'man or the maddened beast?' male sexuality and coming of age in australia, 1918-1938

Abstract

This thesis examines the historical and cultural construction of a process which is often credited as being beyond both body and culture. 'Coming of age', making the transition to adulthood is something we all do if we live long enough and yet the experience is not only politically contested-if one has not yet come of age does he have rights? what are our responsibilities once we pass that mark? at what point do we forgo the freedom of childhood for the responsibility of adulthood?-but historically protean. In this thesis I will be examining a range of historical evidence of cultural conversation, declaration, diagnosis and representation which, over a twenty year time period from 1918 to 1938, brought these and other questions about the getting of manhood into sharp focus. Use of the masculine pronoun is intentional for it is the male experience of coming of age which was discursively linked to the most pressing cultural anxieties of the day. The male body was implicated in degeneration of the white race in Australia, in the decadence of modem culture, in the respectability of women, and future success of the nation culturally and politically in ways it had not been before World War One. Masculinity, the male body and sexuality were sites upon which the male subject was defined. The quality of Australian manhood was drawn into these discursive milieux by experts and professionals who defined 'man' in relation to woman and, more importantly here, to boy. The ways in which the distinction between boy and man was drawn through expert and popular knowledge in the inter-war years defined not only what it meant to be one or the other of those things, but also what it meant to be the strange, transitory creature who marked the division between the two. Adolescence, and the process of coming of age which has since become sui generis contributed substantially to understandings of bodies, subjectivities and masculinities. Drawing upon Foucault's formulation of genealogy and the application of that theoretical standpoint by subsequent historians in the fields of sexuality and youth studies, this thesis considers a range of discourse-medical, legal, representational-that turned its attentions to the body and character of the adolescent male in the inter-war years. In doing so, these forms of discourse generated ways of knowing the corporeal self and, through a formulation of unique and volatile sexuality, the social form of that self. Show more