Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. These works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, are analyzed alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. This chapter includes a comparative analysis of two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, a sentimental anti-war drame by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and an alternative version of the play that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest (Le Théâtre de la Marine). A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles.

This chapter charts historical developments and central themes in the anthropological study of men and masculinities. As the chapter shows, this body of knowledge is not free of frictions and contestations. Early anthropological studies were often motivated by finding globally generalizable patterns of masculinity. Other research has broadened the focus by questioning coherent gender-identities, analyzing how masculinity constructs are shaped by ambivalences, transgressive practices, and intersectional complexities. To chart this rich body of knowledge, the first part of the chapter critically discusses early anthropological research on men and masculinities as well as concepts that dominated the field for a considerable time. The remainder of the chapter focuses on three prominent topics of anthropological masculinity studies: economic crisis and its effect on masculinities, sexualities and nonnormative masculinities, and the role of masculinities in the negotiation of boundaries between others and selves. The chapter argues that anthropological engagements with masculinity can productively trouble our understanding of what it means to be a man.

Wallace wrote about masculinity throughout his career, from The Broom of the System’s (1987) parodies of neurotic macho posturing to The Pale King’s (2011) encomiums to white-collar workers. It is peculiar, then, that critical attention to Wallace’s treatment of masculinity is still spotty. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that Wallace’s gender politics were rather conservative, and therefore anathema to scholarly communities rightly committed to challenging traditional ideas of masculinity. However, there is more nuance, complication and ambiguity in Wallace’s depictions of masculinity than is normally acknowledged, even if his works do remain broadly masculinist in their tenor, and given to portraying a kind of “masculinity in crisis.” This chapter examines these points of interest and dissonance by drawing particular attention to the following overlapping themes: sport and the body, fatherhood, and class, offering grounds from which scholars can investigate this topic in greater detail. Similarly, although Wallace’s texts generally resist being recruited into a progressive gender politics, I argue that their depictions of masculinity are nevertheless worth considering. By paying attention to masculinity in his work, we can further explicate Wallace’s aesthetic innovations, better historicize his relation to patriarchy, and – as the case may be – reaffirm the need to criticize what he has to say about men.