Cylchgronau Cymru

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1. BOYS FROM NOWHERE: FINDING WELSH MEN AND PUTTING THEM IN THEIR PLACE Jonathan Scourfield and Marh Drakeford Tom Jones is a Welsh man. The argument of this paper is that we need to think harder about what that means. He may have lived in California for many years, but his Welshness, his masculinity, and the intersection of these as his Welsh masculinity are significant both to his construction of his own identity and his public representation by the media. He was brought up and went to school in Pontypridd. It was whilst living in south Wales that he got married, had a son, contracted tuberculosis, worked on a building site, started to sing in clubs, and was, no doubt, described for the first time as having 'sex appeal'. Amongst other things he needs to be understood as a man and as Welsh. This is not at all to say that there is some kind of overriding essence of Welshness or of being a man in Wales. On the contrary, it is to locate the social process of learning to be a man in a specific cultural and geographical context. It is to assume that masculinity and Welshness are socially constructed and are contingent on a range of mediating factors. This paper is not about Tom Jones, but about a variety of Welsh men. It is about discovering the 'man' in 'Welshman' and discovering how masculinity can be local. At the same time, it considers the way in which social and local factors may cohere, through history, culture, politics and language, to provide connections that may transcend the simply local and contribute to an understanding of Welshness. 'WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT?') There is now a growing body of feminist literature on women in Wales, past and present. Some notable examples are the work of Deirdre Beddoe (1981, 1986) and the themed collections of John (1991), Aaron (1994) and Betts