'Cheese Makers Are Always Women': Gendered representations of farm life in the agricultural press

Drawing upon the 'Farmlife' pages of Farmers' Weekly, the most significant farming publication in the UK, this article assesses the ways in which gender identities in farming are represented in text and images. Lead articles from 1976 and 1996 issues of 'Farmlife' are taken as the research focus to determine how representations have altered in line with restructuring of the agricultural industry. Reference is made to Connell's notions of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity to inform the analysis about the ways in which these gender identities are (re)produced through the British farming media. A simple typology is derived from the articles, which assists in revealing a remarkable degree of consistency in the portrayal of gender identities over time. Case studies reveal that hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity are perpetuated through the farming media, but in increasingly subtle and fragmented ways. The limitations of Connell's conceptualisation are revealed, particularly in its ability to accommodate multiple constructions of femininity. Suggestions are made for research that investigates the consumers of these media products.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.     

Obscenity,Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract:

In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.     

Visions of Statesmanship Across The Atlantic: Presidential Masculinity and the American Response to Benito Mussolini

This article explores how hegemonic masculinity forged discourses of modern statesmanship in the United States and Italy in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It unpacks the ‘presidential masculinity’ of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and compares these gendered performances of political leadership in the United States to Benito Mussolini's Fascist rule in Italy during the 1920s. In doing so, this article contends that the manliness of these three modern leaders rested on a contrasting of pairs: if Roosevelt embodied the hegemonic ideal of the ‘frontiersman-as-president’, Wilson personified its ‘unmanly’, bourgeois-liberal countertype and thereby engendered the initially hospitable view of Mussolini's Fascist masculinity in the United States during the Jazz Age. The article covers the publications in The Atlantic Monthly to reveal how the American disillusion with Wilson's liberal internationalism transformed the Duce into a Fascist surrogate for Roosevelt. In a decade of political, economic and social upheaval, the transatlantic ‘public relations state’ in both the United States and Italy discursively positioned Mussolini as the personification of the masculine ideals of acumen, willpower and virility for the American public; a ‘Doctor-Dictator’ who, akin to Roosevelt, became a symbol of modern manliness that signified stability, progress and reform. In the process, the Duce's Fascist manhood shaped hegemonic ideals of statesmanship across the Atlantic while hinting at the paltry support for the liberal democracies of the West.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

‘For the Elections,We Want Women!’: Closing the Gender Gap in Zambian Politics

This article examines the causes of women's rising political participation in Zambia. It argues that women's historical paucity in politics was largely the result of widely‐shared gender stereotypes. These are now weakening due to growing flexibility in gender divisions of labour, which has been catalysed by worsening economic security. By performing work previously presumed to be beyond their abilities and valorized because of its association with masculinity, such women are increasingly perceived as equally capable of leadership. This gradual erosion of gender beliefs has fostered women's political participation and leadership in Zambia.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

‘A belated return for Christ?’: the reception of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History in a British context, 1934–1961

The negative reception of A Study of History at the hands of British historians has masked wider responses to the work in Britain which reflect major tensions within British society and wider attitudes towards the idea of civilisation, the British Empire and religion. The highly critical response to the work from the majority of professional historians reviewing the book is indicative of major debates within British history writing, including the role of empirical and idealist interpretations of history, and the increasingly academic and scholarly role of the historian. Toynbee's position as a public voice and a celebrity historian in the 1950s, whose approach to history eschewed constraints of period or region, represented antithesis to the expanding historical profession and scholarly research. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History was a weathervane for contemporary cultural and intellectual concerns of the era.     

Parody and Satire in the 2008 Canadian Federal Election: Reading the Rick Mercer Report

Political satire and parody continue to influence young adult viewers to a greater degree than traditional political or hard news shows. Soft news has become increasingly important in the category of political entertainment television shows. These shows discursively integrate political information, humor, entertainment and the news. Soft news programs often emphasize public policy issues in their programming while sensationalized, tabloid-style reporting has come to define many segments of Canadian hard news programming. Using Stuart Hall's three main categories of reading televisual cultural texts, this article critically analyzes the Rick Mercer Report. I argue that despite some significant shortcomings and limitations, the Rick Mercer Report does make an important and unique contribution to political entertainment television in Canada.     

Obedient children and reckless rebels: Jabotinsky's youth politics and the case for authoritarian leadership, 1931–1933

This article traces the pivotal role that ideas about “youth” and “generationhood” played in Vladimir Jabotinsky's political strategy as leader of the Union of Revisionist Zionists and its youth movement, Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (Betar). During the leadership struggle within the movement between 1931 and 1933, Jabotinsky believed that he could draw upon debates sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” in order to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The article demonstrates that Jabotinsky's deliberately ambiguous and provocative constructions of “youth” and “generationhood” within the movement's party literature and in articles addressed to the Polish Jewish public, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.     

‘The Absolute Distress of Females’: Irish Abduction and the British Newspapers, 1800 to 1850

Between 1800 and 1850 the British newspapers published over 1,000 newspaper articles concerned with Irish abduction, offering a stark contrast to the little attention devoted to English cases during the same period. This article examines representations of Irish abduction in the British press and considers how this form of sexual spectacle contributed to British perceptions of Ireland during this period. Analysis of a number of particularly heinous abduction cases from the early nineteenth century demonstrates how images of vulnerable and often violated women encouraged unfavourable contrasts between Irish and British masculinity in ways that served to heighten anxieties about the nature of civilisation in Ireland. In so doing, this newspaper coverage of Irish abduction helped to assuage concerns about ‘the Irish question’ and, this article argues, to justify the coercive nature of Britain's imperial presence there.     

Empires ancient and modern: strength,modernity and power in imperial ideology from the Liberal period to Fascism

This article examines the image of Empire developed in public discourse in Italy during the late Liberal period and Fascism by placing it in the context of representations of the British Empire, with which Italian imperial ambitions were compared. There is a continuity in seeing the British Empire as the expression of industrial and commercial modernity and its resultant strength, but what in the Liberal period was seen as an unparalleled superiority became under Fascism a supremacy acquired in a particular period but now exhibiting signs of decline, which Fascism should contest and surpass. Admiration of the British was mixed with disparagement: key figures expressed a competitive resentment towards Britain and its dominant international position, seeing it as the epitome of ‘modern’ imperial power against which Fascism was destined to be measured. In the 1930s signs of the British Empire's decline were sought, developing the idea in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that British domination would also rise and fall, and announcing the replacement of the ‘British order’, founded on commercial modernity and the strength of money and capital, by Fascism's new civilisation, with its authentic heritage of imperial romanità. This competitiveness towards Britain, which historiography has principally seen as a component of foreign policy (as was clear over Ethiopia), has additional significance when seen as an element of political culture that relates to the concept of the State. The autonomy and strength of the State were an important feature of Fascism's self-representation and of its legal culture, and in this light the possession of an empire came to be seen as an essential aspect of statehood and power.     

Reframing the “Irish Question”: the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the formation of Irish nationalism, 1900–22

This article examines the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the early twentieth century and argues that it played a crucial role in shaping a popular understanding of the “Irish Question”. This mass-membership movement impacted upon the development of the Irish state and population. By taking this rural, social movement as a lens to analyse Irish society in the early twentieth century, social and economic issues re-emerge as central components to a contemporary understanding of Ireland's increasingly contested position within the Union. As the expectation of some kind of political resolution to demands for political independence grew during the First World War, radical nationalism absorbed a social and economic discourse that originated within the co-operative movement in its critique of the British state as it operated in Ireland. Irish co-operation represented a sophisticated form of political economy that provided an influential ideological platform for Irish nationalists as they anticipated some form of political independence.     

From ‘motherland’ to ‘daddy state’: A genealogical analysis of the gender undertone in China's nationalist discourses

This article examines the gender undertone of China's nationalist discourses, especially in familial metaphors of nationalism, and how such an undertone shapes people's understandings of state authority and state-citizen relations. Conventional nationalist discourse of the ‘motherland’ evokes the image of an insulted and raped mother as the symbol of national humiliation and calls for actions from patriots (masculinised in the discourse). In recent years, however, we have seen the emergence of a new discourse that depicts the nation-state as a rich, powerful and masculine ‘daddy’. Using discourse analysis and Foucauldian genealogical methods, this article argues that the discursive development has to be analysed against China's historical backgrounds, especially considering new standards of masculinity and femininity in the era of economic reform. Capital is equated to masculinity and righteousness, whereas femininity is shaped by the middle-class values of consumerism and political disengagement. The ‘daddy state’ discourse conjures strong paternalistic power from China's economic capacity that can be projected onto challengers of state authority, while also constructing the nationalist public as feminised consumers whose consumerist enjoyment relies on patriarchal state protection.     

Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or “minipublics”) that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.     

Neo-Colonialism Reconsidered: A Case Study of East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s

A former major base of British colonialism, East Africa, has served as one of the testing grounds for what has been referred to as neo-colonialism. According to Kwame Nkrumah, neo-colonialism indicates that although ‘in theory’, a colony attains independence, ‘[i]n reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Panaf Books, 2004 [1965]). This article challenges this image of neo-colonialism. Based on British documents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have become available to the public only in the last decade, and sources in East African libraries, it casts new light on British external relations with East Africa in the heady days of independence. These documents demonstrate that the new states of East Africa enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy, that Britain's development aid was inconsistent and that Britain's involvement in the affairs of its former colonies was reluctant. These accounts reveal that the impact of British policy on newly independent states was actually limited, and thus the nature of Britain's relationship with its ex-colonies and the discourse of neo-colonialism are debatable.     

L'écologisme français entre présent évanescent et avenir incertain

This article reviews the factors determining whether the ecology movement in France has been a success or a failure. Broadly speaking the French ecology move ment - l'écologisme français - came into existence to fulfil a dual ambition. First, through its incursion into the political arena - an incursion initially thought of as temporary - its purpose was to force other political parties and public bodies to pay greater attention to environmental issues. Second, in the swirl of ideas following May 1968, its ambition was to become a 'politics of the future': among other things, it would strive to displace the other parties and undermine or redefine the traditional divide between the Left and Right. These and other concerns are analysed in order to assess what role 'ecologism' plays in France today. This article is based on the author's latest book, L'introuvable écologisme français (PUF, 2000).     

‘Blindness which we mistake for sight’: British officials and the economic world of the cultivator in colonial Burma

Prompted by the recent completion of a study of the economic – and, to a degree, social and political – strategies used by Burma's rice cultivator to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of the economic crisis of the early 1930s on his material circumstances, this article explores some of the major methodological issues faced by the historian seeking an understanding of the economic behaviour of the cultivator in Burma under colonial rule. One set of issues concerns the need to locate that economic behaviour in a distinctive cultural context. A second rises from the fact that since almost the sole source for the Burma research is the surviving records of the colonial administration, the historian is forced to peer into the economic world of the Burmese rice cultivator through the eyes of British officials, whose sight of that world was far from complete and commonly distorted by cultural preconceptions. Here the article pays attention to the historian's use of colonial statistical data and impressionistic reports.     

War Trauma and Alcoholism in the Early Writings of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë

During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.