Interior Portraiture
and Masculine Identity in France,
1780-1914

Temma Balducci,
Heather Belnap Jensen,
Pamela Warner, editors

The private person who squares his accounts with reality in his office
demands that the interior be maintained in his illusions. This need is all
the more pressing since he has no intention of extending his commercial
considerations into social ones. In shaping his private environment he
represses both. From this spring the phantasmagorias of the interior. For
the private individual the private environment represents the universe. In
it he gathers remote places and the past. His drawing room is a box in the
world theater.

--Walter Benjamin, „Louis-Philippe, or the Interior“

We invite proposals for a collection that considers portraits of men in
interior/domestic spaces over the long nineteenth century in France.
Scholars of this period have conventionally associated men and masculinity
almost exclusively with the public realm based on such paradigms as the
„ideology of separate spheres“ and Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur.
Indeed,
in scholarly theorizations of modernity, this assumed relationship between
masculinity and the public realm is ubiquitous. Men’s relationships to
interior spaces, which are typically associated with women and children,
have been marginalized in such approaches. The numerous nineteenth-century
portraits of men in interior spaces, however, suggest that such
interpretations of both masculinity and modernity are limited. These
images need to be investigated in terms of how they construct various
understandings of masculinity as well as how such representations help to
fashion conceptions of the modern.

The editors seek submissions that interrogate interior portraits of men in
light of changes to the family, the impact of Haussmanization,
homoeroticism, patronage, authenticity vs. masquerading, domesticity,
aging, family property, and other issues. Such examinations will
necessarily take into account political, structural, and social changes
that inflected understandings of masculinity, modernity, and public and
private spaces. The editors hope to create a more complex and multifaceted
understanding of masculinity in this crucial period of modernity in
nineteenth-century France.

We encourage and wish to present multiple theoretical frameworks and
perspectives.

Please send a 300-500 word proposal and a CV as electronic attachments in
MS-word to Temma Balducci (tbalducciastate.edu), Heather Belnap Jensen
(heather_jensenbyu.edu), and Pamela Warner (pwarnerumassd.edu)
by April 30, 2007.
Those invited to submit essay manuscripts will be held to a deadline of
September 30, 2007.