My brain hurts

This is a subset of the work I've been doing this summer towards my comprehensive exams (I have also finished reading other categories, but have yet to write them up - watch this space!). I am somewhat worried that this is the graduate school equivalent of my musing in grade 11 that I do not exist. At any rate, here is my long, rambling reading response. I am well aware that my citations need work, and that everything I argue here is tentative/provisional. At the very least, I think it's pulled from my head and not my ass. Ideally, even at the end of comps, I'll be able to tell the difference between these two orifices.

Comps Reading Response – Sex and Gender: Theory

The theory behind the history of sex and gender is a multi-faceted and perhaps infinite category. This paper will consider a few important strands: queer theory—namely the work of Butler and Foucault—, the 1990s debate over women’s history versus gender history, and the history of masculinity. These three tangled strands show a need to further deconstruct our deconstructions of identity.

Queer theory is an important component of many analyses of sex and gender in history. Among the more prominent queer theorists are Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, offering key insights into the construction of sexuality and the dichotomy—or lack thereof—between sex and gender. Many contemporary queer activists emphasize a distinction between sex and gender, using a simple definition of gender as a social, cultural and emotional construction and sex as a biological fact; Butler’s work gives a theoretical foundation to work that positions sex as a social construction as well. To Butler, neither sex nor gender is natural or immutable. Indeed, she argues that seeing gender as natural is “a pre-emptive and violent circumscription of reality.”[1] Emphasizing that bodies are constructed as well, Butler claims that the cultural construction of gender falsely positions sex as prediscursive,[2] an insight that is particularly important to understandings of trans* bodies.

Butler’s theorizing is stylistically complex; while she defends her decision to write in such a manner, this does render her work inaccessible to the average reader. This is unfortunate. Much of Butler’s work is quite theoretically dense, and challenging to apply practically or politically. However, she offers insights that are important even beyond a theoretical level. Gender, in particular, is performed; this analysis of performativity is arguably Butler’s most critical contribution to queer theory. For Butler, gender is a verb, rather than a noun, and is regulated according to what we assume it to be.[3] Butler argues that gender is self-identified according to what one is not, according to a binary differentiation often based on heterosexual desire.[4] Butler’s questioning of “women” as the natural subject of feminism is an issue taken up by a group of historians who engaged in a mid-1990s debate concerning the role of “gender”—as opposed to “women”—as the focus of their historical analyses. Butler’s analysis takes a different shape from that of the historians, however; for Butler, “woman” is not a solid identity, but a relational one, formed symbolically.[5] The historians—whose work I will discuss in more depth shortly—are less focused on questioning whether “woman” is a category or identity, but whether it should be analyzed on its own or as part of a gender system.

I have some problems with the idea of the “heterosexual matrix” that Butler argues constrains our identities and their performed manifestations. In short, she says that a woman can be recognized as someone attracted to a man, and of course sees this as problematic. I take issue, however, with her claim that this matrix makes non-straight identities “unintelligible.” My own identity is intelligible, to me, because I know myself; no part of it is in relation to any construction of “men.” I am concerned about the wider implication that queer identities must be “intelligible.” I would posit instead that identity is an internal experience, and need not necessarily be performed. While it is relational, it is also personal and often in flux. Being “unintelligible” may give a marginalized identity the power to articulate subversion or to assimilate for safety.

Marcel Stoetzler, one critic of Butler’s work, takes issue with Butler’s analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s theories of sex and gender. Butler quotes de Beauvoir’s statement that one becomes a woman, rather than being born one, and questions when and how a human becomes gendered.[6] She claims that de Beauvoir sees sex as unchangeable, with gender culturally placed upon it, so that gender is an action beyond the binary limits of sex.[7] According to Stoetzler, this is a misinterpretation of de Beauvoir’s analysis; de Beauvoir, apparently, did not assume that there was a natural or unsexed body that needed to become or acquire a gender.[8] In this case, the question becomes interpreting de Beauvoir’s idea of “becoming,” a matter which Stoetzler and Butler view differently. It seems that Butler is arguing that gender is painted on a canvas, but that the canvas is not natural or blank, but already has a particular form or etchings. At issue with these theorists and critics is what exactly exists on the canvas, and how the canvas is formed. Where Butler asserts that she disagrees with de Beauvoir and rejects dialectics, Stoetzler argues that Butler would be more satisfied with other interpretations of de Beauvoir’s argument, and indeed forms her own views through the careful use of dialectics.[9] Butler apparently viewed dialectics as “phallogocentric” and used this anti-dialectical criticism as the basis of her rejection of dialectics; Stoetzler perplexingly argues that Butler ought to use dialectics to critique dialectics, and see them as “an emancipatory, critical, dynamic and open way of thinking” as she had in her earlier work.[10] It appears that Stoetzler and Butler are working from different interpretations of dialectics.

Butler’s conclusion of Gender Trouble considers the political implications of her work, arguing that the identity categories assumed to be central to feminism actually constrain its cultural possibilities.[11] Gill Jagger takes up these possibilities in her refreshingly accessible overview and critique of Butler’s work, in which she emphasizes that performativity enables us to totally rethink binary frameworks that structure sex, gender, and sexuality. In terms of trans* politics, Jagger picks up a thread which Butler largely neglects, arguing that trans identities and politics contribute to “the rearticulation of the hegemonic symbolic beyond the binary frame.”[12] Reading Butler, I was regularly dissatisfied with her silence on trans* identities. For example, she saw drag as a troubling act by cis people, without acknowledging how some trans* people use it to articulate their identities in otherwise unsafe spaces, or to further trouble the gender binary. It is problematic that Butler’s work in troubling gender comes from within the very binary she seeks to problematize. I found that Jagger addressed many of the concerns that I had with Butler’s work; where Butler was at her most theoretical, I was left wondering about the social and even academic significance of her ideas about the phallus or the use of the word “I.” Jagger’s analyses show the utility of Butler’s ideas of performativity in how we think about agency and heteronormativity.

In their article “Trouble with gender,” John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison raise questions about Butler’s idea of performativity, considering the genealogy of her arguments. Arguing that, “what is objectionable about the concept of gender is precisely the way it operates within discursive fields to cohere a set of disparate practices which it homogenizes and falsely unifies,” Hood-Williams and Harrison see gender as unstable, rather than as a locus of agency.[13] Their treatment of the word “I” is clearer than Butler’s, specifically situating the word as performative.[14] According to these authors, the term “performative” originated with linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin, rather than with Judith Butler. Austin’s argument that language consists largely of “performative utterances” moves the idea of performativity beyond gender and situates performativity as linguistic as well as based on physical actions.[15] Discourse becomes an effect of performativity, as well as a means of performing.[16]

While less focused on gender, Michel Foucault’s work has served as a basis for a significant body of work on sex and sexuality. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault traces the genealogies of the “repressive hypothesis”: according to Foucault, rather than the silence and repression that is often assumed around sexuality, attempts to circumscribe sexuality have actually made it more visible and thus more powerful.[17] Rather than repression, the historian of sexuality can see the production and multiplication of discourses.[18] A useful reminder to historians is Foucault’s claim that the history of sexuality is actually the history of a specific nineteenth century field of truth;[19] it is thus a history of discourses, rather than facts or events. This is an essential point, but needs to be qualified further; in addition to being a field of truth specific to a certain period of thought, the history of sexuality is overwhelmingly produced through western discourses. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, Foucault problematically ignores the large racial and colonial elements of sexuality.

Some elements of Foucault’s work have been sufficiently disseminated that his theories appear self-evident in academic circles; any analysis of sex and sexuality would, for example, be remiss in neglecting power as something that is intimately entangled in sex and sexuality. Among Foucault’s insights are that power is an action, rather than a possession; it comes from above and below, and is sustained through hegemony; and it necessitates plural resistances.[20] Foucault argues that sexuality is a “transfer point for relations of power,” an instrumental but not intractable element of power relations.[21] These transfers occur through four sex-centered mechanisms of knowledge and power: the hysterization of women’s bodies, the pedagogization of children’s sex, the socialization of procreative behaviour, and the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.[22] This division into four elements of knowledge and power is, to me, quite reductive; the four figures that Foucault labels—the hysterical women, masturbating child, Malthusian couple, and perverse adult—could well overlap, and could experience and perform sexuality, knowledge, and power differently according to other facets of their identities. Foucault considers this to a certain extent, arguing, for example, that the ruling classes tested ideas of sexuality on themselves rather than imposing them on others.[23] He considered sex as a means of disciplining bodies, proposing a history of bodies, but without considering the intersecting webs of power that this entails. Intersections I would like to see him probe further include, for example, considering how the “masturbating child” is gendered. It likely comes as no surprise that I wish Foucault had devoted attention to individuals who transcend gender binaries; a Foucauldian analysis of the pathologization of trans* bodies and psychiatry would be academically and socially valuable.

Foucault’s silence on race is the focus of Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire. Stoler argues that race is actually more central to Foucault’s work than is often assumed, despite his lack of consideration of empire; while History of Sexuality is limited in its analysis of race, Stoler argues that Foucault attempted to detail a genealogy of the discourse of race in less-known 1976 lectures.[24] While Stoler makes problematic contentions as to what Foucault “would have” argued in particular contexts, she makes an important argument: “an implicit racial grammar underwrote the sexual regimes of bourgeois culture in more ways than Foucault explored and at an earlier date.”[25] These other ways included the class elements and racial dangers of desire, manifesting outside the metropole and self-referential Western culture, and considering the colonies as “laboratories of modernity.”[26] Stoler makes the critical link between Foucault’s biopower and the regulation of bodies that is implicated in racism; while colonial sexual regulation is not, to Stoler, quite the same as biopower, it was closely linked in the racial implications and power potential of sexual morality.[27] Thus, for Stoler, the nexus of race and sexuality was key in structuring colonial society.

Stoler argues that applying Foucault’s 1976 account of racial discourse to colonialism enriches it, rather than undermines it, and is useful in analyzing Europe as well as colonial settings.[28] Outlining the regulation of bourgeois bodies in the Dutch East Indies, Stoler shows the vulnerability, rather than hegemony, of imperial systems of control.[29] While vulnerability and racial ambiguity were present and important in the colonial context, I would argue that vulnerability and hegemony existed parallel to one another, such that the questioning of colonialism gradually entrenched it as a norm. Concluding her work, Stoler offers a new definition of the history of sexuality; rather than a history of nineteenth-century discourses, Stoler extends Foucault’s analysis beyond Western society and argues that the history of sexuality is “a history of how sexual desire came to be the test of how we distinguish the interior Other and know our true selves.”[30]

Connecting Butler’s and Foucault’s works, April S. Callis works to situate bisexual subjects within queer theory. Callis is concerned that queer theory breaks down the binary of hetero- and homosexuality, yet ignores bisexuality—and, particularly, bisexual identity—that is not part of this binary.[31] Her work thus reinserts bisexual identity into queer theory, and argues that this insertion ultimately strengthens the arguments of both Butler and Foucault.[32] Reviewing sexology from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Callis explains that bisexuality has often been considered as a developmental stage, rather than an identity.[33] Despite involving both heterosexual and homosexual acts, bisexuality has often been subsumed within homosexuality.[34] This element of sexology is particularly fascinating to me, given its parallels with science about race from the same time period, where people with even one non-white ancestor could be classified as black, for the purpose of maintaining a “pure” ideal of whiteness.[35] Callis clearly illustrates how Foucault’s work shows that the lack of medical discourse surrounding bisexuality identity has limited its development as an identity.[36] Like Foucault, Butler also had limited treatment of bisexuality, briefly mentioning it but without any dedicated analysis.[37] For Callis, however, bisexuality can serve alongside drag as a “way of starting gender trouble” and highlighting the importance of performance.[38] She articulates a concern of the bisexual community, asking, “how can bisexuality ever be performed?”[39] It would seem to me that bisexuality cannot be performed clearly in a monogamous context, leading me to consider the extent to which an assumption of monogamy underpins queer theory. I would like to see an extension of Callis’s analysis, considering sexualities that work further outside the gender binary and in non-monogamous relationships. In addition, it could be useful to trouble the very idea of bisexuality, which rests upon the assumption that there are two sexes to which an individual can be attracted. How could ideas of pansexuality expand this analysis?

In Writing Gender History, Laura Lee Downs provides an excellent overview of the debates and issues in women’s and gender history. From a pedagogical perspective, this text has excellent potential as a backbone to tie together other readings in women’s and gender history courses. Downs charts key shifts in twentieth-century historiography, focusing on the more prominent changes in the field since the 1960s. For each of her chapters, she focuses on one or two books that illustrate the trends and themes she is exploring. Among her considerations are the link between research and the women’s movement; how historians considered the intersections between women’s experiences and their race and class; the emergence of gender history and the history of masculinity; poststructuralism and cultural history; and postcolonial contexts of gender history. Her analysis clearly supports her initial argument that women’s and gender history enables historians to examine larger epistemological debates.[40] Readers can also see how historians have spent the past century wrestling with the definitions of, and intersections between, gender, race, and class.

Downs provides a concise, readable introduction to the debate among historians over women’s history and gender history. One of the key players in this debate was Joan Scott, whom Downs credits with a pioneering application of poststructuralism and its feminist reflections to history beyond women’s history.[41] This was in line with a move among historians to trace the production of discourses over time.[42] Scott’s 1988 essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” is cited regularly as foundational to the move towards gender history. Scott takes up a suggestion from Natalie Zemon Davis to study the sexes in relation to one another, defining gender as “the social organization of the relationship between the sexes.”[43] It is striking to note that at this point, social construction was not at the forefront of historians’ definition of gender. Scott’s aim in her essay was to point towards a framework for analyzing gender in the way that Marxism enabled historians to analyze class. She does, importantly, note the importance of social and linguistic constructions of gendered identity, arguing that historians need to consider signifying systems and the formation of meaning.[44] To Scott, an analysis simply considering women’s experiences without questioning the category of “women” would be ahistorical; instead, one must chart how the idea of “woman” has been formed and categorized and apply a self-conscious, analytic vocabulary.[45] She emphasized that the gender binary is inherently problematic, rather than known or constant, and implored historians to apply such ideas to their analyses.[46]

Scott’s work links significantly with that of her peer, Denise Riley. Riley’s slim study, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History opens by noting how feminism focuses on yet simultaneously refuses the identity of “woman.” For Riley, “woman” and “women” are historically and discursively constructed, unstable terms.[47] Her analysis thus charts how this category has been formed and has historically shifted. Like Scott, Riley points to the necessity of intersectionality, arguing that one needs a history of several categories to understand the history of one; thus, historians must consider the links between gender, class, and race.[48] Riley charts the genealogy of “woman” as a category starting with classical philosophers, who grappled with the construction of the soul and body, nature and reasoning.[49] Cartesianism was critical in questioning whether the soul has a sex, and whether the struggle between the flesh and the spirit was a strictly male concern.[50] By the modern era, the concept of the female person was thoroughly sexed, and there was an entrenched belief that the soul was male or female, not neutral.[51] Such ideas evolved further with the creation of “the social,” a sphere that made women both agents and objects for reform.[52] Social science reformed the idea of women, dividing this category according to race and class. This idea became further entrenched by debates over women’s citizenship, conceived as applying only to a narrow subset of women.[53]

Riley’s work shows how modern social and political concerns crafted new denotations and connotations of “woman” as a category. The debate over women’s suffrage birthed an idea of “women’s interests” and entrenched the association of women with “the social,” continually seeing women, but not men, as an object of analysis and reform.[54] Critically, Riley notes in her final chapter that gendered self-consciousness is not a full-time state, and questions the relevance of distinctions of women’s experiences or biology.[55] This point likely riles radical feminists who see women’s experiences as specifically tied to their biology, but Riley emphasizes the role of power, rather than innate physical characteristics, in forming women’s experiences.[56] It is evident that shifting from women’s to gender history has prompted a wider range of questions—and conflicts—among historians.

The question of women’s versus gender history is taken up by a handful of historians in a series of articles about “dichotomies.” Gisela Bock seems to have started this line of questioning, outlining six dichotomies that must be broken down to avoid fragmented analyses. Her three original dichotomies are nature/culture, work/family, and public/private; she adds to this with a call to deconstruct sex/gender, equality/difference, and integration/autonomy.[57] For the purposes of my analysis, her views on sex/gender as a dichotomy are particularly relevant, as she highlights the need to make men visible in gendered analyses, rather than allowing them to exist as a “universal” part of humanity.[58] She raises the concern, however, that many analyses consider sex and gender too separately, failing to see biology, and thus, sex, as a social product.[59] Though not challenging the concept of gender, Bock insists that we question how we see it in opposition to sex.

Several Canadian historians have taken up this debate. In 1995, Joy Parr published “Gender History and Historical Practice,” an article which reviewed the challenges of practicing gender history, seeing historians’ critique of this form of analysis as epistemological and also political.[60] Parr notes that research that historicizes the ideas of difference and truth that sustain hierarchies of power presents a threat to other historians who are not inclined towards feminist or cultural history.[61] Like Joan Scott, Parr calls for more self-conscious work focusing on relational identities, acknowledging instability and ambiguity, and focusing on discourses rather than simply experience; studying experience is insufficient without considering how that experience is formed.[62]

The debate between historians in a series of articles in Left History shows how historians respond to the questions raised by Parr, Bock, Riley, and Scott. Echoing Bock’s “Challenging Dichotomies” title, but raising quite different concerns, Joan Sangster’s “Beyond Dichotomies: Re-Assessing Gender History and Women’s History in Canada” alleged that other historians had created a hierarchy that dangerously privileged gender history above women’s history.[63] Where Bock works to break down the dichotomy between women’s and gender history, Sangster condemns this dichotomy yet simultaneously reinforces it in her assertions that women’s history had become marginal, academically and politically, in an environment that saw gender history as a product of progress in the field.[64] She insists on a “common front” between women’s historians and gender historians, in an article that takes such a defensive tone that it is unsurprising that she sparked conflict among historians. Subsequent issues of Left History saw the continuation of this debate, with pieces by Franca Iacovetta and Linda Kealey, and by Karen Dubinsky and Lynne Marks, before a final response from Sangster.

Both of these pairs of historians responded to Sangster that her dichotomies are exaggerated or even of her own creation. Iacovetta and Kealey remind readers that many historians have been working on topics concerning both women and gender and argue that “the notion that there is a “story” that all of Canada’s gender historians tell about the Whiggish ascent from women’s to gender history distorts rather than illuminates the Canadian scene.”[65] Much of their piece is concerned with outlining how women’s history and gender history are intertwined, sharing feminist insights.[66] They contend that the shift towards poststructuralism has not necessarily undermined considerations of the material basis of women’s oppression; gender history can thus be compatible with socialist feminist analyses, while also considering other elements of women’s identities.[67]

Dubinsky and Marks offer a perspective from younger historians, arguing that Sangster has severely misrepresented feminist history.[68] They argue that Sangster has created the dichotomies that she wants historians to move beyond.[69] This is, perhaps, an unfair response, as Bock also pointed to a dichotomy between sex and gender that had to be broken down. The problem in Sangster’s piece is her allegation of a hierarchy within this dichotomy, an allegation that to me reeks of the claims of current “men’s rights activists” who claim that feminism has put women above men. More compellingly, Dubinsky and Marks claim that gender history “is closely linked to women’s history—it neither supercedes it nor renders it obsolete.”[70] Unlike Sangster, they do not see gender history as potentially undermining women’s position within the university, and argue that a gender history that includes men has the potential to strengthen feminist critiques and analyses and undermine masculine hegemony.[71] Accusing Sangster of attacking a shared feminist project, they sensibly suggest a combination of approaches, where historians deconstruct gendered categories, but also consider how men and women experienced these categories.[72]

Sangster’s response to her four critics backpedals somewhat, insisting that she still supported gender history.[73] This may be the case, but it certainly isn’t what she implied in her earlier article. She denies the claim that she “created a non-existent dichotomy between women’s and gender history”[74] and comes across as problematically defensive in her text, footnotes and parenthetical remarks, at one point claiming that her respondents perpetuated, rather than deconstructed, dichotomies.[75] I wonder if, after this debate, Sangster could concede that women’s history is an element of gender history. She does, after all, acknowledge, “there may be more continuity in the themes and problems we are encountering in both women’s and gender history than we have acknowledged.”[76] This quotation is particularly telling of her limitations of Sangster’s analysis; in their responses, Iacovetta, Kealey, Dubinsky, and Marks show how other historians have acknowledged continuities, rather than seeing women’s and gender history as a dichotomy.

Among the concerns for historians in the move from women’s to gender history was separate “public” and “private” spheres. Again, Gisela Bock appears to have ignited this discussion. Laura Lee Downs provides context for such a debate, and considers it in relation to widely read studies in gender history. Among these is Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes. In this study, which examines how the English middle class was gendered, Davidoff and Hall emphasize how the division between public and private is not tidy; public men were enmeshed in family networks that enabled their success, and domesticity was very important to them.[77] Part of the family role was to mediate the gap between the public and private spheres, or the market and domestic space.[78] These spaces interpenetrated, with the economy and the family profoundly affecting one another.[79] Religion was somewhat anomalous, as a space which insisted upon separate spheres—the home being a moral world, supervised by women—but which enabled men, paradoxically, to assert their manliness through association with moral activities that would normally be attributed to women.[80] Davidoff and Hall’s work has had a clear impact on Canadian research on class, religion, and gender; Joy Parr’s The Gender of Breadwinners and Lynne Marks’ Revivals and Roller Rinks particularly come to mind.[81] Davidoff and Hall clearly establish that “public” was not the same as “political”; women’s entry into the public sphere did not mean that they had control over property or capital, or any significant political power. Similarly, this idea of the “public” was neither an exclusively masculine space, nor the only masculine space; they show how masculinity could be situated in domestic contexts.

Laura Lee Downs’ work is also a sensible starting point to explore historiography concerning masculinity. According to Downs, the history of masculinity catalyzed the rift between women’s and gender historians.[82] She is evidently in favour of integrating the history of masculinity into a gender history approach, noting that the history of masculinity emphasizes how males are implicated in social constructions and are mutable, rather than natural.[83] Sangster does, in her response, point to a particularly salient issue in women’s and gender history. The relationship between women’s or gender history and poststructuralism, she suggests, needs far more exploration.[84] Some of this exploration—likely to Sangster’s dismay—has emerged in histories of masculinity, and analyses of these histories. Joy Parr succinctly outlines the fears of opponents of the history of masculinity; several historians raised concerns that poststructuralist techniques could destructuralize history so much that all power structures, responsibility, and agency disappear, and thus make masculine power appear benign.[85] Parr suggests that historians avoid this pitfall by considering the interactions between industrial capitalism and masculinity, and avoid analyses that emphasize “crises” in masculinity when there is merely a change.[86] She also notes a limitation in histories of masculinity at the time that she was writing; most work at that time focused on institutional and workplace settings, examining the formation of masculinities in homosocial environments.[87] These studies were lacking the relational dimension that historians such as Parr and Zemon Davis call for.

The debate in Left History among Canadian historians over women’s versus gender histories also considers the role of histories of masculinity. Iacovetta and Kealey refute Sangster’s allegation that histories of masculinity risk emphasizing positive elements of men’s lives, calling such a position “premature.”[88] Dubinsky and Marks point out that strong work on masculinity considers how masculinity is a relational concept, rooted in power over women.[89] They stress how historians of women should be more careful to also consider women’s experiences as relational, with white women’s identities based on their power over women of colour.[90] I am overall quite convinced by their position on this issue: “good, critical feminist work on the history of masculinity will not contribute to masculine hegemony, it will help to undermine it.”[91] Certainly, non-feminist work on masculinity continues to be published; I will consider some of these in subsequent reading responses. While there remains room for growth in histories of masculinity, two decades later it appears that Sangster could have been less worried; my impression is that historians question and condemn masculinity far more than they celebrate it. The years since Sangster’s article have seen a more diverse body of work on histories of masculinities.

Sangster suggests that historians “interrogate the politics of writing on masculinity.”[92] I notice that this was already being done; nearly all the historians involved in this debate point to work by John Tosh and Michael Kimmel; Tosh in particular does this in “What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain.” Tosh situates masculinity as integral to women’s and gender history when he asserts, “the gendered study of men must be indispensable to any serious feminist historical project.”[93] For Tosh, the history of masculinity has significant subversive potential in critiquing how “man” has become the universal gender.[94] Tosh is careful to problematize his area of study. Just as a study of gender should not be limited to women, a study of sexuality must also consider heterosexuality.[95] At the forefront of his article is an emphasis on masculinities as relational. He thus stresses how manliness is not the same as masculinity, and is, by itself, insufficiently relational as a strand of analysis.[96] For Tosh, masculinity is largely a social status, rather than a set of cultural attributes.[97] In this sense, masculinity seems to be a manifestation of gender privilege and patriarchy, rather than a label given to men’s performances of gender identity.[98] Ultimately, Tosh reminds his readers that masculinity has multiple social meanings; this leaves flexibility for future historians working on masculinity to probe its manifestations in varying spheres and cultural contexts, considering the subordination of some masculinities in relation to dominant constructions.[99] Tosh seems to consider masculinity as both a social status, and a social identity, which he claims is “usually the most deeply experienced that men have.”[100] I do wonder, however, whether his perspective on this could be influenced by his own racial and class position; if he were not an educated, white man, would he situate class or race as a deeper experience?

As Tosh suggests probing the link between gender and sexuality, Steven Maynard considers this concern in his “Queer Musings on Masculinity and History.” He stresses that studies of masculinity must integrate sexuality by considering gay men and the feminine components of men’s identities. Maynard is critical of the notion of a “crisis” in masculinity, such as is scrutinized by Joy Parr in response to one of Maynard’s earlier articles.[101] One element of Maynard’s article particularly struck me; he describes how the structure of texts can strengthen heterosexual hegemony, by considering gay men only in a single chapter, often at the end of a monograph, in studies of masculinity.[102] This is so similar to how Indigenous peoples have been treated in many surveys of Canadian history, and how non-white masculinities continue to be approached. A thorough integration of intersectionality seems to be an ongoing challenge for historians.

Kimmel’s work is an example of how historians can use masculinity in their analyses. Taking up Zemon Davis’s call for a relational analysis, he reconfigures the history of the United States in terms of problems with manhood, arguing that we can only understand manhood in relation to history, and history in relation to manhood.[103] Kimmel’s work offers several important insights. Importantly, he acknowledges that “femininity” is not the equivalent of “women.” Men define themselves in relation to their ideas about women, rather than in relation to actual women.[104] This is compelling, as it shows the role of representations of the Other in the formation of identity. However, I find this simultaneously to be problematic, as it does risk writing women out of histories of masculinity. Additionally, his assertion that homophobia is “the fear of other men,” rather than specifically a fear of gay men, is one that I need to think about further, as it troubles the definitions of homophobia that I have grown up with.[105] How would such a definition relate to acts of hatred against lesbians, for example? How would he account for transphobia, where the targets of the most extreme violence are trans women, and thus not men at all? I would provisionally argue that homophobia could instead be a fear of how other people bring out one’s own insecurities about the fluidity of sexuality and of gender binaries. Kimmel’s emphasis on masculinity has made his Manhood in America a central text in gender history, and an important contribution to the history of the United States; I am surprised that there is no similar definitive work for Canadian masculinity.[106] Such a strong emphasis on masculinity is also a drawback to this work, however; his argument that the quest for manhood is the most formative and persistent experience in men’s lives is, by his own acknowledgement, quite Freudian; I would say that this is an overstatement, and risks neglecting other facets of men’s lives.[107] My position here is consistent with Denise Riley’s reminder that our sexual bodies are relevant to our experiences only at particular times.[108] Rather than simply a story of masculinity, to what degree is the history of American men a history of a particular manifestation of whiteness? Masculinity is certainly a persistent thread in this history, but I am not confident that it is as perpetually in the foreground as Kimmel believes.

Nearly two decades later, it appears that historians are more inclined to study gender history, or to blend women’s and gender history; gender is still a clear undercurrent in analyses of women’s experiences, even by historians who do not seem particularly inclined to problematize the idea of “woman.” What seems to have been lost in all but the more theoretical circles is a consideration of sex as a social construction; as an undergraduate student in women’s and gender studies, and as an anti-homophobia peer facilitator, I was taught—and in turn, I taught—that sex and gender were separate, with sex being biological and gender being social. More historians could do well to, once again, complicate this dichotomy—possibly by considering in their analyses people who do not identify with binary concepts of sex and gender, or who are not normatively masculine or feminine.

One gap that I have noticed thus far in the readings I have done on masculinity is that there appears to be an absence of work considering women’s masculinity. In Sangster’s “Beyond Dichotomies” it appears that male and female are equated with masculinity and femininity, respectively. This is problematically reductive. Women certainly have behaved in ways that would generally be labeled as masculine, just as men can be feminine. Maynard similarly portrays men’s gender identities in terms of masculinity, without considering how women, or people outside of gender binaries, might present masculinity in a more subversive way.[109] One wrench in such an analysis, however, is Tosh’s assertion that masculinity is a social status. Women who are often described as masculine still lack the social power given to masculine men; would it still be appropriate to characterize their presentation and behaviours as masculine? Does masculinity belong exclusively to men with social power, or can it be part of women’s assertions of their own agency? This does, of course, raise the issue of whether masculinity and femininity are separate performances; I am inclined to suggest that they are not, and are simply part of a spectrum that historians have overly compartmentalized.

In the preceding pages, I have explored some of the ideas advanced in queer theory and in the historiography of sex and gender, including that of masculinity. I would at this point tentatively argue that historians need to even further deconstruct the categories upon which we base analyses of sex, sexuality, and gender. This is challenging, as we seem to lack the language necessary for such a deconstruction; there is not even a universally-accepted grammar to discuss individuals in a non-binary way. Most individuals whose experiences we study would, if given the opportunity, likely situate themselves within a gender binary. Deconstruction of identities may therefore seem like a theoretical circus; however, I am inclined to believe that troubling gender further can disentangle the constraints placed upon our lives, which have restricted how we write about history.

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[1] Butler xxiv.

[2] Butler 10.

[3] Butler 34.

[4] Butler 30-31.

[5] Butler 53.

[6] Butler 151.

[7] Butler 152.

[8] Stoetzler 349.

[9] Stoetzler 354.

[10] Stoetler 357.

[11] Butler 201.

[12] Jagger 16.

[13] Hood-Williams and Harrison, 89, 82.

[14] Hood-Williams and Harrison, 77.

[15] Hood-Williams and Harrison, 77.

[16] Hood-Williams and Harrison, 85.

[17] Foucault, 48-49.

[18] Foucault 72.

[19] Foucault 69.

[20] Foucault 94-95.

[21] Foucault 103.

[22] Foucault 104-5.

[23] Foucault 123.

[24] Stoler viii

[25] Stoler 12

[26] Stoler 15.

[27] Stoler 44.

[28] Stoler 95.

[29] Stoler 97.

[30] Stoler 195.

[31] Callis 217.

[32] Callis 221.

[33] Callis 224.

[34] Callis 225.

[35] I do not remember the citation for this! Am still trying to remember where I read it. This is bothering me.

[36] Callis 226.

[37] Callis 226.

[38] Callis 228.

[39] Callis 228.

[40] Downs 2.

[41] Downs 92-93.

[42] Downs 95.

[43] Scott 28.

[44] Scott 38.

[45] Scott 40-41.

[46] Scott 49.

[47] Riley 1-2.

[48] Riley 14.

[49] Riley 18.

[50] Riley 20-23.

[51] Riley 43.

[52] Riley 50-51.

[53] Riley 54-55.

[54] Riley 70.

[55] Riley 99.

[56] Riley 99.

[57] Bock, basically the whole article.

[58] Bock 7.

[59] Bock 8.

[60] Parr 359.

[61] Parr 360.

[62] Parr 362-365.

[63] Sangster 111.

[64] Sangster 121.

[65] Iacovetta and Kealey, 222-223

[66] Iacovetta and Kealey, 224.

[67] Iacovetta and Kealey, 227.

[68] Dubinsky and Marks 205

[69] Dubinsky and Marks 207.

[70] Dubinsky and Marks 207

[71] Dubinsky and Marks 213, 217.

[72] Dubinsky and Marks 220, 218.

[73] Sangster 240

[74] Sangster 241

[75] Sangster 242

[76] Sangster 121.

[77] Davidoff and Hall, 13, 21.

[78] Davidoff and Hall, 32.

[79] Davidoff and Hall, 195.

[80] Davidoff and Hall, 74.

[81] I would expand further on the link between books, but am not sure how much I am “allowed” to build bridges between the fields, and cannibalize my own work from one field to another. So, for more thought on public and private, see my reading responses pertaining to these books in my Canada field. Similarly, this is a theme in Jones’ Labour of Love, Labour of Sorrow, but I will discuss that in my upcoming reading response for my colonialism sub-category, rather than here.

[82] Downs 74.

[83] Downs 74.

[84] Sangster 244.

[85] Parr 366.

[86] Parr 367-368.

[87] Parr 369.

[88] Iacovetta and Kealey 233

[89] Dubinsky and Marks 214.

[90] Dubinsky and Marks 215.

[91] Dubinsky and Marks 217.

[92] Sangster 247.

[93] Tosh 179.

[94] Tosh 179-180.

[95] Tosh 182.

[96] Tosh 183.

[97] Tosh 184.

[98] Tosh 187.

[99] Tosh 189-191.

[100] Tosh 194.

[101] Maynard 185.

[102] Maynard 187.

[103] Kimmel 2-3.

[104] Kimmel 7

[105] Kimmel 8.

[106] The closest I have seen is Wayne Martino and Christopher J. Greig, eds., Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012) and Nancy M. Forestell, Kathryn M. McPherson, and Cecilia Louise Morgan, eds., Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, Canadian Social History Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Admittedly, I have not yet read these texts.

[107] Kimmel, x, 4.

[108] Riley, 102-103.

[109] Maynard 197.