Making men from whales: gender and American whaling art, 1814-1861
Embargo Date
2027-09-18
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Between the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War, commercial whaling was an impactful transoceanic industry that produced oil and other products, operating from hubs largely out of the American northeast. Whalers engaged in the environmental destruction and economic exploitation of whales, and their activities inspired a wide array of creative cultural practices inside and outside the industry. By examining the wide field of whaling art—a category of creative expression of and about whaling that includes prints, paintings, logbooks, drawings, illustrations, and scrimshaw—through the lens of gender and sexuality, this dissertation makes the first expansive attempt to understand the novel artistic forms and gender expressions that took shape around the business of hunting, killing, and processing whales at sea. Studying paintings and prints by Thomas Birch and other American artists, I show that whaling imagery often strove to express a dominant able-bodied, producerist, self-possessed, heterosexual, and cisgender masculinity. But other images and objects made around the whaling industry dissolved the ostensible coherence of this set of traits. By examining four categories of cultural works that figured gender at sea as a complex and unstable construction––a print by a disabled whaleman, descriptions of the imaginative and physical slipperiness between man and whale bodies, whalebone corset busks that expressed sexual longing, and scrimshaw depictions of “female pirates” who transgressed gender conventions—this dissertation demonstrates that the forms of masculinity articulated by whaling art often fell outside nineteenth-century social norms and exposed men’s vulnerabilities.This project challenges long-held assumptions about masculinity’s naturalness in whaling’s homosocial labor. It argues that whalemen’s claims to dominant violent manhood must be seen alongside cultural representations that subvert the legitimacy of those same ideas, representations that explore an interest in gender’s malleability, contend with disability and trans-species corporeality, and trouble the boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Unpacking the revelations that whaling art offers about maritime manhood and the unstable qualities of masculinity broadly, this interdisciplinary project recovers a more complex set of gender identities than scholarship has previously acknowledged and brings new perspectives to the areas of oceanic studies, animal studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
Description
2024
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International