Henpecked Man’s Gender

This book captures queer forms of masculinity in Polish prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – forms that offer an alternative to the model of hegemonic masculinity dominant in patriarchal societies. The eponymous henpecked man figures here as an enigmatic trope of deheroization, the one who dismantles the cult of masculinity through the grotesque, parody, and laughter. Tomasz Kalis´ciak identifies queer masculinities by the following traits: effeminacy, monstrosity, hybridity, homosexuality, anality, and autoimmunity. He examines a wide spectrum of threats to which masculinity was subject over the two centuries and defines it as a biopolitical problem. Kalis´ciak traces variants of masculinity in the works of major Polish writers such as Bolesław Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, along with the lesser-known Stefan Grabin´ski and Christian Skrzyposzek, and two recently rediscovered authors: Zbigniew Grabowski and Czesław Dobek.