ABSTRACT
On ne naît pas homme, on le devient: one is not born a man, one becomes one. What is now called the nature of man is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. Often hitching a ride from feminist studies recent critics and historians have explored the implications of what now seems a self-evident proposition: men too have a gender. 1 Masculine identity is never a given but the outcome of shifting cultural negotiations and contestation. It is essentially a relational construct, inseparable from the totality of gender relations, and as these change so too does the notion of what constitutes the manly; rather than a single idea of masculinity, the historian has to consider matrix of culturally and historically specific masculinities.
