Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory (review)

The editors' introduction offers a very useful comparative account of the state of masculinity studies today in France and the English-speaking world; the ten essays which follow address texts from the Middle Ages to the present. Peggy McCracken examines how dying for love is involved in shaping heroic masculinity in the Prose Lancelot. Analysing texts by Rabelais and Brantôme, David LaGuardia suggests that the sharing between men of stories about cuckoldry is 'part of their figurative or even literal love for each other' (p. 78); on the evidence presented this may be stretching a point. Margaret Waller reveals Napoleon's keen understanding of the power of vestimentary codes to express gendered and political meanings. She sees him as a transitional figure, looking back in the silky splendour of his coronation attire to a form of exhibitionism which was coming to seem effeminate and forward to modern masculinity in his more usual practice of sartorial understatement. Lawrence Schehr presents a complex but convincing analysis of the multilayered performance of gendered identity by Colette's character Chéri: he is queer, but not homosexual, 'parading as a heterosexual man playing a female courtesan' (p. 166). Lawrence Kritzman examines Sartre's investment in masculinity, principally through his biographical and autobiographical writing. He argues that writing, for Sartre, can be understood as the preservation, through mourning, of the feminine and the maternal. Ross Chambers examines Henri Alleg's account of his experience of being tortured in the Algerian War and suggests that torture is presented there as a heroic masculine ordeal. Whether this amounts to saying much more than that it took place, in Alleg's case, between men, is questionable and a comparative analysis might have yielded more: an obvious contrast would be with the troubling presentation of the tortured Djamila Boupacha's femininity in Halimi and Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha (1962). Jarrod Hayes revisits Guinean novelist Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir (1953) and defends it from feminist criticisms by arguing that its story of becoming a man through separation from the maternal is more an allegory of colonial alienation than a pre-colonial masculinist idyll. David Caron's arresting 'unruly thoughts' (p. 252) on queer male group friendship begin with Guy Hocquenghem's theorization of gay male desire and his questioning of the repression of anal eroticism. Replicating the sometimes sudden shifts in Hocquenghem's own theorizing, Caron moves directly on to Antelme's L'Espèce humaine (1947) and argues that scenes of collective urination and defecation, practices Caron thinks were intended to dehumanize prisoners in the camp, are shown to contain potential for collective rehumanization. Caron's final section, entitled 'Fucking your friends', briefly sketches an argument in step with Lee Edelman's No Future (2004) for a queer masculine relationality premised on reckless disregard for heteronormative investments in futurity and family; but to what extent do regressive, familial, modes of relating creep back into this utopian queer space? This volume is a rich, diverse and very welcome contribution to a burgeoning area of study.