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Textual Practice
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Performing Masculinity
a
Michael Rowland
a
University of Sussex
Published online: 11 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Michael Rowland (2013) Performing Masculinity, Textual Practice,
27:6, 1074-1077

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.841408

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 Textual Practice

Eurozone austerity, the freedom for which Joyce wrote would indeed be
one that ‘repeatedly turns back or reverses into itself’ (p. 240). Perhaps
Gibson resists invoking actual Irish independence because it has, unsurpris-
ingly, been such a convoluted, compromised matter. Its early years are one
topic of Finnegans Wake, which ought logically to be the last subject of
Gibson’s Joycean sequence. Whether he one day produces that study,
and hence reckons in detail with the form of Irish independence achieved
in Joyce’s lifetime, we shall see. Meanwhile The Strong Spirit is vital reading
for any student of the early work. It reminds us of the scholarly doggedness
and intellectual clarity of a critic who must be counted, at the very least, as
one of the major Joyceans of his generation.

Joseph Brooker
Birkbeck, University of London
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# 2013 Joseph Brooker

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.841407

Michael Rowland

Rainer Emig and Antony Rowland, Performing Masculinity (Basingstoke:

Palgrave, 2010), 256 pp., £58.00 (hbk)

Recent years have seen a slow burgeoning of increasingly nuanced work

within the field of men’s studies. This has come in part from feminism,
and in particular from work done on gender by Judith Butler et al. As
such, Performing Masculinity is a timely and apt intervention in what is
still a relatively small field. It works brilliantly as an overview of the pro-
liferation of studies of masculinity in different areas, featuring essays on
topics from Byron’s celebrity body to the presentation of male avatars in
popular video games like God of War. In between, it takes on Victorian lit-
erature, romantic ballet, cricket manuals, poetry, film, theatre and postco-
lonial narratives. This is not just a whistlestop tour of the field however;
neither is it a box-ticking exercise. As Joseph Bristow points out in his
preface, ‘. . . only 20 years ago the idea of a scholarly collection titled Per-
forming Masculinity would most probably have sounded somewhat unusual
to readers located outside the field of dramatic studies’ (p. vii). It is this
subtle and complex issue of gender as reiterated, repeated performance
that is the focus of all the essays in this book.
Editors Rainer Emig and Antony Rowland present the problem which
faces scholars of masculinity, namely its elusive nature. In their introduc-
tion to the collection, they observe that, ‘. . . what is pervasive in society
and culture often remains invisible [and this] also remains true for

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 Book reviews

masculinity’ (p. 1). The contention that many social structures are
somehow inherently masculine is difficult to deny, but this should not
mean that masculinity is therefore not worthy of study. There are issues
that remain specific to the masculine experience, as Emig and Rowland
point out:

Since in the early nineteenth century masculinity was figured to be a

kind of violent blundering, the invisibility of masculinity could be
said to appertain particularly to the middle classes; this process con-
tinues apace today, since suspicious ‘hoodies’ and failing working-
class children at school are the focus of media attention. (p. 1)

The idea of the performance of masculinity being both troublesome and

dangerous is picked up by several of the contributors to this volume, par-
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ticularly Jessica L. Malay’s piece on Victorian working-class construc-

tions of masculinity in the works of Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth
Gaskell. In this essay, Malay refers to the surprising abundance of
reports in local British newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century
which told of violence and murder committed by men in industrial
towns. She contends that Bronte’s novel Shirley, and Gaskell’s North
and South are attempts to construct ideal industrial masters out of the
seemingly unstable foundations of contemporary manhood. The theme
of masculine violence is continued in Wolfgang Funk’s essay on
Martin McDonagh’s plays, in particular his discussion of The Lieutenant
of Inishmore. Here, violence and anger seem to engage with gender in a
different way – not so much the effects of technological progress, but
the unsettling malleability of gender itself. Funk highlights the ways in
which male characters in McDonagh’s play disintegrate when faced
with the confidence and certainty of the play’s principal female character,
Mairead, who is ‘. . . far from being helpless’, while the ‘rational super-
iority of the members of the strong sex is doubtful to say the very
least’ (p. 191). This leads to masculine violence being the subject of a
play which is both horrific and comedic. It also allows Funk to disregard
ideas of masculinity being rooted in the sexed body, positing Mairead as
the natural inheritor of masculine values. In the latter part of the essay,
Funk turns to McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, in which violence per-
formed on one (male) twin leads the other (male) twin to invent stories.
The violated twin writes his own manuscript in blood, which Funk
interprets as a male-gendered body writing itself through ‘an alternative
system of signification, a notion akin to the feminist idea . . . of an ecri-
ture feminine’ (p. 204). Funk sees McDonagh using violence as a way of
transforming gender and ultimately destabilising, rather than consolidat-
ing, hegemonic masculinity. This kind of reading is representative of a

1075
 Textual Practice

volume which explores feminist concepts to produce helpful readings of

masculinity.
Traditional masculine qualities like power and conquest are also ably
deconstructed in essays such as David Boulting’s exploration of the James
Jones’s war novel The Thin Red Line. As Boulting comments, ‘The per-
formance of tough, heroic or hypermasculine male identities repeatedly
debilitates free will and channels men toward often futile encounters
with death and danger in the novel’ (p. 111). He remarks on the ways
in which Jones’s characters frequently perform savage or heroic acts for
the same reasons, namely to reassert – to themselves or others – the essen-
tialist nature of masculine courage. However, he also points out that Jones
seems to be in agreement about this essentialism, ‘. . . he . . . expresses in the
text and elsewhere the concern that individual courage and morality are
being squeezed out by massive mechanizing and homogenizing social
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and economic forces’ (p. 113), an interesting echo of Malay’s argument

with regards to the mid-nineteenth-century British industrialised
manhood. Meanwhile, in Anthony Bateman’s essay on cricket manuals,
we see an interesting evolution (or devolution, depending on how you
see it) of imperial power between the later Victorian period and post-
war cricket discourses. Whilst cricket is always posited as not just a
centre of colonial and imperial power, but an arena in which boys could
learn to become leaders, the influence of diminishing political power in
the twentieth century leads to changes in the game. Bateman performs
some impressive close reading of widely used cricket texts which places
emphasis on ideas of masculine power and grace bound up in playing
style. He also points out the difficulties the discourse had in accommodat-
ing non-British male bodies, often resorting to racial stereotypes in order to
praise Caribbean players such as Learie Constantine.
There are essays which manage to step away from the traditionally
masculine to focus on how manhood has been conceived in ways that
are less expected. Essays on Byron’s body and its role as an object of
desire; the camp poetics of W.H. Auden and John Ashbery and the role
of male dancers in romantic ballet, are all engaging and provoking discus-
sions of non-normative masculinity. Wendy Ho’s examination of Asian
American masculinities focuses on the work of David Mas Masumoto, a
writer-farmer living in California whose writing concerns itself equally
with environmentally conscious farming practices and his role as a
family man. It is this willingness to combine aspects of oneself that Ho
suggests is a pathway forward for modern masculinity: ‘His is not a
choice for violent masculinity that seeks to dominate or ravage the land
or people; it is not a masculinity that marks its separation from women,
children, or its escape from an ethnic community’ (p. 159). Here, the
reconciliation of masculinity and displacement – whether political or

1076
 Book review

ethnic – need not be traumatic and destructive for the men for whom it
occurs.
Performing Masculinity is a collection which manages to be both wide-
ranging and coherent. The sheer diversity of contributions here points to
the field’s endless potential for fertile discussion. The fact that some of
the essays, such as Ho’s, reject the paranoid notion that masculinity in
itself is inherently problematic, shows that developments in masculinities
can be practiced as well as theorised. Performing Masculinity has enough
range to ensure that no reader will approach every essay as an expert.
However, it does have a common value: to reject the idea of masculinity
as monolithic and unchanging. What it offers are contributions which
are accessible and learned, witty and thought-provoking.

Michael Rowland
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University of Sussex
# 2013 Michael Rowland
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.841408

Norman Vance

Jennifer FitzGerald, Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke, Irishwomen, Friends

and Scholars (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 292 pp., £40 (hbk)

Many Irish women writers, historically neglected, were rather belatedly

recovered and represented in the massive supplementary volumes of the
controversial Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 2002. But the distin-
guished medieval historian Maude Clarke (1892–1935) was not included,
and the medieval scholar, novelist, dramatist, and translator of Latin and
Chinese lyricist Helen Waddell (1889–1965) was represented only by a
few pages from her best-selling novel Peter Abelard (1933). Even the excel-
lent and comprehensive Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006) gives
only a paragraph to Waddell and says nothing about Clarke, presumably
excluded because her published writing, graceful and humane as well as
immensely competent, was historical rather than conventionally ‘literary’.
Yet both were significant scholars and writers and pioneering Irish univer-
sity women. They were also close friends.
Jennifer FitzGerald’s thorough, well-contextualized account of their
lives and friendship from student days in Belfast makes a valuable contri-
bution to literary biography and to the social history of scholarship and
women in the first half of the twentieth century. The technical problem
of narrating, and sustaining interest in, two only partly intertwined lives,
one much longer than the other, is skillfully and tactfully handled,

1077