Not long ago, at a local county fair, I found myself consuming a sticky mess of French fries under a tent that abutted a Marine recruitment kiosk. The young male soldiers (and they were exclusively male) had no need to hail passersby, since most of the adolescent boys who happened along tended to stop. The Marines lured the boys with two pieces of equipment, one high tech and one low - a Humvee and a chin-up bar. Though men and women alike ogled the massive tank-like vehicle, it was the simple metal bar that attracted the kids. All of them wanted to test themselves against the Marines, and I witnessed a number of spontaneous competitions - between friends, younger teens, and older professional soldiers and aspirants.
I was somewhat surprised, since I assumed that the allure of a machine - especially a large, technologically sophisticated, cherry-red machine - would hold much more appeal than an unadorned iron pipe. The fascination, however, lay not in the apparatus itself, but in the competition that it inspired. The contests allowed the boys to perform or reinforce their toughness, strength, competitiveness (what made them masculine in their eyes), offered a way to create community among themselves, and provided a forum for them to emulate and identify with men they found heroic. Where the Humvee was merely an accidental marker of masculinity, the chin-up bar offered a tangible way for these boys to engage in a performance of manhood.
The way that the ancients performed masculinity and the structures that reinforced male gender identity are not the same as those of the twenty-first century in the United States. This example is instructive, however, because it brings to light issues that scholars have attempted to address as they examine the nature of male gender identity in ancient Rome and the societal structures that codified it, such as markers of masculinity, the importance of competition in male public life, the value of uirtus (virtue, manliness), and the public nature of gender performance. This chapter will consider two studies found in this large body of scholarship, both of which examine these issues in Catullus, specifically, a Foucauldian reading of Catullus by Marilyn Skinner and a postmodern interpretation by David Wray. Both address how Catullus
Fashions a masculine subjectivity for himself, and how his notions of masculinity conform to or challenge our ideas of what it meant to be a Roman male in the first century BC. It will first, however, be profitable to consider the origin of the study of masculinity and, more specifically, what it meant to be a man in Rome.
World History
