Melissa N. Stein. Measuring Manhood

It has become axiomatic within cultural studies to refer to race, gender, class, and sexuality as mutually constitutive categories of identity. For at least three decades now, historians of race and gender have been elucidating the ways in which the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies have depended upon a logic that homologizes racial, gender, and sexual difference in the service of producing a normative subject against whom all others are deemed deviant and inferior. With Measuring Manhood, Melissa Stein has added to this literature and done so in a smartly conceptualized and engagingly written way. Although the title suggests that the focus of the book is on masculinity, Stein's analytical vision is ultimately much broader. To be sure, much of the book is devoted to an examination of how racial science—ethnology in the nineteenth century and eugenics in the early twentieth—explained (or, rather, manufactured) difference between the races by invoking the presumed sex and gender differences between the archetypical males of those respective races. Comparative anatomical measurement of the male body was central to antebellum ethnologists' efforts to construct a racial hierarchy that reaffirmed the natural dominance of whites, on the one hand, and the inferiority and docility of “negroes,” whose natural condition was enslavement, on the other. In the postemancipation period, ethnologists pointed to physical and secondary sex characteristics as an index for each race's capacity for citizenship. In a fascinating chapter titled “An ‘Equal Beard’ for ‘Equal Voting,’” Stein reveals the ways in which anthropometric studies of black and white soldiers and other Reconstruction-era ethnological research concluded that the very bodies of African American men—including their lack of facial hair relative to the hirsute northern European—was evidence of their inability to responsibly exercise their newly gained citizenship rights. Although racial scientists certainly invoked the physical differences between black and white women, the bodies of men were the principal scaffolding on which they hung their scientific arguments about racial hierarchy. Race and gender were intertwined in the theories that scientists and physicians advanced to defend slavery and white supremacy. As Stein argues, “a familiar scientific lexicon of sex difference provided nineteenth-century scientists an ideological framework through which to conceptualize race” (135).

Eugenics · Human sexuality · Masculinity · Political science · Race (biology) · Racial hierarchy · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Law