This somewhat unfocused gender history nevertheless marshals an
appealing wealth of evidence of what trials can reveal about the
boundaries of men's roles around the turn of the century,
especially in England. McLaren (History/Univ. of Victoria, Canada)
smartly chooses to examine trials as events where the law meets the
vagaries of public culture (including journalism, class hostility,
economics, and medicine) in an unpredictable drama, creating a cast
of characters out of men according to how they conducted themselves
- for example, "gentlemen," "hard workers," "cads," or "weaklings,"
among others. Men of modest means suing a fraudulent matrimonial
service suffered public ridicule for their foolish hopes - or
calculating schemes - of attracting wealthy wives. A prominent
obstetrician who dutifully informed his father-in-law of medical
evidence of his sister-in-law's adultery fell afoul, in a libel
suit, of expectations of a gentleman's discretion toward a lady.
The second half of the book explores the medicalization of male
deviance, culminating in the case most suggestive of the nuances of
the cultural definition of masculinity: A man was tried for
procuring another to commit "gross indecency" when, in the guise of
a woman, he earnestly courted a man. The cases, scattered from
Canada to France and dipping into the continental literature of
sexual pseudo-science, lack the sense of a coherent study of one
society but are provocative in their implications for each. A few,
such as that of a fatal abortion in England, while themselves
illuminating, are only perfunctorily tied by the author to the
claims of the book's thesis. More suggestive than conclusive, this
study stakes out, in the courtroom drama, a solid ground for the
study of gender norms as played out in real life, and makes a
promising initial excavation of the issues raised in such cases.
(Kirkus Reviews)
In this history of manhood and masculinity, the author argues that
modern formulations of masculinity, despite any sense of
naturalness and constancy, are in fact, idealized cultural products
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He examines the process
of social construction whereby this traditionalized model of the
heterosexual male was selected, delineated, and maintained. The
author focuses attention on two domains essential to the
legitimation of Western cultural constructs - medicine and the law.
Through court reports and newspaper accounts, McLaren shows how
everyday people, not just the juridical elite, helped to define
through their testimony, an ideal of manhood and proper masculine
behaviour. He then considers the medical world: psychiatrists and
sexologists emerged as arbiters of sexual and gender differences,
devising new categories of deficient masculinity - homosexuals,
sadists, exhibitionists, and transvestites. Forming such deviant
types required the medical community, he argues, to further
demarcate a particular form of preferred masculinity.
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