Shandean Masculinities: Reading Gender and Sexuality in Tristram Shandy

ABSTRACT Masculinity remains a well-established site of contestation in eighteenth-century British literature. In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a sense of phallic loss places masculinity in crisis. The novel calls into question the futurity of its male subjects. Using queer theory, this essay takes the uncertainty about Tristram’s patrilineal heritage as its point of departure to examine the ways in which Walter and Tristram perform masculinity in the novel. I demonstrate that Walter’s monthly documentation of sexual intercourse alongside Tristram’s aversion to female bodies reveals their inadequacy as heterosexual male subjects. Read this way, Walter’s and Tristram’s respective performances of masculinity in Tristram Shandy are, I argue, queer facades masking their inadequacy. The underlying challenge to normative logics of gender and gender behaviour lays the foundations for what I call masculinities in eighteenth-century narratives of masculinity.