Speaking of Failure
Modern Masculinity and Medieval Confession
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2229400 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Garrison (Calgary Laboratory Services, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 923-942 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/724241 |
| OpenAlex | W4381487543 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Modern hegemonic masculinity often entails a focus on the past, a longing for an imagined time when men had more authority and power. I argue that this orientation toward the past stretches back to the Middle Ages. Specifically, the discourses surrounding medieval confession—the mandatory ritual of confessing one’s sins to a priest—continue to shape how white men assert their own power and domination in modern North America. In Europe’s Middle Ages, guides to confession encouraged men to assert their patriarchal authority by narrating their own past failures. Through an analysis of representative medieval penitential manuals, I show how confession became a discursive tool for men to imagine themselves in positions of social and moral superiority. This penitential tradition’s continuing influence is particularly evident in North America’s booming men’s self-improvement culture and the growing nostalgia for historical versions of masculinity. By narrating the sins of their own past and their collective flawed past as men, North American men enact a modern penitential masculinity that does not undermine patriarchy but rather justifies their place as powerful men within it. Western patriarchy has long relied on a penitential model of masculinity that deploys men’s past failures—both individual and collective—as a justification for future gendered domination
Confession (law) · Hegemonic masculinity · Hegemony · Masculinity · Patriarchy · Penitential · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation
Proving Woman
The Devil's Historians
Rivalrous Masculinities
Apocalypse Man
Critical confessions now
Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology, and the History of the Self in Middle English
Reading for gender
Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historian’s Gaze
Antifeminism, Profeminism, and the Myth of White Men's Disadvantage
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |