Masculinities In Politics And War

In this collection, a group of historians explores the role of masculinity in the modern history of politics and war. Building on three decades of research in women's and gender history, the book opens up new avenues in the history of masculinity. The essays by social, political and cultural historians therefore map masculinity's part in making revolution, waging war, building nations, and constructing welfare states. Although the masculinity of modern politics and war is now generally acknowledged, few studies have traced the emergence and development of politics and war as masculine domains in the way this book does. Covering the period from the American Revolution to the Second World War and ranging over five continents, the essays in this book bring to light the many "masculinities" that shaped--and were shaped by--political and military modernity.

Analyzing the speeches of the two Bush presidencies, this book presents a new conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity by making the case for a multiplicity of hegemonic masculinites locally, regionally, and globally. This book outlines how state leaders may appeal to particular hegemonic masculinites in their attempt to "sell" wars and thereby camouflage salient political practices in the process. Messerschmidt offers a fresh historical perspective on the war against Iraq over an 18-year period, and he argues that we cannot truly understand this war outside of its gendered (masculine) and historical context.

This book advances the claims of feminist international relations scholars that the social construction of masculinities is key to resolving the scourges of militarism, sexual violence and international insecurity. More than two decades of feminist research has charted the dynamic relationship between warfare and masculinity, but there has yet to be a detailed account of the role of masculinity in structuring the range of volatile civil conflicts which emerged in the Global South after the end of the Cold War. By bridging feminist scholarship on international relations with the scholarship of masculinities, Duriesmith advances both bodies of scholarship through detailed case study analysis. By challenging the concept of ‘new war’, he suggests that a new model for understanding the gendered dynamics of civil conflict is needed, and proposes that the power dynamics between groups of men based on age difference, ethnicity, location and class form an important and often overlooked causal component to these civil conflicts. Exploring the role of masculinities through two case studies, the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), this book will be of great interest to postgraduate students, practitioners and academics working in the fields of gender and security studies.

Addressing the relationship between masculinity, war, and violence, this book covers these themes broadly and across different disciplines. These analyses are located at different levels: public policies at the macro level; resistance and independence movements at the meso level; and masculine subjectivities, processes of mobilization, and radicalization at the micro level. The ten contributions encompass four recurring themes: violent masculinities and how contemporary societies and regimes cope with traditional violent rituals and extreme violence against women; popular written and visual fiction about war and masculine rationalities; gender relations in social movements of rebellion and national transformation; and masculinity in civil society under conditions of war and post-war. Taking into account different geographical contexts, the book emphasizes the relationship between the local and the global as well as the importance of understanding gender and masculinity in their intersectional interrelations with religion, race, ethnicity, class, and locality. This book was originally published as a special issue of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies.

This volume explores the role that republican political participation played in forging elite Roman masculinity. It situates familiarly "manly" traits like militarism, aggressive sexuality, and the pursuit of power within a political system based on power sharing and cooperation. In deliberations in the Senate, at social gatherings, and on military campaign, displays of consensus with other men greased the wheels of social discourse and built elite comradery. Through literary sources and inscriptions that offer censorious or affirmative appraisal of male behavior from the Middle and Late Republic (ca. 300–31 BCE) to the Principate or Early Empire (ca. 100 CE), this book shows how the vir bonus, or "good man," the Roman persona of male aristocratic excellence, modulated imperatives for personal distinction and military and sexual violence with political cooperation and moral exemplarity. While the advent of one-man rule in the Empire transformed political power relations, ideals forged in the Republic adapted to the new climate and provided a coherent model of masculinity for emperor and senator alike. Scholars often paint a picture of Republic and Principate as distinct landscapes, but enduring ideals of male self-fashioning constitute an important continuity. Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire provides a fascinating insight into the intertwined nature of masculinity and political power for anyone interested in Roman political and social history, and those working on gender in the ancient world more broadly.

A fresh historical perspective on the Iraq war, arguing that it cannot be understood outside its gendered and historical context.

This book advances the claims of feminist international relations scholars that the social construction of masculinities is key to resolving the scourges of militarism, sexual violence and international insecurity. More than two decades of feminist research has charted the dynamic relationship between warfare and masculinity, but there has yet to be a detailed account of the role of masculinity in structuring the range of volatile civil conflicts which emerged in the Global South after the end of the Cold War. By bridging feminist scholarship on international relations with the scholarship of masculinities, Duriesmith advances both bodies of scholarship through detailed case study analysis. By challenging the concept of ‘new war’, he suggests that a new model for understanding the gendered dynamics of civil conflict is needed, and proposes that the power dynamics between groups of men based on age difference, ethnicity, location and class form an important and often overlooked causal component to these civil conflicts. Exploring the role of masculinities through two case studies, the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), this book will be of great interest to postgraduate students, practitioners and academics working in the fields of gender and security studies.

Across a rich terrain of empirical and theoretical trajectories, the concept of military masculinity (now understood in its plural as military masculinities) has been a significant conceptual tool in both feminist international relations (IR) and in critical men and masculinities studies scholarship. The concept has helped us to unpack the relationships between gender, war, and militarism, including how military standards function in the production of wider normative, hegemonic manliness. As such, military masculinities has been a rewarding tool for many scholars who take a critical approach to the study of war and the military. This edited volume advances an emerging curiosity within accounts of military masculinities. This curiosity concerns the silences within, and disruptions to, our well-established and perhaps-too-comfortable understandings of, and empirical focal points for, military masculinities, gender, and war. The contributors to this volume trouble the ease with which we might be tempted to synonymize militaries, war, and a neat, ‘hegemonic’ masculinity. Taking the disruptions, the asides, and the silences seriously challenges the common wisdoms of military masculinities, gender, and war in productive and necessary ways. Doing so necessitates a reorientation of where, to whom, and for what we look to understand the operation of gendered military power. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Critical Military Studies.