Overview

In studies on premodern masculinities that have enriched scholarship in recent years, relatively little attention has been paid to the eroticising of the male body. Masculinities and Representation seeks to fill this lacuna, illustrating how gender construction served to affirm but also diversify premodern masculinity. In so doing, this collection details how, as a social construct, masculinity was not a single concept, but a dynamic and intricate notion. Focusing on the premodern period, Masculinities and Representation reveals how heteronormative masculinity was affirmed, but also how it was challenged when the male body was eroticised in art, literature, and devotion, or when 'masculine' norms were transgressed by the assumption of 'feminine' behaviours. Ultimately, the book demonstrates how masculinity itself could be transgressive in its focus of affection or in its inherent ambiguities.

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9781487556976

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Reviews

"""This erudite volume of cutting-edge essays suggestively extends the range of the burgeoning field of masculine studies and crucially illustrates the way current attacks on the study of gender and sexuality limit and undermine critical discourses not just for historical scholarship but for understanding the range of human possibilities.""--Guido Ruggiero, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Miami ""This splendid collection of essays examines how premodern men coped with the tectonic shifts in traditional masculine culture that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By reshaping old motifs, or creating new ones, men expressed their identities, and their conventional or transgressive sexualities, from warrior to dandy, from homoeroticism to effeminacy, from the repression of desire to its expression. These essays reveal premodern masculinities on the threshold of the modern world.""--Jacqueline Murray, University Professor Emerita of History, University of Guelph"

""This erudite volume of cutting-edge essays suggestively extends the range of the burgeoning field of masculine studies and crucially illustrates the way current attacks on the study of gender and sexuality limit and undermine critical discourses not just for historical scholarship but for understanding the range of human possibilities.""--Guido Ruggiero, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Miami ""This splendid collection of essays examines how premodern men coped with the tectonic shifts in traditional masculine culture that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By reshaping old motifs, or creating new ones, men expressed their identities, and their conventional or transgressive sexualities, from warrior to dandy, from homoeroticism to effeminacy, from the repression of desire to its expression. These essays reveal premodern masculinities on the threshold of the modern world.""--Jacqueline Murray, University Professor Emerita of History, University of Guelph

Author Information

Konrad Eisenbichler is a professor emeritus from the University of Toronto.

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