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Sexuality Studies
The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada
How did one act like a modern man in postwar Canada? With a great deal of difficulty. During the Great Depression and Second World War, many men were first out of work and then away from their families. After the war came attempts to re-establish the traditional gender hierarchy by emphasizing men's modernity, allegedly superior rationality, and ability to handle risk, but the strategy had contradictory repercussions. The Manly Masculinity in Postwar Canada traces the history of what happened when men's supposed modernity became one of their defining features.
Through a series of case studies covering such diverse subjects as car culture, mountaineering, war veterans, murder trials, and a bridge collapse, Christopher Dummitt argues that the very idea of what it meant to be modern was gendered. A strong current of anti-modernist sentiment bubbled just beneath the surface of postwar masculinity, creating rumblings about the state of modern manhood that, ironically, mirrored the tensions that burst forth in 1960s gender radicalism.
The first major book on the history of masculinity in Canada, The Manly Modern will appeal to scholars and students in history, gender studies, and cultural studies, as well as to readers interested in the history and social construction of gender.
Through a series of case studies covering such diverse subjects as car culture, mountaineering, war veterans, murder trials, and a bridge collapse, Christopher Dummitt argues that the very idea of what it meant to be modern was gendered. A strong current of anti-modernist sentiment bubbled just beneath the surface of postwar masculinity, creating rumblings about the state of modern manhood that, ironically, mirrored the tensions that burst forth in 1960s gender radicalism.
The first major book on the history of masculinity in Canada, The Manly Modern will appeal to scholars and students in history, gender studies, and cultural studies, as well as to readers interested in the history and social construction of gender.
232 pages, Paperback
First published March 16, 2007
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
Shelved as '0-not-to-read-or-did-not-finish'
September 24, 2019I have put this book on my not to read list after encountering the following article.
Published on September 17, 2019
‘I Basically Just Made It Up’: Confessions of a Social Constructionist
written by Christopher Dummitt
For full article, see
https://quillette.com/2019/09/17/i-ba...
"Here’s where I wasn’t wrong: The archival research, I believe, was solid. I did go back into the documents from the time, and so was able to recover the way people spoke and wrote about being a man. I really got to know the era. This is the wonderful voyeuristic, pseudo-travel-writing part of being a historian.
To the extent that I stuck to the documents, and reconstructed how people talked in the past, I was on safe ground. This is, in the language of historians, the “how” of history. Historians privilege certain kinds of questions over others. Everyone is supposed to get the who, what, when and where right. These are the details of the past. But this kind of accuracy is, as the great historian E. H. Carr wrote, a duty, not a virtue. So it’s not something I offer as a boast.
But then there are two more questions, and these are the ones that really matter. The first of these was “how”: How did this happen? How did people think in the past? To answer these questions meant reconstructing patterns of thought. You can never fully reconstruct the thought patterns of others, especially those who lived in another era. But I do think that on this task, I got a passing grade.
But the biggest question of all—the most important—is the final one: “why?” Why did a certain event happen in the way that it did? In my case, it was: Why did postwar Canadians talk about men and women in the way that they did?
I had answers, but I didn’t find them in my primary research. They came from my ideological beliefs—even if, at the time, I wouldn’t have described this as ideology. Nor did my fellow scholars who adopted the same approach—and, unlike me, still do. But this is what it was, and is: a set of pre-formed beliefs that are built into the gender-studies disciplinary penumbra. Essentially, I followed the three-point Foucault-centric methodology outlined above."
Christopher Dummit recommends...
The Blank Slate, Pinker, 2002
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Published on September 17, 2019
‘I Basically Just Made It Up’: Confessions of a Social Constructionist
written by Christopher Dummitt
For full article, see
https://quillette.com/2019/09/17/i-ba...
"Here’s where I wasn’t wrong: The archival research, I believe, was solid. I did go back into the documents from the time, and so was able to recover the way people spoke and wrote about being a man. I really got to know the era. This is the wonderful voyeuristic, pseudo-travel-writing part of being a historian.
To the extent that I stuck to the documents, and reconstructed how people talked in the past, I was on safe ground. This is, in the language of historians, the “how” of history. Historians privilege certain kinds of questions over others. Everyone is supposed to get the who, what, when and where right. These are the details of the past. But this kind of accuracy is, as the great historian E. H. Carr wrote, a duty, not a virtue. So it’s not something I offer as a boast.
But then there are two more questions, and these are the ones that really matter. The first of these was “how”: How did this happen? How did people think in the past? To answer these questions meant reconstructing patterns of thought. You can never fully reconstruct the thought patterns of others, especially those who lived in another era. But I do think that on this task, I got a passing grade.
But the biggest question of all—the most important—is the final one: “why?” Why did a certain event happen in the way that it did? In my case, it was: Why did postwar Canadians talk about men and women in the way that they did?
I had answers, but I didn’t find them in my primary research. They came from my ideological beliefs—even if, at the time, I wouldn’t have described this as ideology. Nor did my fellow scholars who adopted the same approach—and, unlike me, still do. But this is what it was, and is: a set of pre-formed beliefs that are built into the gender-studies disciplinary penumbra. Essentially, I followed the three-point Foucault-centric methodology outlined above."
Christopher Dummit recommends...
The Blank Slate, Pinker, 2002
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Displaying 1 of 1 review