The Essential Body: Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Gendered Body

Linguistic, art historical, hermeneutic, gender and intercultural analyses clarify body and gender concepts in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, literature and visual arts. The body was a fundamental point of reference in ancient Mesopotamia, metaphor for the total self, royal ideology, cities, humanity and deities. Humanity was created without gender; sex, gender and social status were subsequently inscribed on the body. Gender taxonomy tolerated ambiguity beyond the ‘normative’ masculine/feminine. Body and mind were an inseparable unity and denoted by the same Sumerian word. Mind/body and male/female dichotomy were unknown.     

Complicating hetero-normative spaces at school formals in New Zealand

The school formal in New Zealand constitutes a rich site of analysis for researchers interested in gender and sexuality performances. As a social space, the formal both shapes bodies and is shaped by them. In this article, we explore the school formals of three different types of schools: a single sex girls’, a single sex boys’ and a co-ed. high school, all from an urban centre. Using the theoretical tools provided by poststructuralism and queer theory, we conducted a discourse analysis of observations conducted by the first author at two school formals, interviews with staff and students and interviews with peer researchers. We demonstrate how same-sex practices do not necessarily map onto queer bodies, masculinity onto ‘male’ bodies or femininity onto ‘female’ bodies. Such fluidity challenges the rigid heterosexual/homosexual and masculine/feminine binaries so that schools are more inclusive of gender and sexual diversity.     

Friedrich Sunder and the boundaries of gender

The article explores the gendered imaginary in the Gnadenleben of Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328) and the formation of clerical masculinity in the context of feminine devotional life. Friedrich Sunder worked as a convent chaplain for a Dominican female community and lived within the convent's area. In his book Sunder employs language, images and devotional practices that can be considered in medieval culture to have been feminine. Almost simultaneously, however, he applied masculine roles and emphasised his own manliness. Although Sunder accepted female forms of religiosity and wrote on practices that were considered especially suitable for women, at the same time his priestly masculinity was defined by the physical boundary the cloister created between the enclosed feminine religiosity and that of a pastoral masculine priesthood. His discussion of gender within the mystical frame defined the boundaries of his own masculinity in the web of different traditions of both the proper way of life and the gendered nature of religious practices.     

‘A Remarkably Patterned Life’: Domestic and Public in the Aztec Household City

This article argues that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan should be understood as a ‘household’, a structure that gave powerful significance to binary gendered ideologies at every level of city organisation. Male and female roles were configured around ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ spheres, but these concepts were perceived in a broader and more flexible way than traditional public/private dichotomies suggest and might helpfully be understood in political terms as distinguishing between exterior/foreign and interior/domestic realms. Building on understandings of parallelism and complementarity, the article demonstrates that gendered pairings, based on distinctive masculine/public and feminine/domestic spheres, mirrored the household not only in social, economic and political contexts, but also in religious settings, providing space for both male and female power at every level of urban life. Just as a married couple provided the basis to a successful and productive home, so the parallel responsibilities of men and women, structured according to concepts of ‘household’ and reflected throughout the institutions and activities of the city, were believed to form the foundations of a thriving Aztec city.     

Border guarding and the politics of the body: an examination of the Finnish Border Guard service

In previous studies, the question of the state control over the bodies of people at border-crossing points has been of great interest, while less attention has been given to the bodies that carry out border surveillance and control. This article introduces a new perspective on the study of the state and gender by examining the imaginations and rationalities of state border guarding and the politics of the body in the Finnish Border Guard (FBG) service. By taking the body politics and gendered relations of border guarding as an analytical starting point, this study takes a step forward toward ‘feminizing’ the study of borders and border securitization. The article scrutinizes the depictions, articulations, and conceptualizations of the work competence in border guarding and the performances of female border guards in the official media of the FBG organization, as well as discusses how the interrelations of border guarding and body politics become structured around questions concerning masculine romantics, the (in)capacities of female officers and the embodied nature of border monitoring. The study shows the pervasive, and also controversial, nature of gendered imaginations and rationalities in the domain of border guarding in contemporary societies.     

Women’s Costume and Feminine Civic Morality in Augustan Rome

Augustus claimed that the moral decay of the Roman Republic was especially due to Roman women who had forsaken their traditional role of custos domi (‘preserver of the house/hold’). In reforming feminine morality, Augustus created a new pictorial language that troped the feminine body as a ‘moral sign’ of civic morality and authorized a distinctive costume for women. Sebesta investigates the relationship between women’s garments, the female body and the Roman concept of feminine civic morality.     

Masculine Old Women or Feminine Old Men? Rethinking Gender and the Ageing Body in Early Modern English Medicine

This article challenges the almost universal historiographical claim that women's bodies were thought to become increasingly masculine as they aged in early modern English medicine, especially after menopause. It is not surprising that this ‘masculinisation hypothesis’ has endured with very little critical appraisal, as there have been few in-depth studies into medical conceptions of ageing womanhood. Drawing on c.140 English vernacular medical and popular health texts published between 1570 and 1730, this article interrogates and refutes key claims for the corporeal ‘manliness’ of old women. Instead, it argues that while medicine undoubtedly depicted old women and men as growing closer in bodily constitution as they aged, this generic ageing constitution had more ‘feminine’ corporeal attributes than ‘masculine’. Exploring references to ‘effeminated’ old men within medical books, it then questions the impact of these medical gender associations within wider cultural contexts.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

A New Approach to Ezekiel 23,20

Scholars during the years have noted that Ezek. 23,20 is the only passage in the OT in which pi¯lεgε? appears as a masculine noun with masculine reference. The author of this essay, while using mainly linguistic approach, proves that these scholars were not correct, and that pi¯lεgε? in Ezek 23,20 is a feminine noun with feminine meaning like in all other appearances in the OT.     

(De)queering Hatshepsut: Binary Bind in Archaeology of Egypt and Kingship Beyond the Corporeal

The representations of Egyptian female king Hatshepsut are, as a consequence of a binary heteronormative sex/gender bind, continuously queered in scholarship. Statements on her body and identity are often made by directly equating her representations with the corporeal. This paper offers a critique of the heteronormative interpretations of Hatshepsut, which often identify her as a cross-dresser, gender-bender or “woman with a beard.” An alternative approach will be attempted with the discussion of her imagery in the context of queer and Actor Network theoretical encounters. This paper argues that the binary bind of the sex/gender system can be traversed through a complex network of actants, including bodies, ancestors, relatives, gods, and material culture.     

Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method

In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender history's analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open‐ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender history's foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the discipline's most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.     

A View of Their Own: Women's Committee Leadership Styles and State Legislatures

Analysis of survey data from 291 state legislative committee chairs suggests that professionalization has important gender implications not previously explored. Legislatures are gendered in the sense that culturally masculine and feminine committee management styles are more at home in some legislatures than in others. "Citizen" legislatures seem to be more hospitable to "feminine" behaviors of inclusion and a motivation focused on people-oriented concerns. Professionalized legislatures–promoted in large part on the basis of a masculine vocabulary of independence, rationality, expertise, and competition with the executive–discourage inclusive or collegial committee strategies and public-minded motives. Professional legislatures may be positive environments in which to nurture policy leadership, but their committee leaders eschew public participation.     

Octavia Hill Women Housing Managers in South Africa: femininity and urban government

Women trained in a system of housing management developed by Octavia Hill in Victorian England were employed in South Africa's Coloured and European townships from the mid-1930s. They were also involved in training South African women in this tradition which emphasized the mutual responsibilities of landlords and tenants and rested upon the formation of trusting relationships or friendships between women housing managers and the tenants. Octavia Hill's followers worked hard to make a place for women in the field of housing management and claimed that their femininity gave them special expertise in this area, especially in terms of training housewives in domestic skills and in building up the relations of trust required by Octavia Hill's system. This paper describes the implementation of this system of management in South Africa and considers the implications of the role of women in housing management for our thinking about the gendered character of the state. My main argument is that rather than being a precedent for the value of incorporating femininity and women into the state, Octavia Hill's management tradition had already incorporated both historically masculine and historically feminine practices. In so far as she and her followers (and perhaps other female reformers) played a role in shaping the nature of the state, then it could be argued the state reflected a mediation of masculinity and femininity rather than a dominant masculinity and a subordinated or segregated femininity.     

试论《山音》中的处女崇拜

川端康成晚年的代表作《山音》仍然表现出“处女性”崇拜这一主题。信吾精神饥渴和委顿,内心充溢着怅惘、空虚、失落、孤独和死亡的哀怨与恐惧,他希望获得解脱,希望得到精神的救赎。他在寻求一种精神上的归宿,寻找一种救赎的精神力量。信吾潜意识中所期待的能使之获得救赎的力量是通过女性来体现的,他探寻的目标也具体化为女性,尤其是女性美。以信吾为代表的男性形象在这种“处女”的爱中汲取无限的生命力量。川端康成作品中对“处女性”的崇拜也是一种对生命的憧憬。对“处女性”的崇拜源于川端康成的孤儿根性。也是作者对自己孤儿根性的一种解脱和拯救。     

The Gender of Militancy: Notes on the Possibilities of a Different History of Political Action

Departing from some texts that examine women's participation in clandestine organisations in Brazil and Argentina during the 1960s and 1970s, the author discusses possibilities of a different approach towards the historiography of political action, particularly focusing on left-wing parties. Oral history contributes towards recovering subjectivity, a dimension little explored in political historiography. This dimension is usually confined to a private sphere that appears as radically severed from the public sphere. The articulation of these two spaces as well as tensions, conflicts and complementarities between masculine and feminine roles take the history of women away from the ghetto, allowing this new perspective to analyse political action in a complex way     

Nationalism,Sports and Gender in Finnish Sports Journalism in the Early Twentieth Century

The aim of this article is to examine through Olympic sports journalism the connections between sports, gender, nation and class in Finland during the period before the Second World War. The relationship between sports and the nationalist project has always been strong in Finland, and it is often considered that the Finns were the first nation to exploit sports for political purposes in such a consistent way. The attention here is focused on gender and class, since these were the two most significant dividing factors in Finnish sports at the turn of the twentieth century. The article concludes that the idea of a Finnish national character can be seen as a gender-specific narrative, as the image of the Finn has been built on masculine determinants and the male sphere of life. This is proved by the fact that women are not required, or sometimes even allowed, to follow national stereotypes and characteristics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sports journalists were nevertheless obliged to conceptualise Finnish women as well through nationalist thinking. This was achieved by contrasting them with foreign women: the 'Other' women functioned as a sexualised background against which it was possible to depict the activities of Finland's own female athletes as pure, feminine, decent and respectable.     

Identity,Gender, and the History of European Nations and Nationalisms

Abstract. The distinction between cultural and political nationalisms has become a commonplace in writings on nations and nationalism. In this article I analyse the relation of culture to politics in the history of modem European nationalist thought from a gender perspective. I argue that gendered forms of national identification and masculinist definitions of the body politic and the national citizen were mutually reinforcing. The article has three main sections. First, I draw on feminist historio–graphy to show that the central event of modem European nationalism, the French Revolution, involved a differentiation of masculine from feminine forms of national citizenship. Second, I use nineteenth-century sources to argue that the ‘separation of spheres’ and an image of the bourgeois family effectively diminished the role of women in relation to the nation. In the final section I show that the history of changing perceptions of the sexed human body is implicit in the imagining of national communities and in the political legitimation of national boundaries and national identities.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.