Afterword: The Ethics and Urgency of Studying Old Norse Masculinities

Summary

Writing on the academic study of masculinity in medieval literature, Ásdís Egilsdóttir has noted that,

Oft má sjá í þessum skrifum að höfundum finnst ástæða til þess að útskýra, og jafnvel réttlæta, hvers vegna þeir taka fyrir karlmennsku og svara ímynduðum efasemdarmanni sem spyr, já en höfum við ekki alltaf verið að því? En kynjafræðingar svara því til að þeir séu ekki að stíga skref afturábak […] heldur koma að karlmennsku og karlkyni á nýjan hátt fyrir áhrif kvenna- og kynjafræða.

(Often one can see in these writings that the authors feel a need to explain, and even justify, why they deal with masculinity, and they answer an imaginary sceptic who asks, ‘OK, but have we not always done that?’ But gender studies scholars reply that they are not taking steps backward […] but rather are approaching masculinity and maleness in a new way as a result of the influence of women's and gender studies.)

Ásdís is entirely correct that scholars exhibit an anxiety over writing about masculinity in medieval literature and that they frequently make a point of justifying their choice to do so. But it is nevertheless important that researchers continue to do this in order both to acknowledge their intellectual debts to the tradition of feminist research within which the scholarly study of masculinities is situated and to indicate how such analyses are inevitable, necessary, and logical applications of feminist theoretical insights. In particular, it is largely to Black feminist thinkers that we owe the indispensable insight that there are multiple modes of femininity and multiple ways of ‘being a woman’. It is by the extension of such theorisations that we reach the inevitable conclusion that there are also multiple ways of exhibiting masculinity. But the mere recognition of the logic of this position will be of little impact unless we draw on this insight in our scholarly explorations of masculinity. If we only examine the construction of femininities we, as a side effect, privilege – even reify – masculinity as an unimpeachable, ‘natural’ category. It is only by studying masculinities – their formation and operation – that we force masculinities, like femininities, to be recognised as socially constructed. And it is not until we acknowledge masculinities’ social construction that we may begin to critique them and consider their socio-political effects.