Sex and the Australian Legend: Masculinity and the White Man's Body (original) (raw)
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In metropolitan Britain in the mid 19c there operated a normative code of masculinity, stemming from the ideals of the emergent middle class. According to John Tosh in order to achieve full manhood, men had to demonstrate their masculinity as head of a household, in the workplace and in all male associations. Men were supposed to possess a range of attributes: courage, stoicism, independence and integrity to name a few, and to exercise these attributes in a social environment that was Christian, in which the family was idealized and where heterosexuality was normative.
The Unmanly Savage: ‘Aboriginalism’ and Subordinate Masculinities on the Queensland Frontier
Masculinity is not an indivisible and uniform concept. Masculinities exist and are practiced in a varying environments and historical periods, and arise from the interaction between gender, race and class . Understanding how these multiple masculinities are constituted requires an examination of the differences in and relationships between the different types, as well as the interplay of these types with other social variables (Connell, 1995, 77-79, 80-81; Davidoff et al, 1999, ix). In other words, masculinities can vary across class and race, and one type of masculinity can be defined by how it differs from an alternative type. In the nineteenth century, white colonisers discovered indigenous masculinities which differed from their own. Arguing for what she terms a 'historical-materialist' approach to the analysis of colonial masculinity, Mrinalini Sinha has called for an examination of the mutual constitution of the colonisers' masculinity and the effeminacy of the colonised as a practice of colonial rule (1999, 35).
Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’
Gender & History, 2009
Stretton, later reported, 'it has been a difficult matter to induce the different tribes to amalgamate and fraternise'. 1 This forced grouping was part of the government's plan to sustain Darwin's meagre white population by providing the support of domestic help. While today, the predominant image of the domestic worker is female, in Darwin in the 1930s, Aboriginal men made up more than half of domestic servants. 2 Their jobs usually involved the more arduous, outdoor work such as gardening, chopping wood, shopping, sweeping and hanging out clothes. Drawing on the language of other British tropical colonies, such as nearby Singapore, these workers were known as 'houseboys'. Aboriginal Australian historian, Jackie Huggins, has noted that the experiences of Aboriginal domestic workers are now well documented in the autobiographical and other writing of Aboriginal women, including works by Glenyse Ward, Jennifer Sabbioni and Marnie Kennedy. 3 While this may be true of the experiences of Aboriginal women, almost nothing is known of the Aboriginal men who were employed in domestic service. The process of feminisation of domestic service is perhaps one reason why men have been neglected in the historical literature, not just in Australia, but internationally. 4 A forum on domestic service in this journal pointed to the growing scholarly interest in domestic service. 5 That forum was primarily focused on accounts of domestic service in Europe; our study is concerned with the colonial domain where constructions of gender and masculinity were framed within racialised discourses. In the context of southern Australia, the literature on domestic service mostly deals with white servants and tends towards a class rather than 'race' analysis. This is illustrated by Paula Hamilton's discussion of the home as a political site where 'inter-class tension' and gender politics played out through the domestic service relationship. 6 Hamilton explores representations of white female domestics during the late nineteenth century in
2008
There is now a considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender, yet it has rarely focused on masculinity, either that of the missionaries themselves or of their missionary subjects. As has been the pattern in gender studies generally, the task of retrieving the hidden histories of women in mission has taken priority over analysis of the sources and manifestations of the missionary 'masculine performance'. 1 It is perhaps more surprising that missionaries do not feature much in recent writing on imperial masculinities. 2 Religion has long been acknowledged as playing an important part in the construction of nineteenth-century British Imperial manhood, particularly by fostering muscular Christianity in all its complex forms, but there is little sustained analysis of how the mission field both shaped and was shaped by masculine identities. Furthermore, the few studies that have alluded to gender identity in relation to male missionaries suggest contrasting lines of interpretation. Anna Johnston has seen the male missionary as an overseas exemplification of the muscular Christian, arguing that heroic narratives celebrating the physical and moral strength of the missionary hero were crucial in the recruitment of missionaries in Britain, for they demonstrated 'the importance of boyish adventurism and imperialism'. 3 Susan Thorne and Nancy Lutkehaus, on the other hand, have argued that the mission field was gendered feminine -especially in the eyes of influential Victorian writers such as Dickens, Carlyle, Eliot and Brontë -regardless of whether the missionaries were male or female. 4 Rather than trying to adjudicate these seeming inconsistencies, this paper takes them as a starting point for exploring the complex and contradictory roles that gender and sexuality played in the relationships between religion and imperialism.
Emotional challenges to masculinity in the 1930s Callide Valley closer settlement, Australia
2021
When the Callide Valley closer settlement scheme was opened in central Queensland in 1927 its design was based on a gendered rural ideal. A farming man was to be hard-working, stoic and tough, able to withstand the unpredictable climate and environmental conditions to tame the land, build the new nation and provide for his family; acts by which he could construct and demonstrate his settler masculinity, while cultivating the land. Through an analysis of settler correspondence to a Queensland government enquiry in 1934, this article problematises the myths of masculinity in this rural community to explore the emotional and mental strain on male settlers when the environment posed limits to settler economic and agricultural success.