Making it Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice ed. by Christine Ramsay (review)

The study of masculinity is a relatively recent phenomenon. It has only been since the rise of contemporary feminism in the 1960s and 1970s that critical analyses of masculinity have emerged. In Canada in particular, critical analyses of manhood are relatively few in number, although the literature is growing. Christine Ramsay’s edited collection, Making it Like a Man, offers a significant and welcome contribution to the growing body of work on masculinity. Considered as a whole, Making it Like a Man is a groundbreaking study of Canadian masculinity in art, culture, and film. The text is one of the first to interrogate Canadian masculinity from a cultural perspective and joins with other similar work in offering a corrective to mainstream visions of manhood.

The contributors to this collection come from a variety of academic disciplines. The book’s essays take on many different subject matters from visual arts to sexuality and gender studies to Canadian literature and, perhaps most strongly, film studies. In her introduction, Ramsay properly states that the essays in Making it Like a Man focus on the “representation of men’s gender practices in specifically Canadian arts and cultures.” (xv) In interrogating and challenging the traditional – white, heterosexual, and able-bodied – perception of Canadian masculinity in art and culture, the text succeeds magnificently.

Making it Like a Man contains many essays that will interest scholars of Canadian film, art, music, and literature. The book is divided into five sections, each of which deals with a particular aspect of Canadian masculinity. The essays have many strengths. In a section entitled “Emotional Geographies of Anxiety, Eros, and Impairment,” I was struck by Piet Defraye’s deconstruction of Attila Richard Lukacs’ paintings. Defraye demonstrates the homoerotic elements of Lukacs’ work, as well as the influence of European, especially German, erotic art. Defraye connects Canadian cultural studies with the broader study of masculinities worldwide.

This international focus is also present in the first section of the book, “Identity, Agency, and Manliness in the Colonial and the National.” Jarett Henderson’s fine essay integrates the study of masculinity and gender into the context of colonial Western Canada during the late 19th century. Henderson makes it clear that notions of acceptable manhood were key to the establishment of a white, settler society in Western Canada. “Civilizing” the West meant introducing immigrants – men and women – who would subscribe to conventional definitions of what it meant to be male and female. Henderson’s piece is followed by Michael Brendan Baker’s account of the masculine images present within National Film Board (NFB) movies during World War II. As a Canadian historian, I found both of these essays to be particularly groundbreaking in introducing gendered themes into Canada’s past.

The section entitled “The Minority Male” will be especially useful for Canadian and international scholars and activists concerned about Aboriginal and minority masculinity. Charity Marsh’s sensitive analysis of indigeneity, masculinity, and “gangsta” rap in Regina is representative of the essays in this section. Marsh discusses the experiences of a particular kind of minority masculinity – Aboriginal gang members in Regina’s North Central neighbourhood – and offers a strong critique both of “gangsta” masculinity and, more trenchantly, of colonialism, racism, and the construction of Canada as a settler society. Kit Dobson’s interrogation of Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X (New York 1991), in a section entitled “Capitalized, Corporatized, Compromised Men,” offers a similar perspective. These essays speak to what is perhaps the central purpose of the book: to interrogate the conventional perception of Canadian masculinity and discuss how it might be overcome, even by people – academics, scholars, and cultural workers – who benefit from the dominant view of masculinity.

The fifth and final section of the text, “Abject Masculinities,” dissects heterosexuality through the study of various mediums. Thomas Waugh presents a fine account of the heteronormative nature of much Canadian cinema. Waugh’s essay includes a section where he critiques The Boys of St. Vincent and The Sheldon Kennedy...