Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2019

‘He would be a man in his eyes. ’ Male homosocial desire in novels by Menno Ter Braak

Menno ter Braak is one of the most prominent writers of Dutch high ­modernism. In his two novels, Hampton Court and Dr. Dumay verliest…, the double bind of homosocial desire is fully operative. Building on the critical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this paper questions the role of the  ‘­epistemology of the closet’ in Ter Braaks literary oeuvre, which is pepper­ed with scenes of closeted homosexual desire. Moreover, and in addition to Sedgwick, I pay special attention to the representation of emancipated women in Ter Braaks novels. As I aim to show, the male characters seem to have accepted (or even internalised) feminist notions. Yet, the relative closeness to, and sometimes even identification with, emancipated women, reinforces the conservative reflexes build within male homosocial bonds. So in the end, the conservative fear on which the homosocial bond feeds, trumps the desire for change and a loosening up of the erotic spectrum.

Lucebert’s male fantasies. Bertus Swaanswijk/Lucebert’s early poetry read in the light of biographical information on Swaanswijk's war years

In his biography of Dutch poet Lucebert, biographer Wim Hazeu published fragments of letters in which young Bertus Swaanswijk, who worked in a German factory during World War 2, spoke positive about nazi-Germany and used antisemitic discourse. In this article, the early poems of Swaanswijk/Lucebert are analysed from the perspective of Klaus Theweleits theories on ‘male fantasies’ in texts written by early 20^th century Freikorps soldiers. This analysis will be used to reflect on the question whether the biographical knowledge should influence our interpretation of Lucebert’s poetry.

‘That I may perish like a man’. War and masculinity

This essay focuses on the cultural representation of masculinity in times of war. It unravels the gender effects of the topic ‘call to arms’ in which men are addressed as soldiers while women are often relegated to invisibility or to a helping role. Thus, the onset of war creates gender. The topic reconstitution of men and women in times of war is first analysed in a selected corpus of Dutch war poetry (Jan Camperts ‘Het lied der achttien dooden’ (1943) among others), secondly in Michael Curtiz’ classic film Casablanca (1942) and finally in W.F. Hermans’ novel De donkere kamer van Damocles (1958). Cultural texts can create genders, as I am demonstrating through a detailed analysis of Casablanca, but they can also resist this creation and critically enlighten its failure, which is, in my view, the gender scenario of De donkere kamer van Damocles.

‘The new batch’. Anja Meulenbelt and men's liberation in the Netherlands

Dutch writer and activist Anja Meulenbelt was a key figure in second wave feminism in the Netherlands. Her autofictional novel De schaamte voorbij is considered a milestone in feminist literature in Dutch. Besides her literary work, she had published widely on gender and literary criticism from the 1970s onwards and continues to do so today. A lesser known aspect of her writing and activism concerns masculinity and male emancipation. Second wave feminism was accompanied by a pro-feminist men’s movement which included a number of short-lived periodicals such as Mannentaal en Manuscript. Meulenbelt took serious interest in this movement and commented on it in various essays and articles, arguing that its questioning of the male gender role could contribute to gender equality. This article traces Meulenbelt’s involvement with men’s activism and masculinity studies and discusses the representation of men and masculinity in two novels: De schaamte voorbij and Alba. While the former suggests an impasse in heterosexual relationships with men, even with those of the ‘new generation’ who have been influenced by feminism, the latter depicts a more gratifying relationship with an emancipated male partner.

‘Long live woman and her freedom. It is indecent to gurgle.’ Muslims, masculinity and irony in Hafid Bouazza's work

This article sets out to scrutinize the world of difference that lies between Hafid Bouazza’s story-collection De voeten van Abdullah from 1996, and his collection of essays De akker en de mantel from 2015. It does so by means of a critical re-reading of Bouazza’s celebrated 1996 debut, a work that at that time was primarily read as a tongue-in-cheek depiction of rural Muslim life. This re-reading positions De voeten van Abdullah in a ‘pre-post-erous’ rela­tion to Bouazza’s later, Islam-critical, if not Islamophobic writing. This article’s comparative analysis of both works focuses in particular on the representation of Muslim masculinity and of the supposed threat that this particular masculinity poses to the position of women in society. As I will argue it is the transideological and elusive force of irony in Bouazza’s stories that makes them escape any final determination. The ‘pre-post-erous’ juxtaposition of the two works, however, not only reveals their ideological and historical situatedness, but also that of their readers/readings.

Desperate men leed to desperate deeds. Masculinity in Arthur van Amerongen's posture

To study the dynamics in the alleged ‘crisis of masculinity’ through a case-study, this contribution makes a posture analysis of columnist Arthur van Amerongen. By exploring his posture and the field that speaks from it, it becomes clear how mechanisms such as sexual nationalism, masculinnocence, and recurring anti-feminism tropes give shape to masculinity. Van Amerongen performs a victimized hegemonic white masculinity: he embodies the type of dominant masculinity, but claims to have lost the hegemonic position in the gender hierarchy. Coming from a heteronormative, phallogocentric worldview, he portrays a domination over white masculinity by third wave feminism that favours potentially dangerous cultural and religious diversity. When speaking of topics regarding boundaries, sex, gender, or other ethnicities, his posture is repeatedly ambiguous. This use of detours to attain masculinity underscores the professed shift in the gender hegemony.