Material Culture and the Boundaries of Masculinity

This panel will examine the connections between materiality and masculinity as broadly understood across multiple contexts and methodologies within the field of Religious Studies. Materials are often components of both the construction of masculinity and religious lives, yet are seldom analyzed as a point of connection. The various papers on this panel seek to examine this nexus point, and the materials in question range from clothes to art, and from hair to the archives themselves while questioning the boundaries of masculinity.

The papers in this session will approach masculinity from different perspectives. Some of them demonstrate how materials are involved with the creation and policing of masculine bodies such as “Heavenly Bodies: Mormon Male Homoerotics in the Sacred Art of Arnold Friberg,” “A Transgender Devil No More: The hyper-masculinization of the Baphomet in contemporary occulture and television,” and “Unraveling the Crisis of Masculinity in the University of Oregon’s Keith Stimely Collection on Revisionist History and Neo-Fascist Movements”. These papers will analyze the protection of normative masculinity in Mormon, Satanic, and Neo-Fascist Christian movements and address the construction of normative masculinity, and even hypermasculinity, within materials of cultural preservation.

Through a study of the changes to artwork based on Éliphas Lévi’s Baphomet, “A Transgender Devil No more” examines how the removal of body parts associated with female bodies, particularly of breasts, enforces cisnormitivity. While Levi’s original representation was intended to be “half male” and “half female,” more recent representations, such as the Satanic Temple’s statue of Baphomet, has depicted the figure as exclusively male. This erasure of the genderfucked Baphomet in favor of a masculine cisgender one is particularly complex in the context of groups like the Satanic Temple, which in other respects claims to reject and subvert cultural normativity. Whereas “Unraveling the Crisis of Masculinity” examines the construction of masculinity in a group that overtly identifies with normative concepts of gender. This paper analyzes how a far-right group enforces a masculinity centered on heteronormativity even as one founder was discovered to have participated in gay porn. This paper examines the archival material recording this crisis in the Institute of Historical Review. Placing these two groups in conversation brings into focus how these materials are involved in the preservation of normative masculinity in its intersections with cis and heteronormativity despite the seemingly opposite nature of these religious groups. Similarly, “Heavenly Bodies” examines reflections of idealized Mormon masculinity in the paintings of Arnold Friberg. Friberg’s work depicts hypermasculine, white bodies that support a particularly American normative view of masculinity. However, this paper will demonstrate that, despite Friberg’s intentional preservation of normative masculinity in his art, these idealized bodies subvert that intention with their homoerotic nature.

The final two papers further examine the enforcement and subversion of normative views of masculinity within the history of Christianity by separating it from its association with male bodies. “Clothes Make the Bishop: Masculinity, Materiality, and Authority in the *Life of St. Matrona*'' and “Masculinity across Sexual Difference in the Bearded Image of St. Wilgefortis” use clothing and facial hair respectively to focus on the construction of masculinity for Christian Saints assigned female. Both Matrona and Wilgefortis demonstrate the malleability of the construction of gender and push on the boundaries of masculinity. “Masculinity Across Sexual Difference” examines Wilgefortis’ miraculous beard, a divine gift which grows overnight in order to aid her in avoiding an unwanted marriage. This bodily marker typically associated with masculine virility subverts ideas of a fixed binary. Likewise, “Clothes Make the Bishop '' uses the concept of transmasculinity to propose that Matrona’s authority, and possible position as a bishop, was due to her proper fulfillment of masculinity as it was understood in that context. Matrona’s outward expression of masculinity through shorn hair and male habits demonstrates both a fulfillment of normative masculinity for the cultural context and a subversion through her status as assigned female. Both of these papers subvert the assumption that masculinity is reserved for male bodies and address the ways in which masculinity is a status which can be achieved or denied

These five papers demonstrate the fundamental materiality within religious preservation and subversion of masculinity and masculine identity. While the cultivation of masculinity is arguably always material in its inscription onto bodies, this panel will demonstrate how other materials interact with this inscription. These materials are frequently involved in reflecting not only normative but also idealized masculinity. By analyzing not only materials that signify masculine expression such as hair and clothing but also artistic expressions of idealized beings, this panel examines a broad spectrum of masculinity and materiality in cultural, and subcultural, constructions. Given the status of these figures as ones worth emulating with their religious traditions, it is clear that this is an important intersection that deserves further thought. And finally, this panel also examines how the materials of the archive are not inert, but rather are an active participant involved in these constructions through the preservation of discourse around masculinity. Therefore, this panel has important implications for masculinity studies within many fields beyond the foci of these papers.