Masculinity (Other Keyword)
1-24 (24 Records)
Amidst wartime xenophobia, the United States government unjustly imprisoned over 120,100 individuals of Japanese heritage during World War II. Despite being housed in dreary, tar-papered military barracks at sites that ranged from former racetracks to prisons, Japanese internees transformed their inhospitable living conditions into places that embodied some semblance of home and Japanese culture. These transformations were material in nature; internees creatively modified and consumed...
Creating and Contesting Male Personhood on the Last Spanish Colonial Frontier (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender in Historical Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Gender roles were an especially visible aspect of Spanish Colonial evangelization in Alta California. Part of the worldview Franciscan missionaries attempted to impart to Indigenous neophyte communities was a particular model of manhood, rooted in medieval European ideology and medicant philosophy. Missionaries also...
The Dark Side of Gentility: Race and Masculine Becoming at 18th-century Harvard College (2018)
Materialities of gentility drew captured and enslaved Africans and African-Americans into the production of white male privilege one of its most iconic incubators, colonial Harvard College. During the long 18th century, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution was an intercultural, interracial, intergenerational space of becoming. Archaeological finds and documentary archives clarify how gentility was moralized in this religiously orthodox community, emerging as a tool of racialization and...
Everyday life at Champs Paya: the case study of a French migratory, male-only, cod fishing room in northern Newfoundland (2013)
In the last few decades, most gender studies have focused on women, creating a gap in the understanding of male-only societies. This paper will discuss the question of masculinity in archaeology through the case study of the migratory fishing room, Champs Paya. For almost 400 years, French fishermen left Brittany every spring to spend their summer fishing in northern Newfoundland. Once the salted-dried cod fishing season was over they returned to France to sell their cargo. During these four...
Folktales and Masculinity: Gender Performance at a Southern California Homestead (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Oral traditions of folktales encourage the reproduction of appropriate social behavior. Through migration and immigration, these cultural properties were adapted to accommodate different locations and values, including gender norms as they changed over time. This paper explores how folktales can be used as an interpretive tool for...
A House, a Pistol, China, and a Clock: The Articulation of White Masculinity and the Cult of Sensibility in 18th-Century Montserrat, West Indies (2013)
A modest plantation house overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northwestern coast of Montserrat burned in the late 18th-century. The path charted by the fire was fortunately uneven and has provided us with an archaeologically intimate portrait of the domesticity of empire—from table settings to personal adornment to furniture. The composition of the household is as of yet unknown, however. There are traces of enslaved Africans, and a wealthy British male well versed in the aesthetics of...
Hygiene, Masculinity, and Imprisonment: The Archaeology of Japanese Internees at Idaho's Kooskia Internment Camp (2015)
Historical archaeology provides many insights about unexpected aspects of daily life. One example is the hygiene and beauty practices of the men at World War II Kooskia Internment camp located near Kooskia, Idaho. Excavations in 2010 and 2013 resulted in the recovery of a variety of objects documenting men’s grooming in the camp, including items such as cold cream jars, a cologne bottle, and shampoo bottles. This work explores how these everyday objects provide new insight into the hygiene...
The Intersection Of Femininity And Masculinity Symbolically Materialized By Team Games For Boys In Historic Playgrounds (2016)
Early-twentieth-century American reformers aimed to teach boys a feminized form of masculinity that was symbolized and materialized in supervised team games on playground ballfield landscapes. Organized play expressed new conceptions of childhood in a sequence of stages. Reformers organized team games to modify capitalist masculinity with what were considered feminine moral values of cooperation, fairness, and individual self-sacrifice for the greater good. Women became identified with these and...
An Intersectional Archaeology of Colonial White Male Privilege? (2017)
I suggest that it is worth pursuing an archaeology of white male privilege through the contextual study of white privileged males. Among many outcomes, this project can de-naturalize "maleness" and "whiteness" as nomothetic and unmarked—thereby advantaged—social categories and reveal systematized advantage/oppression. Historical gendering was a nuanced process. Masculinity had multiple practiced and experienced forms. They persisted even within a tightly controlled environment, such as colonial...
Islamic Law in a Quasi-State: Husbands and Jurists at the Fatwa Council in Iraqi Kurdistan (WGF - Post PhD Research Grant) (2019)
This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. According to predominant norms among Muslims in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, sharia ("Islamic law") empowers a husband to divorce his wife by spoken repudiation. When husbands regret their repudiation, they often visit jurists at local Fatwa Councils seeking advice to restore their marriage. Having squandered the authority granted them by sharia, husbands try to restore that authority through...
Let’s Hear It for the Boy: Masculinity, Manhood, and Archaeologies of Gender (2017)
This paper will seek to explore how archaeological investigations of masculinity and manhood can contribute to contemporary theory on gender and sexuality. Drawing on material from a 19th century industrial work camp in Coastal California, I will argue that intersectionality provides promising avenues as both a theoretical paradigm and as a way to articulate archaeological work within a wider, multi-disciplinary discourse on gender. Methodological implications for archaeological engagements with...
Macho and Moral: An Archaeological Investigation of Masculine Behaviors on Apple Island, Michigan. (2016)
It is not remarkable to say that the separation between city and country has become a normalized binary. For years, scholars have discussed how capitalism has framed urban and rural spaces, including desires to leave urban areas for some approximation of a sentimental bucolic paradise. However, investigating the rural and urban separation and "back to the land" movements within capitalism reveals other interesting social phenomena. Archaeological investigations of a vacation retreat owned by...
Making Whiteness: White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Cenutry Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies (2016)
At the close of the 18th century, a planter’s dwelling overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northwest coast of Montserrat was destroyed by fire, and never reoccupied. Archaeological excavations yielded an intimate portrait of the domesticity of British Empire materialized in fragments of everyday life. Ownership of Little Bay Plantation transferred through three generations of unmarried male relations, one of who inhabited the dwelling at its burning. As a white Montserratian-born colonial, or...
Masculine Mis/apprehensions: Race, Place, and Gender at Harvard’s Colonial Indian College (2016)
This paper considers intersecting identities of gender, race, religion, age, and status in early America, centering on the colonial Harvard Indian College—a highly charged masculine setting in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. Institutional structures and the material culture of daily life constrained masculinity for Native American and English members of the early Harvard community while establishing education as a trope of patriarchal power. Young men adopted intensely religious lives...
Material Masculinities: Archaeology of a World War II Italian Prisoner of War Camp (2016)
Camp Monticello, a World War II prisoner of war camp located in rural Arkansas, housed 3,000 Italian enlisted men, officers, and generals. As a military institution and a homosocial space, Camp Monticello provides a lens into the social construction of masculinity and the intersections of class, gender, and cultural difference in the 1940s. This paper will deconstruct heteronormative white maleness and explore the ways that gendered and cultural identities were both maintained and performed...
Nathan Harrison: A Case Study in African American Masculinity (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The expected societal roles of African American men in the past have been discussed across a variety of fields, including masculinity studies, ethnic studies, and Black feminist studies. Included in the literature are discrepancies about the influence of the dominant white hegemonic masculinity and its role in creating an ideal...
Nathan Harrison: Adaptations of Identity and Masculinity on Palomar Mountain (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender in Historical Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the late 19th and early 20th century, Jim Crow and Sundown Laws dominated SouthernCalifornia. As a previously enslaved man living in a region settled predominantly by Anglo-Americans from the South, Nathan Harrison had to construct his identities within these societal pressures. Using historical documents, oral...
No Country for Young Men: the Lives and Livelihoods of Syrian Shebab in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2019)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research examines the processes through which the dilemmas of everyday life in exile contribute to the emergence of novel forms of moral community and ethical selfhood among young male refugees with no links to humanitarian NGOs. Specifically, it asks how masculine vocabularies, practices, and aspirations are and are not reconfigured when the violence of war and exile upset gendered...
"A Novelist-Gardener": Masculinity and Illness in Progressive Era California (2016)
Warren Cheney (1858-1921) of Berkeley, California lived during the period in which ideals of Victorian manliness shifted to those of a more brutish masculinity. Suffering from ill health and neurasthenia for most of his life, he pursued an "outdoor life" while also participating in the Bay Area literary arts scene, embodying the tensions and contradictions of shifting gendered behavior ideals. Historical documents and archaeological excavations undertaken at the Cheney family home enable us to...
Reading, Writing, and Riots: Constructing Masculinity on an Antebellum College Campus (2015)
Recent archaeological excavations at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, have uncovered a rich assemblage related to one of its earliest buildings. The context in question, Graham Hall (occupied 1804-1835), served as a dormitory, chapel, and classroom space; this mixed space created an environment for college males to test social boundaries, bond with peers, and construct a regionally- and temporally-distinct version of masculinity. This poster integrates archaeological,...
The Sporting Life: Archaeological Evidence of Pensacola’s Red Light District Customers (2015)
Archaeological studies have been conducted upon red light districts across the United States. While these studies have yielded great insight into the lives of prostitutes, relatively little has been recovered from their customers. Three collections from excavations conducted in 1975 and 2000 upon Pensacola, Florida’s red light district have also been studied, with a surprising number of artifacts associated with customers identified. This paper will provide an in-depth analysis of red light...
Streaking and Straight Pins: Constructing Masculinity on an Antebellum College Campus (2016)
The myth of the "Southern gentleman" permeates the modern imagination of the historic American South. This archetype is simultaneously "other" and "normative": the concept is saturated in an air of mystery and deep, foreign tradition, yet is often set against studies of traditional American "others" such as women, immigrants, and enslaved peoples. Recent excavations at Graham Hall, an all-male antebellum dormitory on Washington & Lee University’s campus in Lexington, VA, have uncovered a rich,...
A Visual Analysis of Intersecting Identities: Nathan Harrison's Gender Performance in Southern California (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nathan Harrison, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky, was adept at performing specific masculinities (and other identities) within different community groups. Through forced migration, Harrison traveled from Kentucky to California during the mid-1800s. After gaining his freedom, Harrison continued moving south until he settled in San Diego County....
You Can't Keep a Workin' Man Down: Black Masculinity, Labor, and the Frontier (2016)
Historical archaeologists have long examined changing structures of labor in the context of modern global capitalism. This paper will focus on rural sites in the Midwest, challenging normative notions of labor structures. I will examine how, in the face of changing labor economies, Black men on the frontier deployed specific types of skilled labor to create social networks, familial bonds, and to subvert economic inequalities. I will examine shifts from agrarian economies to wage economies,...