Looking at men: anatomy, masculinity, and the modern male body

Abstract

'Looking at men' considers how art, medicine, and sport in the 19th century overlapped to reinforce notions of masculinity. Through a shared violence of human dissection, pugilism, and war, men in artistic and medical professions secured their masculine status and professional authority. This volume scrutinizes the relationships between the heteronormative, the homosocial, and the homoerotic in art and depictions of anatomy. Close analysis of works by Cezanne, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Gericault, Millet, Pissarro, and others offers fresh insight, reinforced by parallels illustrated in literary descriptions of bodies in Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes. Anthea Callen examines how ideas of healthy male "normality" and a modern virile masculinity were constructed and negotiated through these artistic and literary representations; she also measures these virile body images against actual, classed, or racialized male bodies, delivering lively scholarship that spans art history, history of science, literature, and anthropology, as well as studies of masculinity and sexuality.