"When in doubt do gender": Constructing Masculinities in "Penelope," "theyre all Buttons men"

© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Though I mostly avoided using the term “gender” in this book, a central aspect of the research (especially in Chapter IV, pp. 89–125) was an attempt to see Joyce’s work, through the record of his reading, in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century discussions of gender, and to explore the working in such contexts of Joyce’s often elaborate and deliberate constructions of gender difference and perspective as well as his equally distinctive and playful transgressions and subversions of gender difference in the texts. “When in doubt do gender”: Constructing Masculinities in “Penelope,” “theyre all Buttons men”