Women’s Writing, Special Issue: 19th Century Women Writing Men

Parsons, Jo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2884-6676 and Heholt, Ruth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6963-6427 (2021) Women’s Writing, Special Issue: 19th Century Women Writing Men. [Journal]

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Abstract / Summary

As men have always observed and written about women, so women have always observed and written about men. However, to date, there has been much less scholarly attention paid to women’s textual construction of men, with the vast majority of work looking at men’s representations of women. In the scholarly debates since the advent of second wave feminism, the focus has tended and still tends to be towards women as spectacle as viewed through the male gaze, even when this is fiercely critiqued. In the Introduction to The Victorian Male Body, we wrote that “historically masculinity has not been a spectacle: everyone else has formed the spectacle and white men have been invisible, or at least less visible, powerful surveyors”.Footnote1 However, the past thirty years or so has seen the emergence of masculinities studies and, with this rapid rise in scholarly interest in the field of masculinities, the gaze has slowly begun to turn backwards onto the male subject. Despite this, when the attention has turned to the textual construction of masculinity, the emphasis has tended to centre on the representations themselves rather than specifically interrogating who is constructing these gendered representations or from which perspective. This special issue looks directly at how women writers construct and represent men. Men have been subject to construction through a female lens since writing began – albeit a construction that is, sometimes, mediated by dominant patriarchal narratives. Women writers however were always in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre – able perhaps to “look aslant” at masculinity. This special issue seeks to consider to how this “female gaze” that looks “aslant” engages with questions of manliness and deviance, exploring to what extent there is a sense of rebellion and subversion, or even sometimes submission, to the dominant ideologies of the time in women’s portrayals of manliness and masculinity.

Item Type:	Journal
ISSN:	0969-9082
eISSN:	1747-5848
Subjects:	Literature
Department:	School of Communication
Depositing User:	Jo Parsons
Date Deposited:	18 Dec 2025 14:12
Last Modified:	18 Dec 2025 14:12
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6296

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