Benevolent Fathers and Virile Brothers: Metaphors of Kinship and the Construction of Masculinity and Age in the Nineteenth-Century Belgian Army

This article traces the evolution of different discourses of masculinity in the nineteenth century Belgian army. It highlights specifically the way in which officers and men used concepts such as fatherliness, brotherhood, youthfulness, filial duty and other kinship metaphors to express their gendered identities and their mutual relationships within an all-male community. Despite their continued reliance on these metaphors, the ways in which the language of age and kinship was deployed in the army changed throughout the century, and most notably around 1880. As the army became 'modern', its so... Mehr ...