The Military and Edinburgh Society, 1660–1760

Abstract

The most terrible words in all writing used to be ‘There they crucified Him’, but there is a sadder sentence now—‘I know not where they have laid Him’…Surely ‘missing’ is the cruelest word in the language. (Anonymous, To My Unknown Warrior, 1920.)     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.     

“But it's Alright,Ma, it's Life,and Life Only”: Radicalism as Survival

Hunger stole upon me so slowly at first. I was not aware of what hunger really meant [emphasis added]. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger, staring at me gauntly … this hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent … I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think of what was happening to me. ( Wright 1977 )

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Towards a history of emotion, 1562–1660

Abstract

This article examines uses of the word emotion during the seventeenth century, arguing that the term's meaning at this time was in flux. OED gives three principle definitions of emotion, the first as meaning ‘political turmoil or agitation’, the second as meaning literally ‘movement or motion’, and the third as meaning ‘strong feelings or passing’. I argue that a great many uses of emotion during the seventeenth century apply the word in the second sense to the physiological movements of humours. This being so, I suggest that in emotion's seventeenth-century uses it is possible to read a transition in the word's meaning. Through its frequent use with references to humours in motion, the word begins to take on the characteristics which would allow it to develop into meaning ‘feelings or passions’.     

Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists

This article examines the borderlands between transgender MTF (male‐to‐female) and gay male communities in Latina/o Miami through an analysis of the participation of Latinas in the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO). Previous research suggests that Cuban and Cuban American gay male culture have historically been associated with gender transgressive behaviour and identity. Because of this, it is often unclear how to distinguish between what is gay male/homosexual expression and transgender expression. If outward gender manifestations that we now call ‘transgender’ were understood in other historical and cultural contexts as ‘homosexual’, how do we label those manifestations today? By labelling them as homosexual are we simply reinscribing the marginalisation of transgender individuals? On the other hand, by labelling them as transgender are we imposing a contemporary category and therefore performing another kind of intellectual violence? In order to address these questions, I analyse a Latino/a organisation that explicitly labelled itself ‘transsexual’. TAO was an early transsexual rights organisation founded in 1970 by Angela Douglas in Los Angeles which moved to Miami Beach, Florida in 1972. Drawing on the organisation's publications, Moonshadow and Mirage Magazine (1972–75), and Douglas's self‐published autobiographical texts, Triple Jeopardy: The Autobiography of Angela Lynn Douglas (1983) and Hollywood's Obsession (1992), I analyse the rarely discussed participation of Latinas in the organisation.     

The Newer New Life: A.S. Byatt,E. Nesbit and Socialist Subculture

This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.     

Global Gay and Soviet Queen: Polish Transformation and Discourses of Homosexual Gender Variance

The paper discusses the ways in which gender variance of gay, male-bodied persons was positioned within the East/West divide after 1989. The critical media reading is based on gay press columns from the 1990s. While in Polish culture, as in the West, homosexuality was traditionally linked to gender variance, in the 1990s the new gay identity was established as gender-normative — a task much facilitated by the fact that in Poland the development of gay identity was preceded by a medicalized and heteronormative concept of transsexuality. The study shows that gay imagery was highly influenced by the ‘global gay’ capitalist ideal and the ‘chasing the West’ narrative of progress and liberation. After 1989, homosexual gender variance became a taboo that was only discussed in the gay erotic press in satirical columns in which the term ciota was used (queen, auntie). In the columns, cioty were ridiculed and degraded, but also positioned as more authentic and noble. Their femininity was framed in the misogynist discourse of flawed, uncontrollable physiology and emotional instability, which corresponds with the second meaning of the word ‘ciota’ in Polish — menstruation. Ultimately, the change from the Soviet queen to the respectable Western gay was legitimized by the use of nostalgic rhetoric and the fact that ciota was equated with the fallen communist regime and ‘gay’ with blooming capitalism.     

The map drawings of Aegidius Tschudi (1505–1572)

‘On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don't show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only ‘living churches’ we don't show.”

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’

E. F. Schumacher, ‘On philosophical maps,’ A guide for the perplexed (New York, 1977).     

Researching ‘gay Cape Town’ finding value-added queerness

An initiative to market Cape Town as a premier gay and lesbian tourist destination has steadily gathered steam over the last decade. I set out to study this phenomenon thereby adding to conversations about the normalization and globalization of queerness. Rather than straightforwardly presenting my findings, however, this paper considers queer theorizing as an inductive process by detailing the answers I did not find in the field and the questions I did. Based on my close readings of queer theory, I went looking for resistance and therefore queerness in the normalized space of ‘gay Cape Town’. I was disappointed. But I did not instead find outright capitulation. Rather, in this process of queer's commodification, I found anxieties, cracks and fissures beneath a veneer of assured mainstreaming. I found an undetermined process that did not represent either ‘un-African-ness’ or ‘global queer homogeneity’ or ‘African-ness’ and ‘local queer heterogeneity’. I found not an un-queering through commodification, but a queer commodity struggling to gain a foothold in a nation in which the terrain for gay and lesbian politics has drastically changed in such a way that the market cannot be ignored. To grapple with these findings, I argue for a more ambivalent approach to queer theorizing.     

The German Argentines between Nazism and Nationalism: The Patagonia Plot of 1939

Abstract

When seizing control of the US embassy In Tehran in November 1979 during the Iranian revolution, militant students not only took sixty-one US citizens hostage, but also captured thousands of pages of official documents. During the 1980s, they published seventy-seven volumes of selections in order to prove to the world that the United States had colluded with the Pahlavi regime, and to discredit Iranian moderates by revealing their former ties to US officials. In keeping with the militants' perception of the embassy's role in Iran's domestic politics, they entitled the publications Documents from the US Espionage Den (Asnad-i Lanah-yi Jasusi).¹ Surprisingly, among the papers published is one by Harvard University anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer entitled ‘Religion and Progress in Iran’, apparently written for a state department colloquium on Iran held on 25 May 1979. In the introduction, Fischer characterizes the Islamic Republic as a ‘challenge to modernization theory’: ‘Iran has been a major test case for modernization theory throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was the case where the constraint of capital was theoretically removed, and therefore the case where transformation from the third world into the first world was expected to be most feasible.’²     

Queering Beirut,the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: fractal Orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues

In this article, I analyse discourses that have been circulating in a number of Euro-American journalistic articles, gay travelogues and an international gay tour guide since 2005, which present Beirut as a new gay tourist destination. Since representations in gay travelogues often trade in imagined ‘sexual utopias’, promise encounters and the ‘discovery’ of unfamiliar and ‘exotic’ settings with other non-heterosexual men, I explore how both Beirut and the Lebanese are represented and made intelligible. I argue that even though these representations depart from a binary distinction between East/West and Self/Other, they are still premised on Orientalist depictions of both place and people. However, these depictions are complex as they rely on and produce what I call ‘fractal Orientalism’, or ‘Orientalisms within the Orient’, and essentialized, yet relational, understandings of both ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. Hybridity and liminality become central, whereby Beirut is presented as safe but dangerous, and glamorous but war-torn, and the non-heterosexual Lebanese are racialized and represented as sexually available (in private) but discreet (in public). These representations rely heavily on linear narratives of progress, where progress is assessed in terms of ‘tolerant’ attitudes towards homosexuality, the presence of a Western-constituted ‘gay identity’, gay-friendly spaces and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer organizations. Finally, I argue that these depictions, despite attempting to make Beirut and non-heterosexual Lebanese men intelligible, produce monolithic and essentialist understandings of both, which fail to take into account the complexities and intersections of gender, race, class and sexualities.     

Contesting Identity: Politics of gays and lesbians in Toronto in the 1970s: Identidad en Conflicto: políticas de gays y lesbianas en Toronto en los años 1970

This article explores a particular moment in the history of Toronto's gay movement politics when the movements' ideological perspectives on the nature of gay and lesbian identities and associated spaces shifted dramatically from the so-called liberationist stance of the mid-1970s to the so-called ethnic minority approach of the late 1970s. This occurred within the context of a particular series of events that prompted gay activists to rework their conceptualization of gay and lesbian identity in order to be recognized as legitimate participants in certain pivotal, public proceedings. Far from being a well-thought-out and deliberate shift in political strategy, the ‘minority’ argument was, in many ways, a reflexive and unexamined response to unanticipated circumstances. Toronto's gay activists, in representing gays and lesbians as a minority fundamentally altered meanings associated with both gay and lesbian identities and with the spaces dominated or controlled by gay and lesbian interests.

Este artículo explora un momento particular en la historia de las políticas del movimiento de los gays de Toronto cuando sus perspectivas ideológicas sobre la naturaleza de identidades gay y lesbiana y sus espacios respectivos cambiaron dramáticamente, desde la llamada ‘perceptiva liberacionista’ de los mediados de los años setenta hasta la llamada ‘perspectiva de las minorías étnica’ de los últimos años de los setentas. Esta cambio ocurrió dentro del contexto de una serie particular de eventos que incitaron a los activistas gay a revisar sus conceptualizaciónes sobre su identidad gay y lesbiana con el fin de ser reconocidos como participantes legítimos en ciertos procesos públicos. Lejos de ser un cambio bien planeado y deliberado en la estrategia política, el argumento de la ‘minoría’ consistía, de varios maneras, en una repuesta no reflexiva no examinada a circunstancias inesperadas. Los activistas gay de Toronto, al representar a los gays y lesbianas como minorías, alteraron de manera fundamental los significados asociados tanto a las identidades de gays y lesbianas como los espacios dominados o controlados por intereses de gays y lesbianas.     

‘This is disco-wonderland!’ Gender,sexuality and the limits of gay domesticity on The Block

Gay men have been positioned as arbiters of ‘desirable’ domestic style—a domestic imaginary epitomised through their presence as designers and participants on lifestyle television. This paper offers a post-structural critique, examining how the intersections of gender and sexuality shape the contours of, and public responses to, gay domesticity. I scrutinise one telling example: commentaries on the domestic design created by a gay couple on The Block, an Australian lifestyle-reality programme. Applying discourse analysis to the public reception of their design, I argue the acceptability of gay domesticity is proscribed by norms of sexuality and gender, and consequently gay domesticity must be understood in both normatively feminine and masculine terms. While the desirability of gay domesticity reflects a feminisation of gay men, it is also constrained by processes of masculinisation that associate gay men's domestic tastes with Playboy-style bachelor domesticity. Through bachelor domesticity, tropes of partying and seduction undermine traditional feminine homemaking and the heteronormative ideology of home championing privatised nuclear family life. Scrutinising the intersections of gender and sexuality thus reveals limits to gay domesticity, with implications for the cultural politics around mainstream acceptance of gay masculinity: gay men and their homes are welcome when they reinforce heteronormative ideals.     

Das Förderprofil der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft 1949 bis 1969

The DFG, short for ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’ (German Research Foundation), was founded in 1920 and re‐founded after the 2. World War in 1949. This article concentrates on the activities of the DFG in the period between 1949 and the end of the sixties and on the two major programmes (the so‐called ‘Individual Grants Programme’ and the so‐called ‘Priority Programme’) because until now it has not been known, how many — and more importantly — which studies in which disciplines had been financed by the DFG. All together almost 54.000 studies (36.500 in the ‘Individual Grants Programme’ and 17.400 in the ‘Priority Programmes’) were accomplished with the support of the DFG, whereas — in the ‘Individual Grants Programme’ — less than 3.000 proposals were declined (there are no figures for the ‘Priority Programmes’). Till the end of the seventies the whole amount of money allocated for the ‘Individual Grants Programme’ was not fixed for the different disciplines in advance. Consequently every proposal submitted in the ‘Individual Grants Programme’ had to compete against all others for the overall allocated funds. Who — in other words: which of the disciplines — won this competition? The analysis shows a clear result. With regard to both, the number of successful proposals and the money received, the winner was medical science (with 23 percent of all successful proposals in the ‘Individual Grants Programme’). Chemistry finished second with 15 percent and then biology a distant third (9 percent), followed by physics (8 percent) and agronomy (8 percent). Coming to the ‘Priority Programmes’, which were instituted in the middle of the 1950s, it must first be stated that here the topic is fixed in advance. The broad issue of investigation is devised by the DFG itself or — to be more precise — by the Senate of the DFG. In contrast to the ‘Individual Grants Programme’ the ‘Priority Programme’ can therefore be seen as an important instrument of the politics of research support. This leads to the following question: Which programmes did the DFG establish between 1954 and 1969? In other words: Which research topics or fields were, in the view of the DFG, the most important ones? The database again shows a clear result. Almost 50 percent of the money distributed overall and more than 50 percent of all programmes were benefitted to natural science, another fifth part to engineering technology (which didn't play an important role in the ‘Individual Grants Programme’). Medical science which was the most successful discipline in the ‘Individual Grants Programme’ received 16 percent of the funds. With regard to — first — the number of successful proposals within a Programme, — second — to the money received and — third — to the duration there were three frontrunner programmes: nourishment research, research on water and hydraulic engineering, and aeronautical research. And the humanities? The DFG didn't grant much relief giving only 7 percent to these disciplines.     

Country report: The ambiguities of social and cultural geography in Greece

This paper contributes to debates on the empirical and conceptual potentials of anti-essentializing notions such as ‘thirdspace’ with the aim to open new epistemological and political grounds. Based on the findings of ethnographic research, I critically examine two spatial strategies (the deliberate creation of an ethnic neighbourhood, and the securing of a community centre) that Latin American immigrants in Toronto, Canada, developed to appropriate urban space and lay claims to equal rights. The case of Latin Americans' struggle for belonging in Toronto serves to reflect on how and why new immigrant groups today (re)construct collective identity spatially. I argue that immigrants strategically essentialize their identities in and through place in order to make themselves visible and their voices heard. Ethnic places represent sites of resistance and creation where immigrants construct their own subjectivities while also redefining dominant notions of inclusion and citizenship. Although locally grounded, these new immigrant identities remain fluid and engage with multiple forms of exclusion

[The] situation is simply sad; the [Latin American] community … is one of the most orphan communities … in [Toronto] … [We] don't even have a place where to dig our own grave basically. If there is need to get together … a meeting … there is no place. We have to be looking for a basement … for a recreational centre to give us a room … If there is a social or cultural event, we do not have a place where … we can present what we have … [It] is sad and it is a reality. (Cesar Palacio, city councillor candidate to Toronto's 2003 municipal elections, interview, 2 May 2003, translated from Spanish)     

‘Why can’t they meet in bars and clubs like normal people?’: the protective state and bioregulating gay public sex spaces

State regulation of gay public sex spaces (PSS) has prompted geographers to assess the influence that localised legalities exert in specific micro-spaces of interaction, and to expand this research into cities not considered to be archetypically ‘gay friendly’. Through the lens of Foucault’s governmentality, it is important to consider state-directed bioregulatory influences upon toilets and parks as PSS. Such bioregulation, with its aim of producing a ‘healthy’ sexual population, seeks to expose public sex as ‘dangerous’, encouraging a policing of PSS and the men who use them. Part of this bioregulation also enlists men using PSS as responsible for peer surveillance to ensure anonymity and privacy in PSS. This auto-surveillance develops a ‘common code of conduct’ leading these men to develop their own modes of ‘normativity’ within these hetero-challenging spaces. By consulting with men who use PSS, I unearth oral histories of how changing laws, policy and ‘mainstream’ attitudes towards PSS in Glasgow, Scotland, have impacted upon cruising and cottaging. This paper will provide a place-specific reading of gay urban sexscapes, exploring how state bioregulation encourages the creation of new gay practices, identities and geographies.     

‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.     

Sight and Sound on the Western Front: Surveyors,Scientists, and the ‘Battlefield Laboratory’, 1915–1918

Abstract

The Japanese were a race who considered themselves to possess a mission in the world, and were a military race from beginning to end. In a comparatively short space of time Japan had brought three wars to a successful conclusion.

Admiral Earl Beatty, First Sea Lord (1919–1927), 3 July 1925

it is on record that one young samurai… was so convinced at first that bravery by itself was sufficient to overcome the power of the western ‘barbarians’, that he swam out to Perry's flag-ship with his sword in his teeth, intending to fight the whole ship's company single-handed. This man was Yamagata, who died but recently.

Captain M.D. Kennedy, Military Language Officer in Japan (1917–1920), 1928