Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Sabine Frühstück, UC Santa Barbara

Friday, March 15th, Time and location to be announced

“’Real Men Die Wrapped in Horsehide:’ and Other Tales of Modern Masculinity.”

“This talk considers the history of modern masculinities, spanning the early processes of nation-state formation and empire building, through defeat and democratization. About 150 years ago, scientists, reformers, and government officials understood sexuality as the natural source of human life, social renewal, and national strength. They made sexuality a principal target in their efforts to know, manage, and control national populations. They perceived healthy (male) bodies to be the very basis of the nation’s military potency. Hence, conscripts and soldiers were of principal concern to the accountants of sexuality within the Japanese defense elite, the public health bureaucracy, and academe alike. Military physical exams revealed which male bodies were fit — and unfit — for that new kind of service to the nation-state: modern war. Despite a great deal of ambivalence about the will to go to war, young men took pride in their eligibility for military service. Out of the same concern for maintaining soldiers’ health and fighting capacity, military health administrators routinely investigated conscripts’ patterns of STD infection, while public health officials regulated prostitution. From 1940 onward, a modern health and defense regime became articulated as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Rhetorically and administratively, this regime saw its imperialist capabilities as intimately tied to its population’s resistance to Western colonization.”