The Volatility of Sex: Intersexuality,Gender and Clinical Practice in the 1950s

The term ‘gender role’ was coined at Johns Hopkins's paediatric endocrinology clinic in the 1950s, where Dr Lawson Wilkins and psychologist John Money diagnosed, treated and evaluated intersexual children, most of them suffering from a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Going beyond existing discourses on the medicalisation of intersexuality, I reframe the emergence of gender as an element in the development of a specific medical treatment for an endocrinological condition and excavate the complex and contingent historical factors that led to the formulation of gender role in the Hopkins context. Using previously unavailable patient records from the clinic, this article follows the patients through their medical encounters and describes the process of normalisation around the diagnosis, treatment and management of CAH. By paying specific attention to the practices at the clinic, I show that diagnosing a child's sex often depended on the physicians’ skill, experience and techniques. Correct gender role was folded into the management of CAH as one aspect of successful treatment. Normalisation was a process, in which treating somatic effects and assuring psychological healthiness were deeply enmeshed in the conviction that a normal life would only be possible as a clearly gendered and sexed person.     

Race and Gender in the United States of America

Books reviewed in this article: Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol Ann D. Gordon (ed.), The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti‐Slavery 1840‐1866 Ann D. Gordon with Bettye Collier‐Thomas, John H. Bracey, ArleneVoski Avakian and Joyce Avrech Berkman (eds), African AmericanWomen and the Vote 1837‐1965     

Cancer, quackery and the vernacular meanings of hope in 1950s America

Hope was central to cancer control in twentieth-century America. Physicians placed great store in its power to persuade people to seek medical help as early as possible in the development of the disease, when it was most amenable to treatment; to maintain patients' loyalty through what could be a long, painful and uncertain course of therapy; and to encourage doubts about alternative healers. Some also argued that hope could have beneficial therapeutic and psychological effects for patients. However, we know very little about its meanings for the public. Focusing on a large collection of letters written to the Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s concerning an anti-quackery campaign, this article explores how men and women responded to the competing messages of hope promoted by orthodox cancer organizations and by alternative healers. It asks: What did hope mean to such men and women? How did they construct this meaning? How did they decide which treatments were hopeful and which were not? And, how did they use hope to imagine the social world of cancer? In short, this article explores the vernacular meanings, epistemologies, and imaginative uses of hope among Americans in the mid-twentieth century.     

Gender,Race, and Rumours: Re-examining the 1943 Race Riots

Focusing on three riots of the World War II era – those of Beaumont (Texas), Detroit, and New York's Harlem – this essay examines the rumours that sparked these disturbances to uncover the gendered ideologies that underlie racial violence. In these rumour narratives, women appear as either rape victims or tortured mothers, while men appear as either depraved rapists or noble protectors. The deployment of these images helped forge a defensive collective identity that facilitated the outbreak of violence. Because racial and gender ideologies were intimately linked, the author argues, race riots must be analysed through the lens of gender in order to be fully understood.     

Re-analysing the Baining: The Mytho-Poetics of Race,Gender and Art

This article criticises primitivist caricatures of the Baining in Melanesia as a society that lacks exegesis, symbolic logics, religion, structures of power and control, and even an interest in play. The mytho-poetics of gender and procreation in Mali Baining society are documented by focusing on how art and sexuality are traced onto each other. The formative power of painting, barkcloth, dancing masks, netbags and music are merged with the formative power of women. Art and sexuality are made to inform each other's generative potential, and even each other's aesthetic charm. These fertile mytho-poetic practices also underpin Mali political practices. Mali indigenous identity is celebrated as local control over the original powers of creation, which continue to reside in the earth, in the local landscape and, above all, in that which underpins all creation, women's procreative bodies with their creative potential to bring forth something new. The Mali localise creative processes so as to empower and revalue themselves within a culture of resistance to the hegemony of colonialism, modernity, settlers and regional ethnic elites.     

20世纪50年代美国对拉美的经济援助外交

第二次世界大战后,美国为同苏联争夺第三世界国家实施了第四点计划。通过对20世纪50年代美国在拉美开展经济援助外交进行历史的纵深考察后可以看出,美国从自身国家安全、繁荣等国家利益出发,将拉美视为其"战略资源库"和"传统盟友",加以严密掌控。但是,这一时期美国对拉美经济援助的重视程度与美苏两国对抗和争夺的激烈程度相关联,服从于美苏争霸的总体战略需要。而援助双方基于国家利益的深刻矛盾,是导致此期美国对拉美经济援助外交失败的根本原因。     

Ida Vera Simonton's Imperial Masquerades: Intersections of Gender,Race and African Expertise in Progressive‐Era America

Ida Vera Simonton, a New York socialite, visited the French colony of Gabon in 1906 and 1907. Her subsequent narratives about her stay demonstrate a very ambiguous view of the horrors of European colonialism that she claimed to despise and the amoral nature of Africans. Simonton ultimately employed her stay in Gabon to claim a right to form female self‐defence squads in New York and to act as an independent defender of white women. By carefully shaping her public persona to alternately appropriate discourses of masculine regeneration through empire and to highlight her female vulnerability, she made herself into a provocative spectacle. In an ironic twist, given how much Simonton embellished on her own experiences, Broadway producers in 1925 plagiarised her 1912 novel Hell's Playground in their successful play White Cargo. Simonton successfully sued for damages, thus upholding her highly edited version of her trip in law. Her writings expose the intersections of racial anxieties, gendered visions of empire and feminist aspirations in the United States during the Progressive era.     

Race,Gender, and Communications in Natural Disasters

We examine public attitudes toward vulnerability and evacuation in hurricane natural disasters. Using the results of an opinion survey in a coastal, New England state, we find important differences in how men and women, and Whites and minorities perceive natural disasters. Race, gender, and geographic proximity to the coast affect how vulnerable people believe their residence is to a major hurricane, while government officials and media reporting telling people to evacuate influence evacuation decisions. In order to avoid future breakdowns, governments need to understand the different information processing approaches of various groups of people.     

美国的言论自由与种族诽谤

美国虽然标榜言论自由,但是却对黑人和其他少数民族进行种族诽谤。美国在法律上禁止种族诽谤,各州还制定了各种各样的反诽谤刑事法案,但是在20世纪70年代以前这些法案并设有得到很好的执行。白人种族主义者利用言论自由的宪法权利,为种族诽谤的罪行开脱。民权运动胜利后,美国的反诽谤刑事法令开始得到一定程度上的执行。但是由于存在根深蒂固的种族歧视,美国要彻底消灭种族诽谤,仍然任重道远。     

20世纪五六十年代中国史学的基本走向

20世纪已经结束了。 2 0世纪的中国发生了天翻地覆的巨大变化。2 0世纪的中国史学同样经历了急剧的演变。在跨入新世纪的时刻 ,为了更好地推动中国史学的发展 ,我们很有必要认真地总结和反思它在 2 0世纪的发展。大家都承认 ,2 0世纪的中国史学取得了重大的成就 ,同时也存在许多问题。在学界中对这些成就和问题至今存在着不同的看法 ,这本是很正常的现象。重要的是 ,我们应该通过不同意见的交流和切磋来加深我们的认识 ,更好地进行总结和反思 ,从而促使我国的史学在新世纪发展得更快更健康。这就是本刊举办这次学术讨论的目的。应该说明的是 :一 ,这次学术讨论的题目和范围是 2 0世纪中国史学的发展 ,重点是 1 94 9年新中国成立以后。二 ,讨论的重点是对 2 0世纪的中国史学或其中的某个阶段 ,或某个学派 ,某个学术思潮 ,某个史学分支 ,某个重大专题 ,某个史学领域 ,某种重要现象等从总体上进行观察和评述。一般不对某个具体学者进行讨论和评述。三 ,讨论必须坚持“百花齐放 ,百家争鸣”的方针。欢迎发表各种不同意见 ,进行平等的讨论。四 ,讨论中的任何意见均不代表编辑部的看法。文责均由作者自负。