Introduction: Men’s Worlds? Hunting for Hegemony

In various cultural and historical contexts, hunting has served as an explicitly gendered social technology by which prevalent norms of masculinity are established and maintained. As a rite of passage, an allegory for warfare and leadership, and a practice associated with dominance and control, the hunt indexes attributes that are often coded as masculine. Because hunting styles are also highly ritualized and regulated, the figure of the hunter-hero tends to embody a culturally sanctioned ideal of masculinity. Hunting is therefore a formative myth in hegemonic discourses of masculinity. To examine cultural manifestations and representations of the hunter is to examine the ubiquitous modalities of masculinity in these cultures. At the same time, the hunt is a quintessentially transgressive practice: hunting is predicated on violence, on entering the wilderness, and on blurring the boundaries between civilization and nature. Despite the normativizing functions of the hunt, these transgressive elements also align hunting with unsettled and liminal masculinities. In order to explore the lasting impact of the cultural and critical associations between hunting and masculinity, this introductory chapter offers a survey of the academic debates that have both consolidated and challenged the unmarked case of the “male hunter.”