Speech,Gender and Power: Beyond Testimony

This article aims to unsettle some taken‐for‐granted ideas about speech and power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication, and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.     

The Power of Persuasion in Propaganda: The Taiping Three Characters Classic

Taiping leaders were adept at using material from traditional Chinese sources and Western Protestant writings. The Taiping Three Character Classic, or Sanzijing (SZJ) exemplifies the Taipings’ skillful adaptation of a pre-existing popular text in order to propagate its religious doctrine and political ideology. The traditional SZJ featured an appealing style and imparted Neo-Confucian values to readers. The style of traditional SZJ contained a unique pattern that was kept in latter adaptations, while the text’s content was modified to suit new realities. The Taiping SZJ followed the structure of the traditional SZJ, but it provided its own historical ideas and utopian visions, which differed from Christian Millennialism. The Taiping utopian vision was not about the future, but about a return to the period of the “the three dynasties” in Chinese history, an approach also used by Confucian intellectuals. The persuasive power in Taiping propaganda text lies in Taiping’s exploitation of Chinese and Western resources, especially in utilizing existing concepts, popular texts and cultural patterns.     

Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development

Gender and development has grown enormously as a field over the last thirty years. In this introduction, we interrogate the ambivalence that underpins feminist engagement with development and examine what current dilemmas may suggest about the relationship between feminist knowledge and development practice. In recent years, there has been growing frustration with the simplistic slogans that have come to characterize much gender and development talk, and with the gap between professed intention and actual practice in policies and programmes. Questions are now being asked about what has become of ‘gender’ in development. This collection brings together critical reflections on some ideas about gender that have become especially resonant in development narratives, particularly those that entail popularization and the deployment of iconic images of women. This introduction explores more closely the issues raised by such myth‐making, arguing that these myths stem from exigencies within the politics and practices of development bureaucracies, within the difficult politics of feminist engagement with development policy and practice and within feminist politics itself.     

Gender,Memory and Social Power

Two books are reviewed here, the first, by a historian of western Europe, Elisabeth van Houts, the second by a Byzantinist, Lynda Garland. Aspects of van Houts's book discussed are: the complementary roles of women and men in the production of historical writing; the role of women in the transmission of oral testimony, especially on genealogies and on property rights claimed through women; and the gender‐specificity of women's transmission of valued objects. The book's contributions to the history of the family are stressed. Lynda Garland's treatment of a series of Byzantine empresses is appreciated as informative, but criticised for lack of reference to historiography on medieval female rulership in western Europe, and insufficient analysis of structural features of the Byzantine polity. A brief conclusion reflects on gender and power in early medieval east and west.     

The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape,Race and Gender in 1950s America

Dating among white American teenagers in the 1950s caused parents considerable concern, as it represented disturbing developments in sexual expectations. While the rhetoric surrounding marriage celebrated traditional gender roles and monogamy, Americans bemoaned social and moral decay, caused in part by women's encroachment on male prerogatives. Sexual experience for boys increasingly became a defining gender characteristic and a means of achieving manhood as well. Ideas about proper marital norms and studies of dating practices among young people naturalised male aggression as proof of masculinity, which made girls, even ‘respectable ones’, vulnerable to violence from their dates. As teens' acceptance of going steady became more widespread, older racialised narratives of sexual danger evolved to incorporate new dating trends. Whereas American, and especially southern white, women knew the dangers of the supposed ‘black beast rapist’, they learnt during the 1950s that a special danger could confront them in the back seat of cars, despite the presence of their white, male date. Even with a white protector, white women remained vulnerable to violence on dates, whether from black men or from their white date. As dating conventions loosened, white women found that that the perils of the back seat only increased.     

近代早期英国家庭中的性别关系

家庭是形成性别关系最小的基本单位,在近代早期,英国社会中的性别关系在家庭中得到明显的体现。结婚后,丈夫和妻子为了建立一个独立的新家而共同协作,劳动的性别分工基本遵循男主外、女主内的模式,各个阶层的妇女都要为家庭经济作贡献,但这并没有改变其地位卑微的状况,“男尊女卑”、“男主女从”仍然是这一时期家庭中的常态。     

The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.     

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.