Masculinity on Stage

Based on some forty duels that took place in Athens between 1870 and 1918, this article examines the different connotations middle-class dueling assumed in the political culture of the period. Drawing on newspaper articles, monographs, domestic codes of honor, legal texts, and published memoirs of duelists, it reveals the diversified character of male honor as value and emotion. Approaching dueling both as symbol and practice, the article argues that this ritualistic battle was imported to Greece against a background of fin de siècle political instability and passionate calls for territorial expansion and national integration. The duel gradually became a powerful way of influencing public opinion and the field of honor evolved into a theatrical stage for masculinity, emanating a distinct glamor: the glamor of a public figure who was prepared to lay down his life for his principles, his party, the proclamations he endorsed, and his “name.”

Violence against women: Can "jealousy" mitigate the significance of violence?

Beliefs about love and jealousy can be variables that influence violence against women. The aim of our reproduction of a United States study was to compare our data with those of the original study regarding the acceptance of violence related to jealousy. A total of 264 college students participated in the study. They heard and assessed two audio recordings ("jealousy" and "no jealousy"), but half heard situations in which the husband beat his wife and half situations in which the husband does not beat his wife. After each audio recording, participants answered six questions, among them: "how much the husband loves his wife" and "how long would the relationship last". It was observed that, aggression, in the case of "no jealousy", showed to have a negative meaning both in the United States study and in the present study, which was not observed in the case of "jealousy". It may be concluded that violence against women is a cultural practice in Brazil and that social rules regarding male honor, female submission and jealousy exert influence on this practice.

Burning Up

Taking the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon harvesting fields during a historic heat wave in Fresno County, this chapter provides a close-up examination of how the organization of labor crews forces migrant farmworkers to privilege their work about their health. It shows that subcontracting intensifies the labor demands placed on field hands by creating a hierarchy of descending pressures on labor crews. To maximize field hands’ productivity, labor supervisors strategically draw upon a code of male honor to impugn men’s virility when they become ill while harvesting. Meanwhile, migrant men on labor crews discipline each other and themselves as they buy into this code of masculinity. As they work through the early symptoms of heat illness, their silence expedites the transfer of value to their employers even as it increases their risk of heat death.

The Custom (ʿurf) Based Assumptions Regarding Gender Roles and Norms in the Islamic Tradition

This article critically examines certain custom ( ʿurf) based assumptions and theories regarding gender roles and norms in Sunni Islamic tradition and law. First the article considers how scholarship should conceptualize Islamic tradition. Next, the processes through which the concept of ʿurf has entered into the Islamic tradition and Islamic law in particular are considered. The ʿurf based assumptions regarding the nature of gender roles and norms in (neo)-traditional Muslim thought are based on what I term a “gender oppositionality” thesis. I argue that the gender oppositionality thesis has strongly influenced the manner in which the Qurʾān and Sunna have been interpreted with respect to gender issues and on the basis of which patriarchal traditional Islamic law (and ethics) have been constructed. In particular, I highlight and problematize the conceptual link between women as “ fitna” (sources of chaos), male honor ( ʿird) and sexual jealousy ( ghairāt) in discourses in (neo-)traditional interpretations of the Islamic tradition. Finally, the article articulates how traditional Qurʾān–Sunna hermeneutics failed to recognize the importance of “comprehensive contextualization” of the Qurʾān–Sunna on the basis of which we can question the validity of gender-oppositionality based interpretations of the Qurʾān and Sunna present in (neo-)traditional discourses that were incorporated into Islamic law through the concept of custom.

John Ford’s The Searchers1

John Ford’s 1956 The Searchers has attracted more scholarly attention than any other Western, including that of receptions scholars who have noted its kinship with Homeric epic. This chapter enlarges on the most important of these arguments – Martin Winkler’s study of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards as an Achilles figure and the author’s own analysis of the film as an Odyssean journey – recognizing the psychological identification between protagonist and enemy-as-alter-ego long noted by Western scholars as an important parallel with the dynamic found in ancient epic and expanding on the importance of women’s sexual fidelity to male honor and identity. This chapter then brings the Aeneid into the conversation, demonstrating that like Virgil’s epic, The Searchers is a self-questioning, multi-layered reflection on heroic achievement, offering a problematic hero and extolling the glories of empire while acknowledging the sacrifices inherent in its establishment. Finally, this chapter considers this film as a commentary on racial and Cold War tensions in 1950s America, reflecting on how this fits in with the larger comparison with ancient epic.

George Stevens’s Shane

Though a staple of the Western canon, George Stevens’s 1953 Shane has been criticized for its self-conscious mythologizing. Perhaps because of this mythic framing, Shane’s connections to the epic tradition are pervasive. This chapter begins by examining the overlapping concern in both with the guest-host relationship, constructions of male honor, and property rights as they relate to masculine identity. Turning next to the Iliad, this chapter expands on Carl Rubino’s examination of Shane as an Achilles figure by looking at the complicated psychological identification between hero, companion, and enemy present in both works. Next, Shane is connected to Homer’s Odyssey in its focus on a hero torn between lust for action and longing for home, its concern with a boy’s coming-of-age, and its anxiety about women’s sexual integrity. Finally, this chapter examines Shane’s close kinship with Virgil’s Aeneid through their focus on nation-building, with each including a significant acknowledgement of the antagonist’s perspective, in effect calling the justice of the hero’s cause into question, along with related notions of divine impetus and Manifest Destiny.

Men and Modernity in Porfirian Mexico

The Porfirian era (1876–1911) marked a watershed in social understandings of manhood. New ideas about what it meant to be a man had appeared in Mexico by the middle of the 19th century in the form of self-help manuals intended primarily for middle-class and bourgeois men who sought to distinguish themselves in a post-independence society that had done away with legal distinctions, including aristocratic titles. Marks of distinction included cleanliness, good grooming, moderation, affability, respectability, love of country, and careful attentiveness to the needs and opinions of others, including women, children, and social “inferiors”—an approach that artfully combined longstanding notions of masculine responsibility and authority with modern ideas about self-mastery and citizenship, especially the sublimation of volatile “passions” in all domains of social life. Modern qualities also mapped onto traditional concerns about male honor predicated on the fulfillment of patriarchal duties, especially the control of female dependents. The socially validated, “hegemonic” masculinity produced by this amalgamation of modern and traditional ideas proved burdensome for many middle-class men, who struggled to maintain an always precarious sense of honor or who rejected the constraints it sought to impose on their behavior. For men from less privileged classes, it represented an impossible ideal that they sometimes rejected through the adoption of antisocial “protest” masculinities and often satirized as delusional or unmanly, even as they too came to define their masculinity in relation to a modern/traditional binary. The modern/traditional binary that characterized ideas about masculinity for all sectors of Porfirian society has persisted until the present day, despite the epochal 1910 social revolution that inaugurated a new era in Mexican social relations.

Words Spoken and Written: Divergent Meanings of Honor among Elites in Nineteenth-Century Rio Grande Do Sul

The article concerns differences in the nature and signs of honor among nineteenth-century Brazilian elites. Based primarily on the court records of a dispute between a frontier rancher and a wealthy urban merchant in Rio Grande do Sul, as well as the correspondence of the merchant with a wide variety of commercial and political contacts, it argues that honor symbolized the value and reliability of exchange partners among all elite groups, but differences in the nature of exchanges led to different means of gauging honor. Landowners involved mainly in local face-to-face exchanges evaluated male honor primarily by the observance of spoken agreements and promises, whereas merchants involved in long-distance trade emphasized careful accounting and the fulfillment of written obligations. In a vast country with severely limited educational opportunities for the great majority of the population, fluency in written communication and accounting skills became important means to accumulate wealth and power, allowing individuals with these skills to occupy central positions in long-distance trade and patronage networks. Differences in the nature of honor also fueled disdain and hatred in the civil wars of nineteenth-century Rio Grande do Sul, which tended to pit frontier ranchers against urban commercial and political elites.