Deformity and effeminacy: The corset and competing masculinities of the late Victorian era

The history of male corsetry is a volatile and transient subject rife with masculine moral anxieties, bounded by the competing, yet intersecting, values of state, empire and capitalism. The dandies of the Regency era and the athletes of the late Victorian era turned to the corset to (re)fashion the body, with the spectre of immorality in tow. These men employed the corset as a prosthesis to (re)fashion the body–mind towards a plurality of moral or ‘refined’ morphological, postural, gestural and performative ideals. Through a look into the depictions of the masculine corset and its a/effects on the body–mind preceding and through the late Victorian era, a plurality of masculinities and intercommunity hierarchies of embodi-mindment are uncovered. Inherent to the beliefs and hierarchies of these various masculinities is the rhetoric of ‘deformity’ and ‘effeminacy’. These rhetorics are disciplinary actors used to reaffirm the interconnected powers of patriarchy, capitalism, the state and empire. This analysis will focus on representations of masculinity and the corset in late Victorian mass media advertising and nineteenth-century satire, contrasted with the competing self-representations of dandies through the century. Mass media depictions of the corset, constructed by the capitalist class and the marketing industry, are analysed as representations of the image of White British masculinity that the ruling class wished to impart upon the proletariat/citizenry. These representations are contrasted with the competing (self)-representations of dandies and aesthetes in literature and caricature to uncover the conflictual interconnectedness of dandiacal/aesthetic dress and mass-media representations of martial/muscular masculinities. This article works to recognize the interconnectedness of these milieus, recognizing that the martial/muscular masculine turn towards the corset sees the taking up of previously queered items through a similar implementation of the corset as prosthesis because of its ‘new-found’ ability to affirm British Imperial bodily ideality.