Although the study of masculinity is now well established in the discipline of history, its impact has been uneven, and historians of different periods, regions and topics can explore it in quite different ways. The study of masculinity in British politics from the eighteenth century onwards is a case in point. This is a national context where gender clearly plays a huge role in political culture, but the particular ways in which the histories of gender and of politics developed in British studies has meant that a dedicated history of political masculinities has struggled to emerge. This chapter surveys the work that has been done in this field since the 1990s, when the field was preoccupied with ‘separate spheres’ and the methodologies associated with the linguistic turn. New cultural histories have allowed historians to assess the role of masculinity, not just in political representation, but in fields such as the body, the emotions and the material world. This chapter therefore uses examples from modern British politics in order to make a case for a gendered history of political practice.
|Title of host publication||The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe|
|Place of Publication||London|
|Publisher||Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.|
|Number of pages||465|
|Publication status||Published - 8 Feb 2018|