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University College Maastricht

HU 2003
2010/2011

The Making of Crucial Differences

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Cover Illustration:

Oval portrait of a Calcutta dandy, 1850 from Colonial masculinity. The ‘manly
Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century, Manchester
University Press/Manchester, 1995.
Pear’s Soap from Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest.
London: Routledge, 1995.
The Oath at the Tennis Court by Johan Braakensiek.

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The Making of Crucial

Differences

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TABLE Of CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Block planning group 7

Block coordinator
Course description 8
Literature
Lectures 9
Assignments
Assessment and examination
Tutorial method: PBL 11

Problems

Problem 1 The Enlightenment and Its Others 13

Problem 2 The Enlightenment and its Others II 16
Problem 3 The Enlightenment and its Others III 19
Problem 4 From "White Negroe" to Upholders of White Supremacy? 21
Problem 5 Imagining Heroes: The Making of Modern Masculinity 24
Problem 6 Colonial Encounters in the Metropolis London 27
Problem 7 Blurring 'Racial' Boundaries in the Colonial Empire 30
Problem 8 Physicians 'Invention' of Homosexuality 33
Problem 9 The Formation of the working Class 35
Problem 10 Middle Class and Domesticity 37
Problem 11 The Making and Breaking of Heroes: Masculinity and the
Great War, 1914-1918 40
Problem 12 Dialectic of Enlightenment: Crucial Differences in National-
socialism and Fascism 43
Ideas for the interpretation of some films 45

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INTRODUCTION

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1. Block planning group

Prof. Dr. Maaike Meijer (CGD) works in the field of gender analysis and gender
criticism of cultural artefacts, texts and images. She performed theoretical and policy
related studies of representation of men and women. She is particularly concerned
with structural ways in which individual and collective identities are (re)created in
different media and cultural repertoires, and how they are steeped in difference and
inequality. She focuses on the need to develop effective tools to analyse such forms of
differentiation. She recently edited a 5-volume book series, Cultuur en migratie in
Nederland [Culture and Migration in the Netherlands], which focuses on the crucial
ways in which migrants helped to shape Dutch culture in the twentieth century.
Currently she is working on a biography of the famous Dutch poet Vasalis.

Prof. Dr. Mineke Bosch (previous CGD, now University of Groningen) was trained
as a historian, and specialised in gender studies and cultural history. Her research
focuses on the history of women, gender and science and on women’s movements and
gender relations in the past. In addition she published on meta-historical and
epistemological questions concerning (the writing of) history. She is also involved in
policy oriented research and development relating to women in science, especially in
the context of European research. One of her books is a biography of the Dutch
feminist Aletta Jacobs: Een onwrikbaar geloof in rechtvaardigheid. Aletta Jacobs
1854-1926. Amsterdam: Balans (2005).

2. Block coordinator

Dr. Ulrike Brunotte Associate Professor (coordinator)

(Centre for Gender and Diversity) was trained in Religious Studies, Philosophy and
Literature (German and Northamerican). She works in the field of gender- and
cultural studies with a concentration on the dialectics of religious traditions (figures,
myths and rituals) and modern appropriations of antiquity in literature, film and in the
corporal dynamics of ritual performativity. In this context, in her book “Between Eros
and War. Male-bonding and Ritual in Modernity” (2004) and, as an editor and
contributor in “Holy War and Gender” (2006) she analizes the modern (re-)
constructions of masculinities- especially the social model of ‘male bands’ and the
figure of the ‘hero-martyr’ within a colonial and post-colonial perspective. She has
also written articles on “Masculinity and Religion in Vietnam Movies”. Another book
is concentrated on the apocalyptic discourse in the work on Edgar E. Poe. In
“Puritanism and the Pioneering Spirit. The Fascination with wilderness in early new
England” (2000) she reconstructed the colonial discourse of the Pilgrim Fathers. Her
new project is a biographical essay and selected edition of Jane E. Harrison (work), a
feminist pioneer in religious and cultural studies around 1900.

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Dr. Ulrike Brunotte (Associate Professor)

Centre for Gender and Diversity
Rm. 2.012
Grote Gracht 80-82
Tel.: 043- 3882666
E-mail : u.brunotte@maastrichtuniversity.nl

3. Course description

The Making of Crucial Differences

Objective:

• To acquaint students with historical configurations and intersections of ‘race’,

class, gender and sexuality, and the way in which they were conceptualised
and sometimes newly invented in science, philosophy and social theory.
• To acquaint students with the way in which these configurations have
structured cultural texts and images, individual identities and organisations.
• To acquaint students with the way in which such intersecting categories of
difference have constituted (and still constitute) inequalities and differences of
power, resulting in invisibility, restricted access to sources etc.

Description of the course

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century was not only a philosophical but
also a political movement. The ‘light’ of reason and science should help the people to
master the ‘wild’ nature and their ‘anxieties’. It should destroy the power of the
churches and liberate the people, as Immanuel Kant wrote: “von selbstverschuldeter
Unmündigkeit” and dependance. All human beings should be “equal”, “free” and
connected my mutual understanding through a “social contract” and “brotherhood”.
But did the Enlightenment really promote freedom and equality? If so, among whom?
Whose perspectives did the Enlightenment reflect? What were its implications for
society? Who were the “Others” of the new produced “free” subject, which was called
“neutral” or “human being” but ressembled more an idealized version of a white male
member of the new hegemonic middle class?
The narrative of ‘heroic manliness’ – as explorer, colonizer, head of state, warrior,
and thinker – belongs to the master narratives of modernity just as much as the hall of
mirrors of his ‘monstrous doppelgangers’ (Girard). Sometimes as ‘good and noble’
but more often as ‘barbaric or brutish’, these “savages”, as representatives of
‘asocial’, ‘violent’, and ‘compulsively egotistical’ manliness, pervade both the
colonialist power discourse and the philosophical concept of the ‘state of nature’ of
humankind. But how were the “differences” between the sexes, between the “races”,
between the upper and the lower classes, between Europe and the Colonies, the “sane”
and the “insane” constructed? How, for example, did the Irish come to be seen as a
separate and distinctly lower race during their migration to the USA? And how did
they later become ‘white’? Why did women have to fight more than 100 years to get
the civil right to vote or to become a student? Why were white women appointed as
the guardians of racial purity in the colonial empires of the West? Why are gay men

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sometimes still seen as more feminine than heterosexual men? Why were Jews
persecuted as dangerous “Others” in German National Socialism? How is our one
position? Which sets of norms, stereotyps and inner pictures of gender, religion, class,
“race” and ethnicity are defining us? From which perspectives can complex life-
stories be written?

This course offers a historical inquiry into the evolution of intersectionality between
gender, sexuality, class, ‘race’ and imperialism from the eighteenth century until
World War II. It aims, firstly, to trace and illustrate the ways in which the
Enlightenment has provided a rationale to mark gendered, classed and racialized
boundaries in science which, more often than not, resulted in inequalities. These
inequalities became embedded in European society in such a way that the active,
dominant subject came to be seen as ‘white, male, and middle class.’ Moreover, this
dominance grew beyond ‘Europe’ and helped to carry out the imperial project. The
centrality of empire discursively and materially forged a ‘European-ness’ that was
distinctively gendered, classed and racialized. This will introduce you to how middle
class was defined in relation to the working class.
Secondly, the course will problematize social divisions such as ‘race’ class, and
gender as well as norms like heterosexuality, middle-class-ness etc. by looking at
shifting boundaries of these divisions and norms. Thus, it will examine the dynamic
processes of their formation and contradictions, which emerged out of these
processes. We will heed our attention to some of the salient ways in which women
and men of the different classes and ‘races’ became embedded in social relationships,
thereby often transgressing taken-for-granted lines of differences. We will primarily
draw on examples from ‘European’ history. This indeed urges us to look at the world
of empire, through which ‘European-ness’ has come to the fore. Finally, the course
aims to introduce a wide range of debates that offer the possibility to analyze the ways
in which differences have intersected with one another in different periods and how
they have manifested themselves in power relations.

Understanding the complexity of “crucial differences” entails an interdisciplinary

approach. The course builds on approaches and theories from such disciplines as
history, literature, philosophy and sociology as well as from gender studies and
cultural studies. The interdisciplinary nature, however, does not mean that we simply
add and stir existing disciplinary strands together in a large pot. Rather, it encourages
you to pursue creative learning. In this process, both lecturers and teaching materials
will facilitate you to develop a lens through which you are able to critically look at the
world. Last but not least, the historical perspectives that you will gain during this
course will help you to comprehend the historical embeddedness of contemporary
issues.

4. Literature

There is no text book for this course. Each problem is accompanied by a list of
obligatory readings. Literature can be found in the E-reader, unless it was too long to
be included. References with a R can be found in the reader and those with an L can
be found in the University Library (usually at the study landscape of the Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences. Check the library catalogue). Readings with E are E-
journals, accessible through the UM E-library.

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5. Lectures

Several lecturers have been attracted to deepen your knowledge of the theories
presented to you in this course. You will also watch some films during the program.
Because of the length of the movies the sessions on those days will last half an hour
longer. Below you find the schedule:

Date Lecturer Title

September 7 Ulrike Brunotte Introduction of the programme
The Enlightenment and Its Others –
Suffrage (with scenes of the movie
“Iron Jawed Angels)

September 14 Movie In the Heat of the Night (1967)

September 21 Jan Nederveen A historical perspective on ethnicity
Pieterse
September 28 Roel van den Oever
The Invention of Homosexuality
October 5 Stefan Dudnik The crucial Differences Masculinity
makes. Theoretical and historical
perspectives
October 12 Movie Apocalypse Now or Lawrence of Arabia

6. Assignment

Students will have to write a comment (1000-1500 words) on a film related to the
course, in which they refer to at least three readings of the course. Students may also
propose a film to comment upon.

7. Assessment and examination

Students should attend at least 85% of all tutor groups and lectures. Attendance does
not mean just being there, but actively participating in the discussions. Active
participation means:
• Conscientious preparation of the reading materials
• Fulfilling your role as discussion leader and note-taker
• Active contributions to working parties and overall participation in the
discussion –i.e. by posing or answering questions, evaluating the
literature, criticizing certain assumptions and arguments, etc.
• Attendance also means being on time. If you are more than ten minutes
late, your attendance for that meeting will not be counted.

The examination will consist of a closed-book, in-class exam. You will be given four
essay questions, out of which three you have to answer three. The exam schedule will
be announced in due course.

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The final grade will be based on attendance, assignment (50%) and examination
(50%)

8. Tutorial method: PBL

During this course the tutorial groups will follow the standard method of "Problem
Based Learning" (PBL) as taught at the UM, in which each of the problems in this
book is treated according to the "seven-step approach". The problems and exams are
made with this model in mind. The approach is summarized below.

First meeting - Pre-discussion

1. Clarifying concepts; make sure that you do not only take the text of the
problem that is posed into account in your pre-discussion, but also the titles of
the readings that are listed.
2. Defining the problem (outcome: one 'umbrella' problem statement);
3. Analyzing the problem: brainstorming
4. Systematic classification (what belongs to what, B is a sub-question of B etc.)
5. Formulating learning objectives
Between Meetings
6. Self-study: finding answers to learning goals and preparation by presenters
Next Meeting - Post-discussion
7. Reporting (post-discussion)

Tutorial group meetings (with the exception of the first) follow a standard format:
POST-DISCUSSION. In the first hour, students discuss the literature on the basis of
learning objectives formulated in group discussions in the previous meeting.
PRE-DISCUSSION. In the second hour, the group deals with a new problem by
formulating problem statements that provides the input for a brainstorming session.
This discussion is concluded by formulating learning objectives that provide the basis
for the presentations in the following meeting.

This format for instruction and learning requires students to fulfil three roles:
Each meeting requires a discussion leader who serves as a chairperson and a note-
taker who takes notes on the whiteboard or the old-fashioned blackboard. The
discussion leader should not only establish an agenda and keep order, but also guide
the discussion, stimulate students to participate, and summarize important conclusions
and should make sure that the literature is well understood. The note-taker jots down
points for clarification and learning objective(s) for further study on the whiteboard.
Ordinary group members have read the literature and have thought about the learning
objectives. They are asked to contribute, in the discussion, on the basis of this
preparation. In order to fulfil these roles effectively, students must be well prepared.
They themselves are responsible for making their own, individual minutes of the pre-
and post-discussion.

Discussion leader and note-taking roles will be distributed either during the first
session, or successively, as agreed between the group and the tutor.

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Problems

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Problem 1
The Enlightenment and Its Others I

As you can read in every dictionary: “ The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the
Enlightenment) is the era in Western philosophy and intellectual, scientific and
cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as
the primary source for legitimacy and authority. The ‘light’ of reason and science
should help the people to master the ‘wild’ nature and their ‘anxieties’. It should
destroy the power of the churches and liberate the people, as Immanuel Kant wrote:
“von selbstverschuldeter Unmündigkeit” and dependance. All human beings should
be “equal”, “free” and connected my mutual understanding through a “social
contract” and “brotherhood”. But did the Enlightenment really promote freedom and
equality? Why were women as “equal” human beeings not treated like “equals”?
Where they “different”? But in which way? Did they not have the same “mind” and
“reason” as men? Was their female “body” their “destiny”? Whose perspectives did
the Enlightenment reflect? What were its implications for society? Who were the
“Others” of the new produced “free” subject, which was called “human being” but
ressembled more an idealized version of a white male member of the new hegemonic
middle class?

One of the most important philosophers of this time was the German Immanuel
Kant. His famous definition of Enlightenment from 1784 is the following:

Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit.
Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu
bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht
am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschliessung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner
ohne Leitung eines andern zu bedienen! Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines Verstandes
zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung. (Kant as cited in Bahr, 1974, p. 15).

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the

inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is
self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and
courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have
courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment”.

In the Enlightenment autonomous man, the self-made-man like Robinson Crusoe

came on stage, equipped with reason, courage and natural rights that had to be
ensured in a ‘social contract’ of equals and brothers according to Jean-Jaques
Rousseau (1712-1778) in his book “The Social Contract” from 1761:

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the
whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each,
while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as
before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the
solution.”

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Not only man’s relation to Nature and to God changed, but also his relation to his
fellow human beings and social and political arrangements.

Looking more closely, however, the abstract figure of ‘the enlightened man’ who took
it upon him to study Nature and Man, and who was deemed capable of entering into
‘the social contract’ seemed to be a white, middle class man. The social contract was
in fact meant to be a ‘fraternal contract’. Rousseau’s work has become famous for
excluding women from the education needed to become a full citizen (in Émile) as
well as for the equally famous reaction from Mary Wollstonecraft, in the form of her
treatise, Vindication of the Rights of Women.

At the same time the Enlightenment inspired the first ‘feminist’ claims to liberty and
equality or women’s emancipation. During the French revolution women contested
the exclusion of ‘the fair sex’ from the polity. Olympe de Gouges drew up her famous
Declaration of the Rights of Women, an act, however, which brought her to the
guillotine.

The women’s suffrage movement, which from the second half of the nineteenth
century came into being in most countries in the western world, made abundant use of
symbols and images of the American and French Revolutions.

The Oath of the Tennis Court (June 20, 1789) by Jean-Louis David above depicts how the hall of the
Estates General is blocked by a military force and how the Third Estate of the National Assembly
meets at the tennis court swearing an oath not to dissolve the meeting until the constitution of the realm
has been established.

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The Oath at the Tennis Court by Johan Braakensiek above is a political drawing at the occasion of the
congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance at Amsterdam, 1908. Carrie Chapman Catt, the
American President of the alliance on the table. Sitting at the table the Dutch suffragist Aletta Jacobs.

Reading

De Gouges, O. (1979[1791]). The declaration of the rights of woman. In D.G. Levy,

H.B. Applewhite & M.D. Johnson (Eds.), Women in revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795
(pp. 87-96). Urbana/Chicago/London: University of Illinois Press. Reader (R)

Richardson, A. (2002). Mary Wollstonecraft on education. In C.L. Johnson (Ed.) The

Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (pp. 24-41). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. R

Rousseau, J.J. (1978[1762]). Book V. In Emile or on education (pp. 357-363).

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. R

Stuurman, S. (2004). Introduction: Origins of the Enlightenment. In Francois Poulain

de la Barre and the invention of modern equality (pp. 1-23). London: Harvard
University Press. R

Reference

Kant, I. (1784). Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? In E. Bahr, (Ed.), Was
ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen (p. 15). Stuttgart.

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Problem 2
The Enlightenment and Its Others II: Science Constructs the Polarity of the
Sexes

In the introduction of her famous book: The Second Sex” (1949) the French philosopher and
pioneer in feminist thinking, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) writes:

“A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes

without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used
symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of
the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the
positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate
human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by
limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing
to hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that
my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing
my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And
you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of
being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman
who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute
vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute
human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison
her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often
said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy
also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks
of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he
apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a
prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue
of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as
afflicted with a natural defectiveness.”

Under the influence of the prominent role that science takes after the scientific
revolution, Nature (or the body) becomes the standard of social being. Along the
debates in which the liberty and equality of Man is discussed, medical discourses
about others – unproductive, unfit, primitive, female, Jewish, black – grow to inform
the political order.

As for women and men, the invention of the polarity of the sexes, or their
complementarity increasingly underpins the growing division between the public and
the domestic sphere, between the market place and the home, between family life and
public (republican) life.

Basic to the social and political separation of women’s and men’s lives is the
anatomical invention of the sexes, or the two sex system. Whereas formerly the
genitalia of men and women were perceived as variations on one theme, in the
eighteenth century they become represented as completely different.

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(Laqueur, 1992, p. 82)

(Laqueur, 1992, p. 84)

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(Laqueur, 1992, p. 170)

Instead of defining women as somehow imperfect in comparison to men but not of a

completely different nature, in the discourses of the enlightened doctor-philosophers
women and men become representatives of opposite and incommensurable biological
sexes. Moreover, the difference is not just ‘skin-deep’, from now on, men and women
differ also with regard to their minds (or souls), and therefore their purpose in life.
Biology becomes destiny, ‘Anatomie ist Schicksal’.

Reading

Laqueur, T. (1992). Discovery of the sexes. In Making sex. Body and gender from the
Greeks to Freud (pp. 149-192). Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Library

Schiebinger, L. (1989). More than skin deep: the scientific search for sexual
difference. In The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modern science (pp. 189-
213). Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Reader

Wahrman, Dror (2008). Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-
Century Gender History: Or, Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?
Gender & History, Vol.20 No.3 November 2008 (pp. 584–602). (E-journal)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com.ezproxy.ub.unimaas.nl/cgi-
bin/fulltext/121460505/PDFSTART

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Problem 3
The Enlightenment and Its Others III: The Construction of Countertypes and
the History of Slavery

Parallel to the construction of the rational white male subject of enlightenment, a negative
andrology was developing. It focused on the ‘raw nature of primeval man’ and on that of the
‘colonial savages’ abroad. The negative andrology produced so called “countertyps” (Mosse).
It functioned also, however, as a warning against the mass of ‘wild’ masculinities at home in
Europe. These are very well illustrated, for example, by the aristocratic villain of the gothic
novel or the wild men of the uneducated classes, the ‘black’ men, the ‘jews’, criminals or the
so called insane. Some of the ideologies of the ‘wild Other’ where a part of the discourse
which legitimized slavery. The Enlightenment ideas of freedom and equality seem to be at
odds with a history of rasism and slavery.

How can a Constitution [of the United States] founded on the appeal to
the universal principles of freedom and equality tolerate, if not, justify,
the dehumanization of a segment of the population? (Auerbach, 1987, p.
3).

The Enlightenment ideas of freedom and equality seem to be at odds with a history of
slavery. It is often claimed by historians that slavery was contradictory to the
Enlightenment and that it was the idea of freedom and equality for all, which would
lead to the abolition of slavery. However, other explanations are that the trinity of
freedom, equality and slavery constitutes the paradoxical relationship.

As the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted, we should not be surprised

that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if
it had not. The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing
highlighted freedom – if it did not in fact create it – like slavery. Black slavery
enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of
blackness and enslavement could be found not only the non-free but also, with
the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me.
(Morrison, 1992, p. 38).

The black female slave experience was in this regard based on a double system of
exclusion, which was part of the same institutions that advocated freedom and
equality. They were ‘the not-me’ in the sense that they were black, but also in the
sense that they were women. To become free, black females had to overcome both.

In a retrospective examination of the black female slave experience, sexism

looms as large as racism as an oppressive force in the lives of black women.
Institutionalized sexism -that is, patriarchy- formed the base of the American
social structure along with racial imperialism. Sexism was an integral part of
the social and political order white colonizers brought with them from their
European homelands, and it was to have a grave impact on the fate of enslaved
black women. (hooks, 1981, p. 15).

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Reading

George Mosse: “The Countertype”, In. The Image of Man (1992), (pp.56-76) R

hooks, b. (1981). Sexism and the black female slave experience. In Ain’t I a woman.
Black women and feminism (pp. 15-49). Boston: South End Press. Library (L)

Nederveen Pieterse, J. (1992). Slavery and abolitionism. In White on black. Images of

Africa and blacks in Western popular culture (pp. 52-63). New Haven/London: Yale
University Press. Reader (R)

Patterson, O. (2004). Introduction: the meaning of freedom. In Freedom in the making

of western culture, Volume I (pp. 1-5). New York: Basic Books. R

Patterson, O. (2004). Primitive beginnings. In Freedom in the making of western

culture, Volume I (pp. 9-19). New York: Basic Books. R

Gage, F. D. ([1851] 1978). Akron convention, Akron, Ohio, May 28-29, 1851.
Reminiscences by Frances D. Gage of Sojourner Truth. In M. Jo & P. Buhle (Eds.),
The concise history of woman suffrage. Selections from the classic work of Stanton,
Anthony, Gage, and Harper (pp.103-105). Urbana, Chicago and London: University
of Illinois Press. R

References

Auerbach, M. (1987). Editor’s introduction. Bicentennial of the Constitution, 54 (3),

1-7.

Morrison, T. (1992) Romancing the Shadow. In Playing in the dark. Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination. (pp. 31-59) Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database: http://www.slavevoyages.com/tast/index.faces

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Problem 4
From “White Negroes” to Upholders of White Supremacy?

Even though some Enlightenment philosophers declared all humans equal regardless
of their sex, the colour of their skin or their status in society, the sciences of race
legitimated slavery until the nineteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century
onwards, science, mostly biology and anthropology, contributed to the distinctions
between races. Below you can see “[t]he science of race in a nutshell. Profiles and
skulls of various ‘races’ showing facial angles, from a European (top left) through
various people to a ‘savage’ African vis-à-vis an ape (bottom). A single plate
suggesting evolution as well as hierarchy” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1992, p. 49).

Figure 1 (Nederveen Pieterse, 1992, p. 49)

However, the story of ‘race’ is more complicated than this. The Catholic Irish farmers
in the nineteenth century were racialized in cartoons and caricatures as well as prose
by depicting them as chimpanzee, orang-utan, or the gorilla. (Nederveen Pieterse,
1992).

Consider the following two statements on the Irish:

1. A statement appeared in England’s most influential news papers in 1880:

“Allow no occasion to escape them treating the Irish as an inferior race—as a
kind of white negroes [sic].
2. A visitor to Ireland commented (1783): “Shoes and stockings are seldom worn
by these beings who seem to form a different race from the rest of mankind.”
(McClintock, 1995, p. 52)

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Figure 2 (McClintock, 1995, p. 53)

Similarly in the Anglo-Saxon, protestant US, the Irish immigrants, who had fled the
Great Famine in the 1840s and 50s, were put in even as low esteem as African slaves.

Figure 3 Nederveen Pieterse (1992, p. 215)

Despite a common culture of the lowly in the US, racial amalgamation between Irish-
and African-Americans did not take place. The Irish became ‘white’. Is ‘white’ a
‘phenotype’? Becoming white meant to Irish labourers at first that they could sell

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themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life, and later that they could compete
for any jobs instead of being confined to certain work. Above all, they became
citizens of a democratic republic, with political rights, with the right to live wherever
they wish and could afford, without restrictions based on ‘race’.

Reading

Ignatiev, N. (1995). White Negroes and smoked Irish. In How the Irish became white?
(pp. 34-61) London: Routledge. Library (L)

Ignatiev, N. (1995). Transubstantiation of an Irish revolutionary. In How the Irish

became white? (pp. 62-89) London: Routledge. L

Nederveen Pieterse, J. (1992). Savages, animals, heathens, races. In White on black

(pp. 30-41). New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Reader

Soper, K. (2005). From Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive

Trickster : The Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between
1890 and 1920, Journal of American Studies, 39 (2005), 2, 257–296. (E-journal)
http://journals.cambridge.org.ezproxy.ub.unimaas.nl/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fi
d=331732&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=&aid=331731

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Problem 5
Imagining Heroes: The Making of Modern Masculinity

“At any given time, one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted”,
R.W. Connell, one of the pioneers in masculinity studies, calls this ‘leading’ or ideal
model of masculinity “hegemonic masculinity”. Throughout almost the entire history
of Europe the order of the sexes has been shaped by the fact that the male gender was
a representative of God or “mankind”, and, so had a reference point beyond nature. In
the enlightenment period the debates about women’s lack of reasoning ability referred
to a decisive new difference. Here masculinity as representative of mankind’s
“reason” could move through processes of selfmastery into an elevated domain that
transcended its limitations as a particular gender. At the same time the modern
differentiation of society into a public and a private sphere was mirrored by the
recently invented difference and reciprocy of socalled “gender characters”.

It is now almost taken for granted that femininity is socially defined. Similar
developments in understanding masculine ideals and masculine privilege have only
begun to be explored during the last years (Connell, Mosse, etc.). It is argued that it is
precisely because 'man' gains status by passing itself off as the norm ('mankind') that
ideologies of masculinity are only rarely articulated explicitly. One exception was
always from antiquity until today? the cult of the warrior and hero who sacrifices
himself for his fatherland. Imaginative literature is one area in which we might
discern also anxieties about masculinity in particular historical periods:

The Young British Soldier

WHEN the 'arf-made recruity goes out to the East

'E acts like a babe an' 'e drinks like a beast,
An' 'e wonders because 'e is frequent deceased
Ere 'e's fit for to serve as a soldier.
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
Serve, serve, serve as a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

When shakin' their bustles like ladies so fine,

The guns o' the enemy wheel into line,
Shoot low at the limbers an' don't mind the shine,
For noise never startles the soldier.
Start-, start-, startles the soldier . . .

If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,

Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

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An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
(Kipling, 1889-1891)

The masculinity that was promoted near the end of the nineteenth century was
entrenched with images of heroism, patriotism, aggressiveness, muscularity and
chivalric courage. This heroic, modern image of masculinity was based on an
increasingly stricter demarcation between the sexes, but it was also

fused in an especially potent configuration with representations of British

imperial identity. This linked together the new imperialist patriotism, the
virtues of manhood ... A ‘real’ man would henceforth be defined and
recognized as one who was prepared to fight ... for Queen, Country and
Empire. (Dawson, 1994, p.1).

In addition, gendering and imperialism/colonialism seem even to overlap in this

regard. Look at the drawing below:

Oval portrait of a Calcutta dandy, 1850 (Sinha, 1995, cover page)

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Reading

George Mosse: Setting the Standard. IN: Image of Man, (pp. 23-39) R

R.W. Connell: Hegemonic Masculinty, in: Masculinities (1995/2005), pp. 77-81, available
online (google-books)

Krishnaswamy, R. (2002). The economy of colonial desire. In R. Adams & D. Savran

(Eds.), The masculinity studies reader (pp. 292-312). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Reader

Reference

Kipling, R. (1889-1891). The young British Soldier. Retrieved July 5, 2005, from the
World Wide Web: http://www.io.com/tog/extra/kipybs.html. Last checked: June 30,
2009.

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Problem 6
Colonial Encounter in the Metropolis

Imperialism manifested itself not only in the colonies but also in the metropolis. It is
indeed this constant exchange that fabricated the empires. This means that even if
ordinary citizens had never traveled to their colonies, their everyday life in the
metropolis was closely bound to its colonies. Commodity advertisement is a good
example. Look at the figure below:

(McClintock, 1995, p. 213)

Likewise, images also traveled to the metropolis.

(Locher-Scholten, 2000, p. 17)

Another good example for the colonial discourse and transfer between the European
cities and the colonies is the discourse which was concentrated on the social position,

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education and the ‘body’ of the ‘oriental’ or ‘indigenous’ woman. In a way the so
called “headscarf-debate” of our days reflects the colonial and orientalistic disourses
which accompanied the European Colonial adventures from the very beginning. For
example the veiled oriental woman and the life behind the walls of the harem were
subjects of male erotic phantasies in Europe.

On the other hand the Enlightenment has played an important role in legitimizing the
higher civilisation and education of the European Empires, often in relation to the
‘low’ status and education of the ‘colonized’ women. James Mill, the British
intellectual, articulated this view:

The condition of women is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the

manners of nations. Among rude people, the women are generally degraded;
among civilized people they are exalted….As society refines upon its
enjoyments, and advances into that state of civilization…in which the qualities of
mind are ranked above the qualities of the body, the condition of the weaker sex
is gradually improved, till they associate on equal terms with the men, and
occupy the place of voluntary and useful coadjutors. (Mill, 1818 as cited in
Strobel, 1991, p. 49).

However, it was not only male colonial intellectuals who felt a ‘burden’ to bring
about “civilization”. Feminists, like the Ladies’ National Association (LNA),
also started a campaign on behalf of Indian women.
The LNA, led by Josephine Butler, originally organized a domestic campaign
against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s, which would allow placing
the women who were suspected of being a prostitute into hospital for
examination. In the 1880s, the LNA turned their focus to British colonial India.

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At the time brothels gradually took an institutionalized form in India as the

station of British troops prolonged. Butler and her associates campaigned for
repealing the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. Butler commented,

We feel deeply for the ill-guided and corrupt young soldiers but we feel as
deeply for the Indian women. Their cause is our cause, their griefs are our
griefs (Butler, 1897, as cited in Burton, 1990, p. 298).

Indeed, Butler and her fellow workers warned the British

of the danger to our Indian rule […]. We have reason to believe that the seeds
of rebellion are being rapidly propagated, especially in the Punjab, the
inhabitants of which have hitherto been among the most loyal of our Indian
subjects. Nothing so surely produces a spirit of rebellion as trampling on the
womanhood of a subject race by its conquerors. (LNA Memorial to Lord
Salibury, 1888, as cited in Burton, 1990, p. 299).

Reading

McClintock, A. (1995). Soft-soaping empire: commodity racism and imperial

advertising. In Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial
contest (pp. 207-231). London: Routledge. Library

Burton, A. (1990). The white women’s burden: British feminists and the Indian
woman, 1865-1915. Women’s Studies International Forum, 13(4), 295-308. (E-
journal)
http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.ub.unimaas.nl/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_u
di=B6VBD-466M0FF-
70&_user=499911&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F1990&_rdoc=3&_fmt=high&_orig
=browse&_srch=doc-
info(%23toc%235924%231990%23999869995%23324391%23FLP%23display%2
3Volume)&_cdi=5924&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=22&_acct=C000024558&_ver
sion=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=499911&md5=f94d3b492392ffd9ac2e099014430
3dd

Strobel, M. (1991). Missionaries, reformers, and the status of indigenous women. In

European women and the second British Empire (pp. 48-71). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. (R)

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Problem 7
Blurring ‘Racial’ Boundaries in the Colonial Empire

In the early period of empire, the majority of married male civil servants and
businessmen moved alone to colonies, leaving their families behind. It was only at the
turn of the last century that wives were allowed to accompany husbands in many parts
of the empire. The exception was India where British wives were already migrating
from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Interestingly, it was concubinage but not
marriage that was facilitated by colonial governments especially in the early days of
empire.

As European settlement became consolidated, however, inter-‘racial’ marriage became

more common than before.

Young Indo bride who married a man 30 years her senior (Gouda, 1995, p. 169)

Dutch men who married Indo women retained their Dutch nationality and these
women were conferred Dutch nationality. What then happened to Dutch women who
married to Indo men?

Initially, the 1848 Civil Code for Europeans had stipulated that an Indonesian
man who became the legal spouse of a Dutch woman would acquire his wife’s
European classification through marriage. At a judicial congress in Batavia in
1887, however, legal experts registered their principled objections to this
regulation and advocated a policy refusal. Marriages between European women
and inlanders were undesirable from an “administrative, social, and moral

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perspective,” they claimed. […] Accordingly, article 158 of the revised statute of
1898, regulating mixed marriages in the Indies, formulating the issue succinctly:
any “woman who concludes an interracial marriage acquires the civil status of the
husband.” (Gouda, 1995, p. 168).

Ann L. Stoler (1992) interprets this difference as follows:

By reinvoking the Napoleonic civil code, European men were assured that their
“invisible” bonds of nationality remained intact regardless of their legal partner.
European women, on the other hand, were summarily (but temporarily)
disenfranchised from their national community on the basis of conjugal choice
alone. These mixed marriages which derived from earlier cohabitations between
European men and native women were not the unions most in question […].
These marriages were considered unproblematic on the assumption that a native
woman would be grateful for, and proud of, her elevated European status and
content with legal dependence on a European man. (Stoler, 1992, p. 544).

In Great Britain, the children who were born as a result of inter-‘racial’ cohabitation
and marriages were called “half-castes”. An anonymous author in The
Anthropological Review writes,

Where the parental elements are very diverse, the hybrid is himself a fermenting
monstrosity…. He is in conflict with himself, and but too often exhibits the vices
of both parents without the virtues of either…. His very instincts are perverted.
He unites the baseness of the negro with the aspirations of the European…. Such
are the many coloured many featured “curs” that abound in most of the colonial
population of modern times. (N.a. 1866, as cited in Callaway, 1993, p. 52)

Nevertheless, racial thinking was not always as blatantly expressed as this quote,
especially in the twentieth century.

In the Netherlands Indies, for example, just when the ‘criterion of race’ as a
means to establish European equivalent status was to be removed from the Indies
constitution in 1920, a subtle range of cultural distinctions (proficiency in Dutch
by the age of seven, upbringing in a ‘European milieu’) secured the same
protections of privilege on which racial discrimination would continue to rest.
(Stoler & Cooper, 1997, p.10).

Reading

Gouda, F. (1995). Gender, sex and sexuality: citizenship and colonial culture in the
Dutch East Indies. In (pp. 157-193). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press Dutch
culture overseas: colonial practice in the Netherlands Indies 1990-1942. Library (L)

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Stoler, A. L. (1992). Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the
cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia. In Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 34(3), 514-551. L

Further references and reading

Callaway, H. (1993). Purity and exotica in legitimating the empire: cultural

constructions of gender, sexuality and race. In T. Ranger & O. Vaughan (Eds.),
Legitimacy and the state in twentieth-century Africa (pp. 31-61). London: MacMillan.
L

Stoler, A. L. & Cooper, F. (1997). Between metropole and colony: rethinking a

research agenda, In A. L. Stoler & F. Cooper (Eds.), Tensions of empire: Colonial
cultures in a bourgeois world (pp. 1-56). Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of
California Press. L

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Problem 8
Physicians’ ‘Invention’ of Homosexuality

Towards the beginning of the twentieth century the age of innocence came to an end
and we can see a transition to a medical and psychological approach of sexuality;
what the philosopher Michel Foucault calls the science of sexuality. There especially
was an increased attention for sexual perversions and homosexual identity as such
became seen as a sexual deficit. One of the most important contributors to the
medical-psychiatric exploration of homosexuality was Krafft-Ebing, who wrote the
influential medical-sexological standard
work Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886.

[D]ie Homoseksualität [soll man sehen] als ein funktionelles

Degenerationszeichen und als Teilerscheinung eines neuropsychopatischen,
meist hereditär bedingten Zustands bezeichnet, eine Annahme, welche auch
durch die weitere Forschung durchaus Bestätigung gefunden hat. (Krafft-
Ebing, 1886, p. 265).

Historians have come to see this episode in the history of medicine as “an evolution of
attitudes and labels”. For them, it isn’t the case that homosexuality changed, but that
same sex sexuality was “no longer regarded as a sin, but became a sickness, relabeled,
‘medicalized’” (Hanssen, 1997, p. 107). In this context the tolerant and open position
of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalyses, to “inversion” and
“homosexuality” around 1900 is surprising. Other theorists – of whom Foucault is one
of the most influential – adopt a constructivist approach to homosexuality and claim
that “a metamorphosis of the social and psychological reality of homosexuality itself
has taken place, from a form of sexual behavior (a patterns of action) to a condition (a
way of being)” (Hanssen, 1997, p. 107).

In these constructionist approaches the medical profession is attributed with a lot of

power in defining what these homosexual patients are. “Doctors were able to further
marginalize and exoticize the female invert or homosexual, and minimize the threat
that the existence of such individuals might pose to broader beliefs about sexuality,
gender and intimate relationships” (Gibson, 1997, p. 108). However, is it correct to
indebt the subjects with no power at all? What is striking in Krafft-Ebing’s work, for
example, is that he strongly draws on personal tales. In letters people confess their
homosexuality to Krafft-Ebing. Consider a part of the numerous thank-you letters:

Nobody knows my true nature, -only you, a stranger, you alone know me now,
indeed in a more detailed way than father or mother, friend, wife, or [male]
lover. It is a real comfort to me to expose, this once, the heavy secret of my
own nature. (Krafft-Ebing, 1890, as cited by Oosterhuis, 1997, p. 82).

Reading

Sigmund Freud: “The Sexual Aberrations”, in: Three essays of the Theory of
Sexuality, p. 1-20, R

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Oosterhuis, H. (1997). Richard von Krafft-Ebings’ "step-children of nature":

psychiatry and the making of homosexual identity. In V. Rosario (Ed.), Science and
homosexualities (pp. 67-88). New York/London: Routledge. Library (L)

Krafft-Ebing, R. von ([1886]1937). Homosexualität. In Psychopathia sexualis (neu

bearbeitet von A. Hartwich) (pp. 261-265). Zürich: Müller. Reader (R)

Gibson, M. (1997). Clitoral corruption. Body metaphors and American doctors’

construction of female homosexuality, 1870-1900. In V. Rosario (Ed.), Science and
homosexualities (pp. 108-127). New York, London: Routledge. L

Foucault, M. ([1976] 1978). Scienta sexualis. In The history of sexuality (pp. 51-73).
New York: Penguin Books. R

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Problem 9
The Formation of the Working Class

‘Class’ is one of the concepts around which fierce debates have taken place. Karl
Marx is known for having defined ‘class’ first as a revolutionary force in history –
the’bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’ (1848) – and then later in his main work “The
Capital. A Critique of political Economie” (1867) as a structure, as it is until today
commonly viewed. This second definition has led to the assumption that the ‘working
class’ is an existing, natural entity.
In his path-breaking work The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
([1963]1980) endorses the idea that class is

a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly

unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in
consciousness. I emphasize that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see
class as a ‘structure’ no even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact
happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. […]
(Thompson, [1963]1980, pp. 10-11).

Furthermore, Thompson emphasizes the political and cultural impact of the ‘Industrial
Revolution’.

But how did the struggle of classes as Marx thought of it, change history and society?
And how do we know who belongs to the working class and who doesn’t? Can we
really still speak of ‘working class’? But aren’t there still ‘class’ distinctions in our
society? The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu speakes of “small distinctions” of education,
manners and life style- beside money and property - which make a social class today.
The statistical information based on clear definitions and sound methodologies seems
to help us answer this question, too. Below you find the classification of heads of
industrie (or “enterprises”, which include both entrepreneurial and productive
activities). It was used in the Statistique de l’industrie à Paris, 1847-1848 (1851), a
statistical report produced by the Paris chamber of commerce.

1) All self-employed individuals; 2) all individuals making goods to order

who employed one or more workers, whether or not they were paid; 3) all
individuals making goods to order for “bourgeois clientele” (this category
included tailors, dressmakers, and even washerwomen); and 4) all
individuals making goods to order and working for several different
manufacturers. (Scott, 1988, p. 123)

Reading

Karl Marx: The communist Manifesto (1848), first chapter (available online:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

Thompson, E. P. (1980). Preface. In The making of the English working class (pp. 10-
16). London: Victor Gollancz. Library (L)

Thompson, E.P. (1980). Exploitation. In The making of the English working class (pp.
207-232). London: Victor Gollancz. L

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Problem 10
Middle Class and Domesticity

The ‘housewife’ and the ‘male breadwinner’ as we know them are contemporary
phenomena. However, the ideology that underpins them can be traced back into the
eighteenth century when the middle class emerged. The status, ‘housewife’ is thus
embedded in history, or even, as Catherine Hall ([1992]1995, p. 68) puts it, it is a
“cultural creation”.

Domestic ideology until the early nineteenth century had been promoted through
manuals, novels and magazines by writers called “domestic thinkers”. One of the
then-bestseller novels, Coelebs (1807) is a good example. Popular characters,
including Coelebs himself, lack the title and land, and they are simple gentlemen who
act as a moral figure towards their aristocratic superiors. Lucilla, Coelebs’ wife-to-be,
is

quite able to listen intelligently to serious discussion. Whereas in London,

young ladies resorted to whispers and giggles, she always listens respectfully
to what the men have to say, for many pages of discussion on moral and
religious issues in the novel the women never speak.(Davidoff & Hall, 1987,
p. 170).

While respectable women were viewed as possessing the positive, natural feminine
qualities, they had to learn to be feminine. It is noteworthy that femininity was
associated with dangerous sexuality and insatiable desires in the seventeenth- and
early eighteenth century (Davidoff & Hall, 1987).

The 1830s and the 40s witnessed political, economic and social transformations in
Europe. It can be said that it was the heyday of capitalism. While women’s labour was
directly connected to production in the pre-capitalist period, the household became
less important to production but it gained significance in the “the creation of the
relations of capitalist production – in the production, we might say, of bourgeois men”
(Hall, 1995, p. 51).

Women should regard good domestic management not as degrading but as a

moral task to do at home, just as their sons and husbands had to do at work.
Wives and daughters, ‘enclosed, as it were, in the home garden’, should
practice the domestic virtues of making others happy. (Davidoff & Hall, 1987,
p. 183).

In the mid- and late nineteenth century, women’s role in the domestic, reproductive
sphere was further legitimized based on positivist science. Henry Maudsley (1874),
the psychiatrist commented,

The energy of a human body being a definite and not inexhaustible quantity, can
it bear, without injury, an excessive mental drain as well as the natural physical
drain which is so great at that time [pregnancy]?... When Nature spends in one
direction, she must economise in another direction (Cited in Callaway, 1993, p.
42).

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See the figure 1 and compare and contrast it with the figure 2.

Figure 1 (Davidoff & Hall, 1987, p. 175) Figure 2 (McClintock, 1995, p.118)

In Victorian society, the newly emerged middle class employed domestic servants.
They freed middle class wives from ‘dirty’, backbreaking domestic work. Arthur J.
Munby (1828-1910) was a solicitor, who travelled throughout Britain in his pastime
and made his way even to continental Europe. He sketched and photographed working
class women, who did most menial, laborious, and dirty work. He also asked these
women questions and touched their hands. He brought exotic and erotic memories of
unexpected female sights back to the private comfort of his room (McClintock 1995).
Below you can find a few examples from his ‘specimens’.

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Figure 2.10

(All the figures are from McClintock, 1995, top: p. 106, bottom: p. 111)

Reading

Davidoff, L. & Hall, C. (1987). The nursery of virtue: domestic ideology and the
middle class. In Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-
1850 (pp.149-192). London: Hutchinson. Library (L)

Hall, C. (1995). The history of housewife. In White, male and middle class:
exploration in feminism and history (pp. 43-71). Cambridge: Polity Press. L

McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial
contest (pp. 98-114). London: Routledge. L

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Problem 11
The Making and Breaking of Heroes:
Masculinity and the Great War, 1914-1918

Finished with the War

A Soldier’s Declaration

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military

authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by
those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe
that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has
now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes
for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been
so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that,
had this been done, the objects, which actuated us would now be attainable
by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil
and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political
errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the
deception which is being practiced on them; I also believe that I may help
to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at
home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and
which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

S. Sassoon
July 1917
(Pat Barker, 1996, p.5).

With this letter the British novelist Pat Barker opens the Regeneration Trilogy (1996),
based on ‘real facts’ that deal with the complexities which nowadays have come to
represent the Great War: madness and masculinity, femininity, class and
homosexuality, embodiment and dismembering.

It is not really new to see the Great War as the breathtaking finale of the old world in
terms of political system, class relations and Victorian culture – in fact as the
definitive end of the ‘long nineteenth century’. Yet it is only fairly recent that WWI is
perceived in terms of gender and as a blow to the existing gender order. In contrast, it
is well-known that in the war industries as well as near the battlefields women for the
sake of the Fatherland performed jobs which were not open to them before: they
drove ambulances and performed surgical operations, they worked in factories and
harvested. It helped women to get the vote, at least in Great Britain (partially in 1919
and full suffrage in 1928) and Germany (in the context of the democratic revolution).

However, also for men and masculinity, the war proved to be a watershed.
On the one hand, as George Mosse writes,

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The war was supposed to bring about fundamental change, fulfilling the dream
of youth: creating a new man who would put an end to bourgeois
complacency, tyranny, and hypocrisy, as they saw it. (Mosse, 1990, p. 59).

Ideals of patriotism, sacrifice, honour were deployed to stir young men into war,
thereby at the same time reinvigorating the ideal of masculinity that in the last
decades had received severe blows by feminism, the literary and artistic avant-garde,
socialism and homosexuals. Effeminacy and androgyny had been gnawing at the
social order that was constructed on an ideal of masculinity and on the pillars of
autonomous, self made, productive and rational Men.

On the other hand, if the hopes were set at these dedicated young men to save this
order by their manly behaviour, these were disappointed if not completely reversed. In
a minimum amount of time reports of muted, trembling, tittering men in the trenches
reached the general public. Psychiatrists were quick to label these ‘male hysterics’
with the psychiatric disorder ‘shell shock’, and in Great Britain about 80,000 patients
were treated..

‘Private E’, suffering from a war neurosis (Burke, 1996, p. 109)

In the novel (as well as in reality) the letter is seen as a symptom of the mental
breakdown of the war author Sassoon. His war pall and colleague war novelist Robert
Graves convinced him of seeing the Medical Board and to consent with psychiatric
treatment, so that he (and England) was saved from the disgrace of cowardice or
disloyalty or worse: effeminate behaviour or degeneration.

Reading

Bourke, J. (1996). Inspecting. In Dismembering the male. Men’s bodies, Britain and
the Great War (pp. 171-209). London: Reaktion Books. Library (L)

Bourke, J. (1996). Masculinity, men’s bodies and the Great War. In History Today,
February, 8-11. Reader (R)

Mosse, G. L. (1990). Youth and the war experience. In Fallen soldiers: reshaping the
memory of the World Wars (pp. 53-69). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
R

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Showalter, E. (1987). Male hysteria. In The female malady. Women, madness and
English culture, 1830-1980 (pp. 167-194). London: Virago Press. L

Further reference

Barker, P. (1996). Regeneration trilogy. Harmondsworth: Viking.

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Problem 12
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Crucial Differences in Nationalsocialism and
Fascism

Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment in the famous 1784 essay What is

Enlightenment as cited in Problem 1 of this course, ends with the following words:
“The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own
intelligence.” (Kant 1784).

This means that he saw reason, or modern science and technology, at the heart of the
European Enlightenment project that promised never ending progress.

If this optimistic view already received some severe blows in the nineteenth and
twentieth century, the Holocaust did much to further destroy this all too easy faith in
the Enlightenment as underpinning modernity and progress. Important in this respect
was the book, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), written by the
German critical philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno during their
American exile in 1944 and published in Amsterdam in 1947. According to them, the
Enlightenment had a dark side in its denial of its own mythical roots and its belief in
nature as something to be conquered and controlled. Knowledge could not only be
liberating, but also oppressive, as we have seen in the use of anthropology or
medicine in labelling people and mapping the social order.

Key Passages from this famous book:

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always
aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly
enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s programs was the
disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with
knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1).

“Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in

its deference to worldly matters. Just as it serves all the purposes of the bourgeoisie
economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs
regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants:
it is as democractic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology is the
essense of this knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 2).

“What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it
and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless towards itself, the Enlightenment has
eradicated the last remnant of its self-awareness. Only though which does violence to
itself is hard enough to shatter myths”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 2)

“The disenchantment of the world means the extripation of animism”(Adorno,

Horkheimer, 2).

“For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately
one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword

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from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed”(Adorno,

Horkheimer, 4-5).

“Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all the
others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 9).

“Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything

unknown”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 11).

In Nazi-Germany, some of the crucial differences we discussed in this course as

markers for social boundaries came to be used as markers of boundaries between life
and death.

Reading

Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust (pp. 61-82). Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. Reader (R)

Bock, G. (1994). Antinatalism, maternity and paternity in National Socialist racism.

G. Bock and P. Thane (Eds.), Maternity and gender policies. Women and the rise of
the European welfare states 1880-1950s (pp. 233-255). London/New York:
Routledge. R

Habermas, J. (1994). The Entwinement of myth and Enlightenment: Re-reading

Dialectics of Enlightenment. In J. Bernstein (Ed.), The Frankfurt School: Critical
Assessments. Vol. III (pp. 35-39). London: Routledge (originally published in New
German Critique, 1982, no. 26, pp.13-30). R

Mosse, G.L. (1987[1970]). Culture, Civilization, and German Anti-Semitism. In

Germans and Jews: the right, the left and the search for a “Third Force” in pre-Nazi
Germany (pp. 34-60). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Library

Further reading

Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, Th. (2002). The concept of Enlightenment. In G. Schmid

Noerr (Ed.), The dialectic of Enlightenment (E. Jephcott, Trans.) (pp. 1-34). Stanford:
Stanford University Press. Retrieved July 9, 2005 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.sup.org/html/book_pages/0804736324/Chapter%201.pdf. Last checked: June 30,
2009.

Mosse, G.L. (1987[1970]). Introduction: the “Third Force”. In Germans and Jews: the
right, the left and the search for a “Third Force” in pre-Nazi Germany (pp. 3-33).
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

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Reference

Kant, I. (1784). What is Enlightenment? Retrieved July 11, 2005 from the World
Wide Web: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html. Last checked, June 30,
2009.

Ideas for the interpretation of some of the Films:

Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness

12. How does Francis Ford Coppola adapt Conrad’s novel to the Vietnam
War?: Think about:
• role of Imperialism and modern war (USA)
• main characters? -
• narrative perspective(s)
• Marlow’s relation to Kurtz?
• role of pop music - performativ
• masculinities – gender- wilderness- violence
• absurdity of war
• Kurtz – the last scene: reflection on different qualities of violence

Lawrence of Arabia

If you want to watch the film twice, you can do so. It is available in the university
library and you can watch it in the UB audio-visual room upon reservation. To make a
reservation go to: http://edata.ub.unimaas.nl/www-reserv/AV-reserveerlijst.asp.

List of topics
What we expect from you to explore and analyze a specific aspect of the film:

1. Historical reality represented in the film (what can you find in history
books?)
2. Arabian culture at the time, the I.WW
3. Lawrence of Arabia as a film—how was it made? Can you identify
elements which are manipulated in the film?
4. Relationship between the construction of different masculinities in this
story: the Beduin and the British, war, empire and orientalism
5. Codes of the British Army, codes of masculinity- the “veiled” man- role of
feminization of “the blond” Lawrence.
6. The ways in which his masculinity is confirmed AND is deconstructed.
7. Historical Lawrence—what do we know about this man?

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