‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.     

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small. Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career. On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Overcoming ‘Simply Being’: Straight Sex,Masculinity and Physical Culture in Modern Egypt

This article considers the specific deployment of gender and sexuality in interwar Egypt against the general backdrop of a universalising colonial modernity, which since around the middle of the nineteenth century aimed at producing a repeatable subject everywhere. It examines the magazine Physical Culture as an artefact of that colonial modernity and as a watermark of an ineffable style of performing gender and sexuality – a culmination of nearly five decades of historicising Egypt and of exercising Egyptians. That the cultivation of healthy and desirable bodies was constrained by Egypt's asymmetrical location in a global economic and political order constituted by colonialism was a well‐established fact of social life by the end of the 1920s; consequently, the problem of the modern subject in Egypt was posed in terms that were not exclusively nationalist and examined in terms that were keenly attuned to circulations of global cultural forms and discursive practices. In the resulting process of subject formation, a gendered and sexualised other was also produced, as a de‐formation, wherein the terms of its prior being would no longer be intelligible.     

From ‘Relief’ to ‘Justice and Protection’: The Maintenance of Deserted Wives,British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870–1920

In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians’ concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife.     

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.     

‘There Was A Third Man…’: Tales from a Global Policy Consultation on Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals

This article reflects on the experience of the two authors as ‘experts’ during consultations on justice and security indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals. The authors examine how the tension between the indeterminacy of the concepts to be measured — justice and security — and the concreteness of indicators shaped the politics of the consultations. Participants used this tension strategically to destabilize notions of time, space and identity on which knowledge production rests. In doing so, they blurred the distinction between academics, advocates and policy makers. They did this to lay claim to some aspects of implementation while distancing themselves from others. The authors then juxtapose this with personal experience of researching South Sudanese citizens, who challenged and deconstructed that distinction. At the same time, experts at the consultations incorporated an image of these citizens as an ethical justification for the discussion. The authors argue that a more complex sociology of knowledge is required to understand how these global knowledge practices work from the global to the local. Such a sociology of knowledge acknowledges fluidity and grapples with how knowledge practices defer and delimit moments of decision; it requires an ethico‐political — rather than just a political — critique.     

Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava,Vanuatu

What happens to people's concept of the person when their ‘dividuality’ engages with the Christian concept of the ‘individual’? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life time? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian ‘soul’? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or ‘back‐slider’) people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity.     

When Governance Gets Going: Certifying ‘Better Cotton’ and ‘Better Sugarcane’

As many new certification systems for commodities have been established over the past decade, scholars have devoted sustained attention to the ways that these multi‐stakeholder governance initiatives have transformed the industries in which they were launched. With a few notable exceptions, studies in this area have continued to focus on the development and impacts of new governance mechanisms, and on the sectoral or industrial changes that have ensued. In contrast to these ‘inside‐out’ perspectives on governance innovation and change, this article considers how two prominent yet relatively under‐studied commodity governance initiatives have been shaped by the broader political economic order in which they operate. To offer an ‘outside‐in’ account of the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and Bonsucro (formerly the Better Sugarcane Initiative), the article details recent changes in what the author terms the ‘world commodity order’, and situates the BCI and Bonsucro within this order. From this vantage point, the author ultimately makes two analytical claims: (i) that the world commodity order has not precluded the differential institutionalization of these initiatives; and (ii) that aspects of the order have circumscribed the potential of the BCI and Bonsucro to deliver pro‐poor business practices.