Introduction: Hunting Animals and Doing Gender in Historical Perspective

This chapter discusses the role of hunting practices for performing gender in a historical perspective. It argues that a praxeological approach can help to question essentialist interpretations of hunting and gender. In premodern Eurasia, numerous hunting practices coexisted, which emphasized—or counteracted—certain gender roles. In the context of the early modern court society, the participation of women in princely hunts was largely due to the hunt’s function in representing status. Differences between men and women, but also between different forms of masculinity and femininity, could be made visible through clothing, riding styles, and actions during the hunt without determining participation itself. Moreover, the choice of certain animals as hunting assistants or prey also could express gender or status. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both hunting and gender roles became increasingly naturalized and bourgeoisified, which led to women’s exclusion from the hunting grounds. While in the emerging European nation-states hunting served the purpose of doing masculinity across all classes, it also served as a means of power and suppression in the expanding colonial empires.