What is Masculinity? Henrik Berg in a new Palgrave Macmillan book
In the latest Palgrave Macmillan book series Gender and Sexualities in History: What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, edited by John H. Arnold and Sean Brady, researcher Henrik Berg at the Centre for Gender Research contributes with a chapter about masculinities in early Hellenistic Athens.
- The book is a result from the international conference What is Masculinity? at Birkbeck College in May 2008, and it gathers different historical perspectives on masculinities, what it means in a specific historical moment, says researcher Henrik Berg.
In addition, as the title shows, the authors have the ambition to go beyond a strictly context dependent view on masculinities in history with an attempt to question both what masculinity was and is over time and space: “It is hoped that both this groundbreaking collection, and the series itself, will foster scholarship in time-period disciplines that look beyond the confines of historical periodisation, context, evidence and discipline, to provide new insights and challenges in questions of the relational qualities of gender - synchronically and diachronically".
The book can be bought from the Palgrave Macmillan website.
From the book cover:
What is masculinity? Looked at across time - from antiquity to the modern day - the contours of 'manliness' take on an intriguing complexity. As the various contributors to this volume demonstrate, the ideas and practices of male identity have varied considerably over time and place: masculinity proves to be a slippery concept, one not available to all men, and one sometimes even applied to certain women. By looking at masculinity over time, this ground-breaking book presents a variety of new perspectives on the nature of masculinity, its social and political functions, and the methods by which historians and others might seek to analyse it. Each author provides both a case study of what 'masculinity' means (or fails to mean) in a specific historical moment, and contributes to a wider collective analysis of the changing historical dynamics to male identity. Overall, the book provides a key methodological landmark in the study of gender history.