Summary Of Masculinity By Angus Pasten

Angus McLaren has done two things that no other author thus far has done, look at masculinity and wrote a book about gender analysis. McLaren masterfully teased out the ways in which masculinity was policed, established, and valued through court trials and medical believes of the time. The way McLaren presents the information allows for two gender theorists works to be applied, Judith Butler and Carole Pateman. The Trials of Masculinity does gender analysis better and more constantly than any of the books we have read so far in class. Thus far this has been the most interesting book because it breaks away from femininity and focuses on a new topic.
Using the trials and medical opinions of the time as a way to determine how men learned
Some of the trials that helped shape masculinity and femininity include the Playfair vs Kitson and Burrows vs Hull. McLaren (1997) highlights what women have to learn from this case by pointing out how Mrs. Kitson acted while on the stand and by her lawyers getting the jury to forgive some actions because they were actions that are not so uncommon for women to do. Some of these actions that women fall prey to is having abortions and lying (McLaren, 1997). Mrs. Kitson enacted the perfect female victim by, speaking in hushed tones, weeping, swooning, and needing the help of her husband to leave the stand (McLaren, 1997). Even though Hull was a transvestite McLaren uses the Burrows vs Hull trail to show what the ideal house wife should do. Hull did all of the necessary work for a woman, being “responsible for finances and household chores” (McLaren, 1997,
The Playfair/Kitson trial did a perfect job of showing what a gentleman would do compared to what a cad does. McLaren (1997) says that gentlemen were assumed to know they had an advantage over women, but never used it. Whereas cads would, and Playfair had used his power over his sister-in-law, breaking the patient/doctor confidentiality and telling his wife and the rest of the family that Kitson had an abortion and had to have an extramarital affair (McLaren, 1997). When it came to the murder trials that McLaren included in this work, he was using the testimonies from witnesses that helped to release the killer, to show what kind of man and in what circumstances could get away with killing another. The men who walked away from these trials were usually in circumstances where they had to defend their honor or their family’s honor (McLaren, 1997). Some men were killing their wives lovers, protecting their family’s honor. Some were killing men they felt had challenged their honor through suggesting lewd acts between men or they feared they had been subjected to these acts while unconscious. They may have killed a man because they were offended by something the other said, therefore protecting their