Humanitarian Masculinity: Desire, Character and Heroics, 1876–2018

Abstract

Humanitarian organisations have been shaken in recent years by a number of scandals associated with masculine behaviour and deportment. These scandals have been interpreted in different ways as the expression of predatory or hypermasculine behaviour. While the gender politics and long-term consequences of these scandals remain contentious, this chapter argues that one has to engage with the cultural history of masculinity in humanitarian endeavours to appreciate the strength of the cultural tropes and myths of character, heroics and risk-taking that have underpinned and sustained specific behaviours in situations of exception. This chapter builds on an analysis of a corpus of early and more recent self-narratives of humanitarian work in order to argue that recent “issues with masculinity” require fundamental debates that acknowledge this cultural legacy.