2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel will demonstrate how a focus on masculinity can contribute to a rethinking of the history of military and war in the modern world. Our contention is that in this field a gender perspective that foregrounds masculinity is productive of empirical and theoretical insights. Focusing on masculinity as both practice and representation and covering both the “long” nineteenth and “short” twentieth centuries, its central objective is to advance our knowledge of both gender history and the ‘mainstream’ history of military and war by demonstrating the extent of their inter-relatedness. By employing the perspective of the history of masculinity and it intersectionality with class and race, the panel will show how military and war have become the seemingly ‘natural’ homelands of masculinity—a masculinity that sometimes has been quite explicit, but more often has been elided in the equation of ‘man’ with ‘human’ and ‘mankind’ which conceals masculinity behind discourses of ‘general interests’ and ‘universality’. How might the histories of military and war look once the masculine construction of these realms is acknowledged? In seeking to analyze the intersection of masculinity, military, and war with class and race, we ask how modernizing tendencies in military and war were connected with the development of modern notions of gender difference. We want to know how such tendencies reflected and shaped emerging notions of masculinity, and how notions of masculinity produced the gendered practices of—among other things—citizenship, conscription and combat. The panelists will discuss these questions by focusing on specific cases.