Domesticating the Frontier: Gender,Empire and Adventure Landscapes in British Cinema, 1945–59

Before 1945, films of the empire genre, produced in Hollywood as well as Britain, celebrated the masculinity of the British adventure hero, and promoted an imperial world view. This article explores the significance of the incorporation of white women into empire films in the late 1940s and 1950s, focusing on three films from different moments in the period. What are the range of meanings assigned to white femininity in these films, and their significance to the politics of race and gender? How is the white woman represented in relation to colonised women and men? In addressing these questions the article considers shifts in the gendering of the empire genre as part of an attempt to address a range of anxieties – about the transition from empire to Commonwealth, the rise of American power, and the collapse of boundaries between colonisers and colonised.     

"Abortion will deprive you of happiness!": Soviet reproductive politics in the post-Stalin era

This article examines Soviet reproductive politics after the Communist regime legalized abortion in 1955. The regime's new abortion policy did not result in an end to the condemnation of abortion in official discourse. The government instead launched an extensive campaign against abortion. Why did authorities bother legalizing the procedure if they still disapproved of it so strongly? Using archival sources, public health materials, and medical as well as popular journals to investigate the antiabortion campaign, this article argues that the Soviet government sought to regulate gender and sexuality through medical intervention and health "education" rather than prohibition and force in the post-Stalin era. It also explores how the antiabortion public health campaign produced "knowledge" not only about the procedure and its effects, but also about gender and sexuality, subjecting both women and men to new pressures and regulatory norms.     

Moon,mud, and cell phones: geographies of race and construction of difference through normalization

How does the meaning of space emerge and get negotiated when individuals of diverse backgrounds interact with each other? Studies reporting that African Americans tend not to spend time in outdoor space attribute this finding to limited access to resources, cultural values, degree of assimilation to mainstream practices, discrimination in outdoor space, or a perception that outdoor recreational space is “white space”. Little research has addressed how such meanings relate to other meanings attached to outdoor space, let alone how this happens through interactions between people with different views on outdoor space. This article, based on interviews and participant observation of college students on an alternative break trip from the Northeastern U.S. to New Mexico in 2014, shows how students of various backgrounds experienced nature differently, how differences were articulated and explained, and how they subverted normalization processes that render not “being in tune with nature” as deficiency. Suggesting that geographies of race are fluid and influenced by individuals’ agency, this article calls for encouraging students to examine the ways their subject positions have shaped their experiences and challenge cultural bias in what is deemed universally desirable.     

An Historian in the Amazon

However private they may seem, emotions depend for their meanings on the communities in which they are expressed. But if emotions are shaped by and for their communities, how can we account for emotional change? After briefly surveying how historians have (1) defined the communities in which emotions have been expressed and (2) explained how and why emotions have changed, this article turns to the community of the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador. It explores whether anthropological explanations of emotional change in that “test case” may help the historian. The answer is not entirely positive. The article concludes with some thoughts about what sorts of collaborations between historians and anthropologists might be more productive for emotions studies.     

From Partisan Warfare to Memory Battlefields: Two Women's Stories about the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Lithuania

This article explores how women fighters tell their stories in relation to the dominant state narratives about a partisan war. In addition to engaging their individual stories, it explores how they speak, write and act as memory entrepreneurs, creating collective memory about a past that they have experienced instead of allowing others to select actors and events for historical narratives. It argues that memory regimes and gender cultures are intertwined, and that gender cultures are essential in understanding the cultural choices made by memory entrepreneurs in memory making. The article analyses the oral testimonies and written memoirs of two women, Rakhel’ Margolis and Aldona Vilutien? (neé Sabaityt?), who were partisans in Lithuania during the Second World War (Margolis) and its aftermath (Vilutien?) and created the first museums dealing with the Second World War and its legacy in post‐Soviet Lithuania. Read as stories about what it was like to be a woman during a partisan war, the narratives include some common themes: widespread betrayal, the difficult physical conditions that they had to endure as women and the vulnerability that came with these experiences. Read as stories told by memory entrepreneurs, the narratives reveal that the two women acted as mnemonic warriors fighting for competing memory regimes built on opposing gender ideologies.     

Wrinkles in Time: Old Age,Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth-century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.     

Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town

Recent research using coroners' inquests (both the original records and ensuing newspaper reports) has opened the door on the domestic arrangements of the Victorian working classes and the lives of the inhabitants therein, including that of the lodger. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of lodgers in Victorian England's towns and cities resided in private working-class dwellings and, while the census reveals the types of households that took in lodgers, we know little of these lodgers – beyond their age and occupation – or how they were accommodated. This article begins to address this lacuna by bringing the lodger to the forefront of the household. Drawing upon a number of coroners' inquest reports, it explores the lodger and the domestic arrangements of lodgers accommodated in working-class dwellings in the town of Ipswich, asking: (1) What were individuals' reasons for taking up lodgings? (2) What length of time did they spend in lodgings? (3) How and what did they pay for? (4) What was their relationship to those with whom they lodged and what were their daily interactions? and, crucially, (5) How were they accommodated? The findings reveal that the domestic arrangements of lodgers, including where they slept, varied widely. The article demonstrates that we need to reappraise our understanding of the lodger and their place in the home.     

Contested mobilities: gendered migration pressures among Cambodian youth

This paper explores how gender norms and expectations shape the migration decision-making processes of Cambodian young people, in a community characterized by high levels of migration to Thailand. Based on qualitative fieldwork with migrant and nonmigrant youth, I examine how young people make sense of migration and its local alternatives, and highlight the various gendered pressures that young people, and particularly men, experience for migration. Given the lack of local life-making alternatives that neatly conform to hegemonic masculine ideals, young men experience strong pressures for migration and encounter negative social judgments where they seek to stay put. In contrast, young women experience less forceful migration pressures, perceive meaningful alternative life-making projects in the village, and feel more free to actively resist migration. More generally, my findings highlight the importance of interrogating gendered processes of migration not only in terms of how they affect women and those who choose to migrate but also with consideration to how they affect men, and those who choose – or would prefer – to stay home.     

The Right to a Nice Home: housing inspection in 1930s Stockholm

This article deals with how the authorities taught the Swedes to live and how Swedish citizens came to accept such an intimate encroachment in their private lives. Why did people accept these social experts of everyday life? The answer tells us something about modern society and modernity itself.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Stockholm had one of Europe's worst housing conditions, according to Swedish experts of the time. One-room apartments were the norm, even for large families. Not all buildings had running water and often several families shared one outhouse. At the same time, the idea that the home was the place in which the conscientious citizens of the future would be raised was introduced – in Sweden as elsewhere. Dwellings became part of the social question. Many people believed that a well-functioning home would improve other aspects of life as well: men would stay at home in the evening instead of going to pubs; women would do a better job of raising the children; and public health would improve. A neglected home was seen as a sign of the exact opposite; the right to a nice home turned into a duty to live well. As an extension of this idea, housing inspections became important processes in the effort to improve the lives of citizens. The inspections were carried out by municipal employees, who were expected to monitor people's everyday lives. They functioned as housing experts, but what did these social engineers actually do? How did they become housing experts? And was their encroachment into people's daily lives accepted by ordinary citizens?     

Masculinity and domesticity in 1930s South Wales: did unemployment change the domestic division of labour?

This article examines masculinity in an area suffering from sustained high unemployment and unremitting hardship during the 1930s: the South Wales coalfield had some of the highest rates of male unemployment and the lowest participation rates of married women in paid employment in Britain. Particular attention is drawn to power relations between husband and wife by looking at the domestic division of labour and whether male unemployment affected the split in domestic responsibilities. Personal testimonies are used to assess how men filled their time whilst unemployed and the meanings they attached to their activities and relationships. It will be shown that some unemployed men engaged more in the home and that many men were able to maintain existing power relations with their wives by finding or creating alternative manual work and maintaining an elastic relationship with the home by continuing to spend the majority of their time in the company of other men.     

Men who ‘Marry Out’: unsettling masculinity,kinship, and nation through migration across the Taiwan Strait

Family reunification has become a widely recognized means to move across borders in the contemporary world. As a migration strategy, family reunification redefines the relationship of kinship to nation, diversifying the ‘national family’ and its gendered role expectations. This article uses cross-border marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese to interrogate how immigration affects the experiences of men who migrate through or in conjunction with marriage, integrating scales of family, citizenship, and nation in an analysis of migrant masculinity. Migrant husbands describe their disempowerment as male providers and citizens through the patrilineal and patrilocal kinship language of having ‘married out.’ The article examines the salience of this kinship model for immigrant husbands seeking to redefine their relationship to patrilineal gender privileges and secure citizenship status. How do men who migrate through marriage negotiate gendered kinship principles that may work to their benefit in their home country but undermine their status once they migrate? How does the experience of migrating as a kin-dependent threaten men’s self-image as family providers? By investigating these challenges to hegemonic masculinity, the article asks how migration reconfigures the gendered foundations of family formation by undermining kinship-based models of normative masculinity and creating a gender crisis for some migrant husbands.     

Crossing the Factory Frontier: Gender, Place and Power in the Mexican Maquiladora

A pressing question raised by contemporary feminist theorists is how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between women as social agents and "Women"— an ideological representation of a female subject. Scholars have shown how women must often disavow this Woman in trying to establish their own careers. This article explores one facet of this issue by tracing one woman's journey through a Mexican maquiladora in the hope of demonstrating how this ideology produces the capitalist division of labor through the reproduction of sex-difference, nationality, and ethnic categories within one firm. The account raises some interesting questions about resistance, which may not be resolvable in the context of the workplace alone.     

Homeschooled and Self-Cultured: The Gendering of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall

This article examines the gendering of the human mind by nineteenth-century Unitarians and Transcendentalists or, more specifically, the employment of the doctrine of “self-culture” to encourage girls and young women to cultivate traits that would lead themselves and others to gender their intellect “masculine,” even while many proponents of self-culture maintained a traditional understanding of woman's role: as wife and mother and the keeper of house and home. Beholden to nineteenth-century categories of masculinity and femininity, many Unitarian and Transcendentalist men — and women — were ambivalent about the practical results of self-culture for women. How could the people who promoted self-culture and self-reliance as the primary religious duties of the spiritually engaged person show only lukewarm support and occasionally outright opposition for the women who followed such advice? To answer this question, this article examines the early lives and educational experiences of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall, in their own words and through primary and secondary sources that highlight self-culture as a source of both empowerment and enervation. In doing so it tracks how both the process and effects of cultivating the “masculine mind” shaped these women and their respective understandings of what it meant to be whole in their own bodies.     

Gender Bias in China,South Korea and India 1920–1990: Effects of War,Famine and Fertility Decline

How has the history of the twentieth century affected the extent of female disadvantage in child survival in China, South Korea and India, and how has this in turn shaped spousal availability and marriage payments? These three countries have similar kinship systems which generate discrimination against girls, and they show the highest levels of excess female child mortality in the world. This article explores how the extent of excess female child mortality was influenced by historical events in these countries in the period 1920–90, and discusses some of the substantial social ramifications of resulting changes in sex ratios. The authors hypothesize that these changes encouraged the retention of brideprice in China while dowry became the norm in India, and illustrate how these demographic changes have influenced the extent and manifestations of violence against women.     

Social relations on stage: Witnesses in classical Athens

The study of witness testimony raises questions which are fundamental for the student of other cultures, whether past or contemporary. What are the standards expected of a reliable informant and how is reliability to be recognised? How is reliable knowledge about the past established?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of witnesses in classical Athenian lawcourts both for its epistemological implications — what does it tell us about Athenian ideas of ‘expert witnesses’, of reliability, of truthfulness and bias — and for the information it gives us about Athenian society and court practice. What kind of men did Athenian litigants select to act as witnesses for them, and what effect did they hope their witnesses’ testimonies would have on the jury?

If we start out from the assumption of modern courts that witnesses are called to ‘establish the facts of the case’ we shall misunderstand the Athenian data. What witnesses actually testified often was not very important: their testimonies might be insignificant, irrelevant or repetitive. To understand their role it is necessary to see them as minor characters in a drama, whose presence provides the backdrop against which the litigant wishes his own actions and character to be seen. Respectable witnesses — officials, members of the ‘professions’, reputable politicians — establish his own respectability. The support of neighbours, associates and kin shows that those who know the milieu in which the dispute arose are on the litigant's side. Denigration Of the opponent's witnesses, kin and associates presents him as a vicious and unreliable character. In the construction of a character‐portrait in court witnesses had an important role to play.     

Debating Womanhood,Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro

This article demonstrates how both the agency of women of colour and a particular set of ideas about femininity and maternity played an important part in shaping the ending of slavery in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It does so through the prism of untapped municipal documentation, exploring initiatives taken by the city council both to abolish slavery by emancipating mainly women and to shape the city's first generation of fully free working families by founding schools and charitable institutions. In enacting these measures, councillors found themselves debating not only the meanings of freedom, but the meanings of ex‐slave womanhood. Their discussions reflected both the long‐term development of ‘free womb logic’ in Brazilian slavery and emancipation, and tendencies by the 1880s abolitionist movement to make emotive, ‘feminised’ appeals for elite women to sympathise with enslaved mothers. The article explores how women of colour used elite discourses about freedom, maternity and womanhood in order to achieve freedom, but also contested and reshaped them as they sought to bring their own lived meanings to freedom.     

‘Generous Amazons Came to the Breach’: Besieged Women,Agency and Subjectivity during the French Wars of Religion

Gender studies of violence have forced scholars to rethink the association of femininity with ‘vulnerability’ and the objectivisation of women as mute victims of organised violence and oppression, incapable of agency. Recent debates about the role women and homosexuals should play in military systems in the United States and other countries have sparked a renewed interest in exploring historical contexts of the relationships between gender and organised violence. If we consider violence as a performative act, whole new dimensions of gendered aspects of the history of violence and warfare emerge. In this article, I intend to draw on my research on gender, honour, and violence during the French Wars of Religion to explore the roles played by Protestant and Catholic women in southern France during siege operations. These besieged women acted to support their coreligionists by participating in the conflicts as healers, suppliers and even combatants. Besieged women were considered ‘vulnerable’ in sieges, yet their involvement in siege operations challenged contemporary gender stereotypes, threatened social norms and opened new potential cultural possibilities for these women. I hope to show how the discourses on violence, bodies, revolt and religion shaped the tough choices that confronted these women as they participated actively in civil violence. The besieged women in southern France, I believe, are key to understanding the dynamics of gender and warfare and the ways in which women have actively participated in violence – especially in cases of civil violence where the status of the body politic was thrown into question.     

基于后人类思想的国际城市研究：理论溯源与概念辨析

进入二十一世纪以来,以赛博格城市、混合城市、城市政治生态学、集合城市主义为代表的后人类城市研究思想成为揭示当代城市中人类与非人类复杂交织关系的前沿性理论视角。本文在深入探讨上述概念的理论渊源、主要思想观点及其应用进展的基础上,指出后人类城市思想在我国城市研究中的可能方法论意义,即城市分析不能将人类与非人类绝对割裂地看待,而需要将城市中的主体或客体重新定义为人类与非人类的“混杂体”,整合以往分散在自然、工程、社科与人文等不同领域中的观察与分析,拓展人们对城市过程的认知,开创更多的城市研究可能性。     

‘A separate people’? Some directions for comparative research on medieval women

Research to date has often positioned women of minority cultures as a separate group. They were, in many cases, twice removed — both from the men in their communities and from the majority communities within which they lived. This essay discusses the benefits of including these women, both as separate groups and as part of cross cultural comparison and points to the possible contribution of such studies. In the three parts of this article I propose different strategies for studying minority and majority women using examples from the sources on Jews in medieval Europe. In the first section, the article explores how to learn from similarities and differences between majority and minority practices, focusing on wet-nursing practices and medical care. The second part of the article proposes examining how ordinary people themselves perceived the ‘religiousness’ of certain everyday practices and set their own boundaries to what they were and were not willing to do. In this case, I suggest that more attention be paid to the way medieval women (and men) turned daily actions into religious proclamations and how in some cases they involved members of other religions in what seem to be internal affairs. This, in turn, leads to a final, larger comparative question taken up in the final part of the article: how do the larger trajectories of transformations in women's roles and rights compare across different religious cultural traditions.     

Frank Cass THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.