What's in a name?  

Article by Dr Karen Harvey. Edited by Liam Geoghegan. Additional Research by Faye Hunter. Defining our terms 

Within the field of gender history covered in this issue of New Histories, the history of masculinity is the most recent arrival. So young is the field, that historians cannot agree how to describe it. Manhood, manliness, masculine identity and masculinity: all these terms are used as labels in the study of men as gendered individuals. The list reflects the richness and range of this historical work. But, because historians scrutinise concepts and categories so carefully, each term also serves as a clue to an historian’s particular emphasis and approach. 

By “manhood”, historians emphatically do NOT mean the first definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘The state or condition of being human’. Instead, historians intend the third meaning, ‘relating to being an adult male’. This quality of manhood can be reached, lost or found, and its acquisition has invariably been a positive rite of passage. Manhood, in other words, is a high status social identity. “Manliness” is also used to describe something socially-turned, but while “manhood” is usually attached to people, “manliness” is often used to describe texts. The OED describes it as ‘manly qualities or characteristics; the type of strength, fortitude, or hardiness traditionally associated with men as opposed to women or children.’ Manliness is a code or ideology; it is achieved and performed, and is also socially and culturally valued. 

Other terms have different emphases. “Masculine identity” can incorporate many different things, with perhaps only some of them overlapping with dominant understandings of “manhood” or “manliness”. It lends itself to the plural, as does the term “masculinity”. This final term suggests emotion, the self and an identity that is inwardly constructed and felt, perhaps, rather than performed. But it is important to note that the word only acquired this meaning of depth following the cultural impact of psychoanalysis during the early twentieth century. Arguably, historians of earlier periods that speak about masculinity as an interior self are using an anachronistic meaning of the word. And yet, if there is one banner under which these historians can gather happily, it is “the history of masculinity”, used in a more inclusive and less specific way than the psychoanalytic term. 

Why not “men’s history”? 

It is noteworthy that these categories are not matched by those in women’s history. We do not have “a history of womanhood”, of “womanliness”, of “feminine identity” or “femininity”. So why is this issue of New Histories not examining women’s history, gender history and “men’s history”? 

It is partly because this field emerged during the 1990s. And with this distinctive genesis, comes a distinctive historical field. Coming after the massive changes that women’s and feminist history had made to the discipline, and also after the first key theoretical statements about gender as a category of analysis, masculinity is a field produced out of the productive tensions between poststructuralist theory, social history, feminist theory and women’s history. The seed was planted outside the historical discipline, though, in the area of study often known as “Men’s Studies”. 

A history of identity 

Those engaging in the field of Men’s Studies in the 1980s made a particular kind of investment in History: their aim was to expose men as gendered individuals, and as people capable of change, by historicising masculinity. History was an intellectual, historical and political resource. It had possessed the same value for women’s historians in the 1970s who sought to rediscover women’s lives and restore those lives to the historical record. Yet for Victor Seidler, who published Rediscovering Masculinity in 1989, the ambition was rather more about personal identity, ‘a contribution to an understanding of a particular masculinity in its social and historical formation [and] also the experience of a particular man and his growing up into masculinity’. 

The historical study of masculinity was also deeply affected by the development of gender as a category of analysis. The landmark work was by Joan Scott, who used a Derridean method of deconstruction and applied it to gender in language, focussing on difference, dichotomy, and the exposure of processes of ‘othering’. Poststructuralism gave shape to modes of gender analysis; it also emphasised the plurality of masculinities. As John Tosh has written, ‘“Masculinities” fits with the post-modernist vision of the world, with its proliferation of identities and its contradictory discourses.’ 

A history of the powerful 

Yet there is another distinctive feature of the history of masculinity. If women’s history is in part faced with the challenge of writing the histories of the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, the silent and the unrepresented, then historians of masculinity have been faced with the challenge of writing the histories of the powerful. ‘Manful assertions’, have been the pre-eminent concern of historians of masculinity. Judicious sensitivity to the history of male power is one important reason why historians do not gather to discuss “men’s history”: such phrases would simply reproduce older gendered bodies of knowledge. 

A problem remains? 

“The history of masculinity” is a historically-sensitive way to describe a gendered history of men. Yet “masculinity” infuses everything about men and their lives with gender. One challenge for historians of masculinity is to explore which aspects of men’s lives were affected by codes other than “manhood” and “masculinity”, and whether those aspects are best understood using gender as a category of analysis or not. If not, the question remains: what terms can we use to describe that field of history?

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