Book Review: Making Men,Making History: Canadian Masculinities across Time and Place

Making Men, Making History: Canadian Masculinities across Time and Place is a substantial achievement in the study of men and masculinities and Canadian studies. In this collection, Peter Gossage and Robert Rutherdale have amassed some twenty essays devoted to men and masculinities and the idea of Canada. The chapters in this volume explore masculinities in English and French Canada as well as (though only briefly) indigenous Canada (wherein we have seen a growing body of scholarship, notably, Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration edited by Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson), and all seek to answer the question: what has it meant to be a man in Canada? The collection consists of six “emerging themes”: expertise and authority, masculine spaces, performing masculinities, boys to men, men in motion, and faces of fatherhood. Each theme speaks to a particular facet of masculinity and manhood.

Each of the emerging themes represents a section of the text. The opening section “prompts us to think about powerful white men—including middle-class professionals, consultants, and managers” (p. 27). In the next section, we are invited to “the study of gendered space” (p. 107), included in this section is a chapter on gay bars, and another chapter on men’s clubs. Inherent in these discussions is a consideration of homosociality. In the third section, we consider the “performativity of gender identities,” wherein we see the influence of Butler’s theories of gender and performativity. One particularly interesting chapter is Downey’s chapter “Claiming ‘Our Game’: Skwxwú7mesh Lacrosse and the Performance of Indigenous Nationhood in Early Twentieth Century,” which considers lacrosse and how it was “appropriated from Indigenous peoples and codified according to Victorian perceptions of sport” (p. 195). The fourth section “is united by a focus on youth and on the challenges, anxieties, and opportunities associated with conceptions and experiences of boyhood, male adolescence, and the transition to manhood” (p. 255). In highlighting youth, however, a question arises about older men—what is the experience of older men in Canada? The penultimate section focuses on “Canadian masculinities on the road” (p. 331). Gossage and Rutherdale include chapters on Métis voyageurs, draft dodging, and motorcycle clubs. The final section addresses “the historical study of fatherhood” and considers how men are situated as “gendered actors within the domestic world of home and family” (p. 384).

The breadth and scope of Making Men, Making History is impressive. While no edited collection is complete, there are a collection of noteworthy absences in this anthology. For instance, how might we conceive of “masculinities without men” to borrow Jean Bobby Noble’s phrasing? Masculinities are presented, in this volume, as a property of male bodies or male-bodied persons. Relatedly, what might queer(er) readings of masculinity look like in the history of Canadian masculinities? What remains clear is that Making Men, Making History is an invitation to further study of Canadian masculinities, and I am hopeful that this collection, alongside other recently published collections, will help inform the growing discussions about Canadian masculinities.

Despite a lack of some of the work I mentioned above, Gossage and Rutherdale’s Making Men, Making History is ready for adoption in a course on masculinity and Canadian history. Instructors could easily augment gaps if the contents as they see fit. All of the chapters are clearly written and informative. The chapters encourage us to consider a range of themes, concerns, and ideas. Perhaps best of all, this book as a whole and its individual chapters encourages readers to consider new perspectives on Canadian masculinities, to ask new questions, and to chart new paths of inquiry. This collection is an important consideration of Canadian masculinity, while also showing the strength of critical studies of men and masculinities in the Canadian context.