‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

Poverty,Dependence and ‘Women’: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand

This essay explores the construction of ‘women’ in New Zealand during the 1930s, when the social legislation of the First Labour Government was being formulated and enacted. It examines the documentation produced by the legislative process in relation to the autobiographical texts of John A. Lee and Mary Isabella Lee, arguing that there are parallel conflicts in each set of texts. There is a series of double movements: the offer of the state’s protection to women is at the same moment a gesture of defence; ‘women’ are simultaneously constructed as ‘helpless’ and—not so overtly—as needing to be controlled.     

‘He Likes Women More Than He Likes Drink and That Is Quite Unusual’: Working-Class Social Clubs,Male Culture,and Heterosocial Relations in the United States, 1920s–1930s

Throughout the early twentieth century working-class men spent much of their leisure time in their basement hangouts, known as social clubs. Social clubs usually formed out of the associational life of young working-class men and remained attached to a larger male culture. But they were also used for dances and other heterosocial interaction. This essay examines the organisation of these clubs and how members used them to negotiate homosocial and heterosocial leisure. In particular, it explores the struggles between men and women over the use of club space and how those struggles affected their relationships and male culture.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.     

NRM Regions in Australia: the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’

This paper identifies external factors affecting the capacity of Australia's now‐formalised 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies and their community‐based Boards to meet planning and management responsibilities. It demonstrates that little is known about the basic capacity‐related characteristics of NRM regions, despite the lengthy and elaborate process of regionalism that Australia has embarked upon, with its associated and substantial devolution of responsibilities and resources. A suite of indicators is used to develop an ‘exploratory’ capacity typology of NRM regions. The ten regional ‘types’ identified are found to attract varying budget allocations under the Natural Heritage Trust Extension and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. There are indications that State and regional interests within and outside NRM can significantly influence the distribution of resources. An examination of resources allocated to capacity‐building activities shows significant differences between regions in the scale of resources allocated (0–96% of total budget). The paper argues the case for intervention to reduce the gap between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ regions, and for further exploration of disparities in the allocation of resources to capacity‐building activities. Clarification is needed of the extent to which capacity‐building activities adequately target regional NRM bodies and their Boards.     

''These Untutored Masses'': The Campaign for Respectability Among White and Black Evangelicals in the American South, 1870–1930

In the post-Civil War American South, leaders of both white and black denominations sought to root out southern 'folk' religious practices from their churches. Denominational modernizers preached the middle-class virtues necessary to the building of a new southern social order: piety, sobriety and the systematic accumulation of wealth. They built bureaucracies of benevolence and conceived of 'intelligent worship' as a means of schooling their 'untutored masses' in the ways of bourgeois religiosity. In response, white and black believers, predominantly small farmers and sharecroppers with limited educations, adopted certain forms suggested by the advocates of respectable religion while also maintaining publicly emotive and physically tactile expressions of southern religiosity derived both from the camp-meeting past as well as African-derived rituals of worship. By focusing on worship practices and musical styles, this article illuminates an episode in the dialectic of traditional spirituality and bourgeois decorum in a region in, but not fully of, America.     

Anthropology, ‘Native Schooling’ and Maori: the Politics of ‘Cultural Adaptation’ Policies

This paper examines three policies of ‘cultural adaptation’ formulated in colonial contexts in the 1920s and 1930s — that of the British Colonial Office for education in Africa, that of the New Zealand Native Schools and that of Maori leaders. While clearly inter-related, these policies were developed and promoted by their respective proponents to serve widely different political goals. Particularly significant is the role played by anthropology in that context. Proponents of all three policies looked to anthropologists for insights and scientific validation of their political agendas. Anthropologists, in turn, not only accepted this role but, particularly in the case of the British Colonial education policy, actively claimed it, involving themselves in the processes of colonial control.     

Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Property in Ghana

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the agency of people who have something at stake. Laws, rules and by‐laws are referred to as important markers and fashion the local political struggles over the rights to and control over resources. This article offers a general account of conflicts and the recategorization of resources in the property system of small‐scale irrigation. It examines the logics and positioning of the different stakeholders, and discusses how different levels of public policy have provided opportunities for such changes. A case study presents the opportunity to examine the details of a particular controversy demonstrating the social and political powers involved in the recategorization of property.     

On the origins of the name for the ‘Black Sea’

The name ‘Black Sea’ is widely attributed to the Anatolian Turks, due to their habit of referring to the South as ‘white’ and North as ‘black’. However, the appellation first appeared in a Hungarian document and later in sources originating further to the North, including Icelandic sagas and other Nordic narratives. The Turks themselves have a small and secondary role in using and spreading the name. Some scholars have suggested that the Cumans, a Turkic people once occupying regions to the North of the Black Sea, are the likely source. However, in medieval times Khazarian traditions seem to have used the term ‘Black Sea’ as well as ‘Great Sea’, though the relationships between the two terms require clarification. This essay seeks to reconcile these two traditions, and offers a conjectural Bulgar source for the Black Sea denomination.