The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (review)

Another book about the “social construction” of gender—an interesting one. Presiding spirit: Foucault. In the dock: “discourse”.

Declaring the turn from nineteenth to twentieth century a time of setting “boundaries” to normative masculinity in the West, historian Angus McLaren has assembled a variety of judicial trials involving men accused of transgressing norms of masculinity. These are grouped under a heading “Legal Discourses: Men, Melodrama and Criminality.” Analysis of an array of turn-of-century sexology and psychology follows, subsumed as “Medical Discourses: Weak Men and Perverts.”

Assertions of power, in McLaren’s reading, these discourses invented—“constructed”—various new negative concepts of manhood, such as the cad, the weakling, the sadist, the exhibitionist, and others, having the effect of narrowing down the boundaries of respectable masculinity. His idea of analyzing courtroom trials, such as an 1895 suit charging fraud against a London matrimonial agency specializing in wantful bachelors, as socially generated “melodramas,” leads to a complex and intriguing discussion of the late nineteenth century Victorian marriage market. A lengthy examination of pre-World War I murder trials in British Columbia successfully shows that men who killed in consistency with traditional views of manhood were not seen as murderers at all but as “real men” and, as often as not, acquitted. Several other discussions—of exhibitionism and transvestism in particular—stand on their own as demonstrations of law both reflecting and enforcing larger social prescriptions.

At no point does McLaren claim that any of his courtroom melodramas and sexological discourses are “representative,” but he locates all of them within a purportedly central enterprise of anxiety-raddled late Victorian culture: reassertion of the authority of supposedly traditional competitive heterosexual manhood, as against only vaguely identified alternatives emerging in modernizing post-Victorian life. Thus, while the new boundaries constituted in one sense new limitations on men, in a larger far more important sense they sharpened and deepened the hegemony of “real men,” and nowhere more strikingly than under the aegis of two ambitious professions, law and medicine, collaborating in the boundary-setting discourses. Just why these two professions so eagerly asserted new powers, and just why discourse on gender served them so well, remains, in McLaren’s narrative, cloudy. He might have sharpened his argument on medicine, for instance, by sketching in nineteenth-century doctors’ discourse on women, evicting, as they did, midwives from medical practice and appropriating women’s bodies to their own exclusive care.

McLaren has trouble holding his book together. He says that he wants to show that gender norms are not “innate,” but, as copious references to other modern scholars show, he knows that his readers, already well instructed by Foucault, hardly need convincing as to this. More to the point would have been steadier historical focus. Diffused in “the nations of western Europe and North America,” sharing, as these did, he says, “important sex and gender traditions,” (p.3) the broad social anxiety he postulates—following Foucault—can seem all too elusive. “I deal primarily,” he hedges, with developments in England and France,” (p.3), but neither nation comes through as a discourse-generating entity. Class, not culture or “society”, inflects his story of the London matrimonial agency, as the trial prompted middle- and upper-class men to laughter at the gullibilities of their lower-class inferiors. As for France, McLaren simply abandons deconstructionist modes altogether for a nakedly political point: France’s gender norms rooted in a demographic hysteria induced by the nation’s disastrous defeat by Germany in 1870, a “truth” destined to be deepened by the catastrophe in the trenches of World War I. McLaren has not been well served by his orthodox neglect of political and national perspectives.

This combination of the vague and the arbitrary allows McLaren to succumb now and then to a-historical reveries, such as Foucault’s lament over “inconsequential bucolic pleasures”, (p.203) once, supposedly, available in some pre-discursive rural idyll, now, sadly, lost to the...