Masculinity and the History of the Body

Taken together, the above summary of scholarly works on fashion and power indicate that a history of dress must be closely linked to the historicity of the body. Even though dress has its own texture and materiality that is distinct from the body, a piece of dress forms the body and can even become part of it. Dressing is a bodily act, like eating or walking. Tony Bellantine and Antoinette Burton propose an approach of what they call “bodies in contact.” It encompasses an attempt to re-narrate world history through the body and the interrelation of bodies, with an emphasis on the concept of Empire, which they define loosely as “a net of trade, knowledge, military power, and political intervention.”¹⁰¹ They are interested in the way colonization and other phenomena are part of empire- building and its impact on everyday life and the way modernity is determined by these conditions. World history attempts to show connections between areas which were thought to be distinct, i.e. by tracing pre-modern trade routes and the cross-cultural exchanges they enabled long before the emergence of global capitalism.¹⁰²

The body herein is regarded as an actor. It makes visible imperial colonial encounters. The authors recount Mary Louis Pratt's suggestion of the “body as method.”¹⁰³ In the colonial context the authors stress the importance of female bodies as targets of colonial discourse and policy, yet they also remark on the lack of analysis of masculinity in spite of its centrality in colonial projects, visible for example in the crisis of masculinity the colonial endeavour evokes for white male bodies through their encounter with the non-white, colonized Other, and the feminization of colonized men, to mention but the most well known examples.¹⁰⁴

The history of Europe’s rise to power is going to be decentered by such accounts.

Even though Europe's rise had profound significance in world history, especially with the expansions after 1760, European culture only constituted itself in the process of imperial

100 Ibid., 77.

101 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette M. Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC [u.a.]: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 3.

102 Ibid., 10.

103 See Mary Louise Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London [u.a.]:

Routledge, 1992).

104 Ballantyne and Burton, Bodies in Contact, 7.

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encounters and in interaction with many different societies on the planet.¹⁰⁵ Despite its hegemony, European power was always contested, and Europe itself remained the center of power only for a very short period of time while new center like China, Japan and others arose.¹⁰⁶

The approach of the “body as method” was introduced by Kathleen Canning.¹⁰⁷ I regard dress as practice which is part of bodily practices like walking. Canning’s model relies on Foucault’s notion of biopower and his ideas of the social body which, she argues, allows scholars to go beyond the notion of the body as merely a metaphor.

Within such a framework the body can be thought as “in many ways the most intimate colony, as well as the most unruly”¹⁰⁸ and thus as a source of resistance. Thereby the body becomes an agent in history to the same degree as factors like capitalism, war etc., being a zone of management, containment, regulation, conformity, resistance and contact tout court.¹⁰⁹ The analytic task of the body as method, Canning assesses, is to make visible what is hidden behind the body's oxymoronic status, its treatment as a discursive object, as ideological work and as sign and symbol. Ballantyne and Burton call those hidden qualities of the body “the real stories” which include labor, leisure, family, mobility, political economy, household, state. These “bodies as contact zones” are then a powerful analytic tool that allow scholars to navigate between representations and relations of power and domination and agency.¹¹⁰

In 1994 John Tosh argued that masculinity was out of the focus and considered irrelevant for historical study because men's bodies were and are not considered gendered.¹¹¹ That is specifically relevant for my study of headgear, because men's headgear is rather related to the mind than to the body, while women's headgear explicitly marks gender and in addition makes reference to sexuality. That reflects the fact that fezzes and hats are also donned by women, but veils and women's hats rarely by men. An exception are the reports of the donning of women's hats after the promulgation

105 See Ibid., 10-11.

106 See Ibid., 10-11.

107 See Kathleen Canning, ‘The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History’, Gender & History 11, no. 3 (1999): 499–513.

108 Ballantyne and Burton, Bodies in Contact, 407.

109 See Ibid., 407.

110 A phenomenon that the authors call the “real,” see Ibid., 409.

111 John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, no. 38 (1994): 179–202.

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of the hat law, but these have been rare occasions. He argued that a perception that was elaborated during “the late Victorian heyday of scientific belief” that

“[m]en's nature was vested in their reason not their bodies. A profound dualism in Western thought has served to keep the spotlight away from men. In the historical record it is as though masculinity is everywhere but nowhere,”¹¹²

which even informs historiography up to the present day. The field of Masculinity Studies also within historiography has grown substantially within the past twenty years, so much so that it is beyond the scope of this introduction to provide an overview.¹¹³ In their 2005 essay on hegemonic masculinity, R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt emphasize the importance of male embodiment. According to the authors, men's bodies are both objects and agents of social practice while bodily processes and social structures are linked by social practice. Wearing headgear is a social practice that produces such gendered bodies.¹¹⁴

Breward demonstrates how fashion, the making of modern male bodies, and nationalism are closely connected. The marketing of men's fashion in late nineteenth-century Europe increasingly promised “health, vitality and the palpable display of the youthful and attractive manly body.”¹¹⁵

Partha Chatterjee has studied the general predicament of postcolonial nationalism, while its interrelationship with masculinity has been scrutinized in-depth by Mrinalinha Sinha.¹¹⁶ In her study of colonial masculinity in India, she analyses how a new nationalist elite in India simultaneously refused and relied on colonialist stereotypes. The colonialist

112 Ibid., 180.

113 See Martschukat and Stieglitz, Geschichte der Männlichkeiten.

114 See R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (1 December 2005): 829–59, doi:10.1177/0891243205278639; for an overview of possible application of this concept of hegemonic masculinities in historical studies see Tosh John,

‘Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender’, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History : Gender in History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester:

Manchester Univ. Press, 2004), 41–56.

115 Christopher Breward, ‘Manliness, Modernity and the Shaping of Male Clothing’, in Body Dressing:

Dress, Body, Culture, ed. Joanne Entwistle and Elisabeth Wilson (Oxford [u.a.]: Berg, 2001), 165.

116 See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World : A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books Ltd in Komm., 1986); and Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the

‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester u.a.:

Manchester Univ. Press, 1995).

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discourse contrasted the 'manly Englishman' to the 'effeminized' Western educated Bengali elite. The latter rejected their stereotyping as effeminized, and engaged instead in the re-appropriation of masculinity to consolidate power in the nation-state.

Wilson Chacko Jacob shed light on similar dynamics in modern Egypt. His study scrutinized constructions of male identities within the context of European imperialism and nationalism, using masculinity as an analytic perspective to demonstrate how certain disciplinary techniques produced the heteronormative male citizen. Part of Jacob's argument hinges on the Egyptian discourse about appropriate headgear for men, in particular on the question of whether to wear the fez or not.¹¹⁷ For Jacob what is specific about this discourse is the way it is characterized by colonialism and by the question of national sovereignty. In contrast to Turkey, where the fez was outlawed together with other headgear in 1925, in Egypt it became a national symbol. For Jacob the quest for national sovereignty is connected to a quest for an identity which embodies male virtues, especially honor.¹¹⁸ Arus Yumul scrutinized how discourses on male national identity evolved from the Early Turkish Republic to the present day through a notion of civilized bodies. Yumul's study sheds light on the impact of Orientalist debates about Westernization on nationalized male identities and Turkish modernity.¹¹⁹ In contrast Deniz Kandiyoti had argued earlier to open the perspective beyond the colonial context.

Instead of attributing phenomena relating to masculinity exclusively to colonialism and Western hegemony, it was necessary to consider dynamics of local patriarchies.¹²⁰ I agree with her to the extent that local dynamics need to be considered, which is definitely accomplished in the studies of Sinha and Jacob, but I think one needs to be cautious to avoid a binary perspective that equates local with traditional and external with modern.

Much of the discussion on bourgeois gender relations as well as traditional Ottoman social organization hinges on the notions of separate spheres as well as gender segregation. Both notions need to be treated with caution, since they describe an

117 See Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt : Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870 - 1940 (Durham, NC [u.a.]: Duke Univ. Press, 2011).

118 Ibid., 335 .

119 See Arus Yumul, ‘Bitmemiş Bir Proje Olarak Beden’, Toplum ve Bilim, no. 84 (2000): 37–50; and Arus Yumul, ‘Fashioning the Turkish Body Politic’, in Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity: Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century, ed. Kerem Öktem, Celia Kerslake, and Philip Robins (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 349–69.

120 See Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘The Paradoxes of Masculinity’, in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper, 1. Publ., Male Orders (London:

Routledge, 1994), 197–212.

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idealized picture that in addition needs to be read against the respective conceptions of space. Although I cannot accomplish a study on the transition of gender and space in the course of the long nineteenth century in Ottoman Empire, the construction of the bourgeois home and the nation state and with it the reformulation of public space and its gendered implications needs to be kept in mind as a framing discourse for these developments.