sexual desire—that is, whether men who dress as women in fact desire other men. These concerns are reflections of the questions that began to circulate in Eltinge’s Los Angeles. However, dthe 1910s, ’20s, and early ’30s lacked a single governing paradigm for explaining sexual desire and sexual behavior. Instead, multiple paradigms prevailed; Eltinge’s offered no answers. For a time, that did not matter. Hollywood was still happy to put Eltinge on screen as a female impersonator. However, the demand for authenticity and interest in desire intensified. In part, the fairy paradigm gained wider popularity. While audiences laughed at male effeminacy, they began to believe that the hidden truth of male effeminacy was homosexuality.

This chapter examines a persistent vein of imagery in James Joyce's Ulysses which cross-associates Bloom with stereotypical properties of Jewishness, particularly those of effeminacy and the peculiar slur of male menstruation. Moreover, the panoply of racist stigmas, as the chapter deftly shows, is inherently contradictory because it simultaneously casts Jews as vengeful and bloodthirsty and as timorous and emasculated. Ultimately, Joyce references and counterpoints the lurid denigrations of anti-Semitism and the discourses of masculinism and athleticism espoused by Irish nationalists such as Michael Cusack and Patrick Pearse in order to refute them. This chapter argues that the unmanliness and pacifism of Stephen and especially of Bloom act as a pointed counter to political ideologies that aggrandize violence and aggression.

Modernization theory threatened the prevalent social order, a key marker of which was the established inequality between the sexes. The resultant nascent feminism and effeminacy, often associated with degeneration or exoticism, became the focus of both science and art. Richard Strauss' opera Salome, reflecting a curious obsession to project the misogynist imagery of the age, pervaded the psyche of a large swathe of the European art force. This chapter seeks to trace the genesis of this obsession. Two elements inform the solution to this problem: feminity, and modernity and technology. Salome represents the extreme feminine fear psychosis of the era, the artistic manifestation of which finds expression in projected fetishism and castration. The earliest important Salome narratives, by Flaubert and Huysmans, establish a fundamental, mutually antithetical two-part pattern—the first part culminates in Salome's dance before Herod; the second dramatizes her relationship to the severed head of John the Baptist.

This chapter takes up a key theme in the liberal peace thesis: that the project of liberal peace begins in the eighteenth century with the work of Adam Smith on commerce and Adam Ferguson on civil society. The chapter shows that far from being committed to ‘peace’, eighteenth century liberalism was concerned that peace would lead to men losing their military prowess and thus becoming effeminate. At the heart of eighteenth century liberalism is a crux of ideas concerning the necessity for war and masculine process. These ideas also underpin eighteenth century police science. The chapter makes this case by building on feminist work concerning masculinity and militarism, and also connects the debates in the eighteenth century with the same debates taking place in the war on terror.

This chapter establishes a framework for understanding pastoralism from both expressive and stylistic perspectives. The first half of the chapter draws upon the work of various literary critics (including Paul Alpers, Terry Gifford, and Annabel Patterson) in order to establish three broad thematic or topical categories for pastoral artworks: Arcadian, soft, and hard. The remainder of the chapter examines pastoralism in terms of its style, providing an overview of both the musical traits associated with it and the major critical and interpretive issues they raise—most notably, concerns with pastoralism’s perceived engagement with the feminine.

This chapter examines the emergence of a distinct and subversive ‘queer’ man in inter-war Scotland. The attitudes of the police and courts appear to have been shaped by the identities assumed by the men that used the nation’s urban spaces for soliciting sex, for pleasure or for money. The effeminate homosexual, in particular the male prostitute, was marked out by his failure to perform expected norms of masculinity, and his deviance was perceived to be inscribed upon his body. Attitudes towards the effeminate homosexual continued in the post-war period and such men were the continued subject of scrutiny and derision from wider society and from homosexual men, the latter group perceiving effeminacy to be a discreditable form of homosexual identity

This chapter shows that there was a political need-at least fifty years earlier than the traditional dating of the breakdown of exemplarity-for a single authoritative pose that seemed timeless and classicizing but was enigmatic and ambiguous. Ghirlandaio’s fresco cycle in the Sala de’ Gigli in Florence (1483) and Pontano’s reinterpretation of ancient political theory in De principe (1460s-1490) demonstrate a nuanced awareness of the distinction between a subject’s interior and exterior. This awareness undermines the pose of monumentality proposed by the ancient exemplars in both Ghirlandaio’s seemingly pro-Medicean fresco program and Pontano’s education of his prince. In response to political crisis, both Pontano and Ghirlandaio emphasize enigmatic surface over virtuous substance. As a result, their exemplary heroic figures are threatened by hollowness and its correlative, effeminacy—and so need to emphasize masculinity.

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  

This chapter considers how Davy’s appeal to women in his audiences at the Royal Institution affected his public persona. At a time of heightened anxieties about shifting gender roles, women’s scientific education was a polarizing political issue. Davy’s recruitment of women to his audiences reflected his commitment to female education, but it was seen by conservative critics as indicating his vanity and effeminacy. He was satirized as a dandy, meaning a man whose emotional energies were invested in preening self-display to mostly female admirers. The figure of the dandy reflects anxieties about Davy’s moral standing that were voiced—in different terms—by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It also informed some of the gossip on Davy’s marriage in 1812 to the widowed Scottish bluestocking Jane Apreece. Some satirical commentators believed Davy had subordinated himself to an intellectually overbearing woman, who had unmanned him.

This chapter looks at Frederick Douglass's depiction of human consumption as a phenomenon that ate away at the psyche and soul. His observations provide a blueprint for how the slave struggled in mind, emotions, and spirit not only against social consumption but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break the enslaved person. Douglass's own hunger for self, familial and ancestral bonds, and civil status manifested as complex erotic ties to white men and cross-gender behavior. The chapter examines three different ways that Douglass wrestled with consumption at the hands of others and the self. First, by discussing how mental and emotional consumption coincided with coded instances of rape at the hands of an overseer; second by analyzing a condition of “mother hunger” that characterized much of Douglass's life; and third by applying the notion of male effeminacy developed in the previous two chapters to Douglass himself.