Women’s History in France: An Ill-Defined Subject

As a new approach and subject, women’s history in France is ill-defined as an academic category and remains on the margins of mainstream history. The concept of gender, a necessary analytical tool, cannot in itself suffice; the historicity of the tensions between men and women must be restored. At stake is the tension between a continuous linear history and the historical discontinuities which arise in its gaps and flaws, the tension between female individuals [individues] who, as objects of representation, are taken to be representative of their sex, and critical subjects who confront representation as a form of power.     

Causality,Chaos Theory,and the End of the Weimar Republic: A Commentary On Henry Turner’s Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power

This article seeks to integrate the roles of structure and human agency in a theory of historical causation, using the fall of the Weimar Republic and in particular Henry Turner's book Hitler's Thirty Days to Power as a case study. Drawing on analogies from chaos theory, it argues that crisis situations in history exhibit sensitive dependence on local conditions, which are always changing. This undermines the distinction between causes and conditions (including counterfactual conditions). It urges instead a distinction between empowering and constraining causes of specific human actions as a more fruitful model. The paper also discusses more briefly two other analogies to chaos theory: 1) similarity across differences in scale as applicable to different levels of individual (psychological) and collective events, which are seen as homologous; 2) a model of branching as applicable to the totality of causes of a given event.     

Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth

This study examines the recollections of medieval English men, found in proof–of–age inquests, regarding their participation in the rite of the purification of women after childbirth. Because the rite of purification was reserved to women, scant attention has been paid to how this rite and the customs surrounding it played in the lives of medieval men. These men’s recollections situate postpartum purification within the festivities celebrating the birth of a man’s heir. For them, it is a public event celebrating paternity and lineage, and a forum for the negotiation of social relationships.     

Tocqueville and the End of History

Abstract

We argue for the relevance of a contemporary return to Shakespeare because his work prompts thinking about the “Body Politic,” perhaps the most vivid and enduring image in speech describing political community ever proposed. Shakespeare's meditation on this image invites us to reflect on the conditions under which a body politic can be made whole; that the constitution of any formal commonwealth requires a self-conscious articulation of the body politic and that this articulation could not happen without the parts themselves being aware of their partial character within the whole political order. The need for the consent of those parts in the political order to which they would belong thus becomes suddenly more evident. Shakespeare's plays show that this need for consent always emerges within discrete political communities. As such, the constituent parts of those communities must grant consent, exercise and enjoy their rights, and participate in the whole within the limitations circumscribed by their political boundaries and borders. His dramatic works thus help us reconsider contemporary attacks on the nation-state and illuminate the body politic as an essential means for bringing into being the preconditions and framework required for healthy political life, including liberal democracy, to flourish.     

Vallejo and the End of History

This article studies the intersections of racial, gender, and national subjectivities in Marta Rojas's novel, Santa Lujuria o Papeles de blanco (1998). I examine the entanglement of fiction and historical memory as well as the (re)appropriation and (re)construction of the slave experience as a vindication of anti-imperialist discourses. By focusing on the depictions of conflicts of race and class set in the colonial period, I also analyze the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento (racial and cultural whitening) and the myth of the eroticized mulatta. Furthermore, I maintain that this novel contributes to the intellectual articulation of new forms of racialization in the Cuban context, while confronting the traditional rhetoric of White supremacy.     

‘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.     

‘It’s a man’s world’: Recent Studies of Male Representation of the Female in the Middle Ages

Blamires, Alcuin (ed.) Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts Baldwin, John W. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 Kay, Sarah and Rubin, Miri (eds) Framing Medieval Bodies Lomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah (eds) Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature Burns, E. Jane Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature Krueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance Cazelles, Brigitte The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century Meale, Carol M. (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 Cherewatuk, Karen and Wiethaus, Ulrike (eds) Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistology Genre     

Hope’s Work

This article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense “worldly hope” draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London.     

Tracing children’s politics

This article sets out to conceptualize children’s political agency and the spaces of children’s politics by addressing children’s politics in official settings and everyday contexts. The study is based on research concerning child and youth policies and the politics played out in children’s everyday life practices. To demonstrate how childhood policies typically seek to involve children in politics, we discuss recent legislative developments related to building a parliamentary apparatus for children’s participation in Finland. We propose that not all children are able to, or willing to, participate actively in this kind of political action, and that all issues important to children can not be processed through (semi)official arenas such as school councils, children’s parliaments and civic organizations. Thus, we agree with scholarship portraying children as political agents also in their everyday environments and on their own terms. To further conceptualize these mundane politics, we propose a model for identifying different modes and spaces of children’s agency in terms of political involvement and political presence. We conclude by discussing the challenges of studying everyday political geographies in childhood.     

Cultural Imperialism and Women’s Movements: Thinking Globally

This essay appeals to feminists everywhere to find ways to fight imperialist forces all over the globe by creating linkages and bridges between women who are in similar predicaments which are created by multinational corporations. Women’s movements are complex phenomena, and there is no fixed, ‘sacred’ theory or path to follow, because women develop consciousness of themselves differently in every place depending upon their social, political, economic, cultural and historical context. But the goal of creating a humane, free and just society should be the guiding principle in making theory, not just talking of individual ‘identities’ and ‘differences’.     

‘Balkan Mentality’: History,Legend, Imagination

Abstract. In this article I attempt to do two things. First I consider in what sense it could be reasonable to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’, shared across national divisions by all peoples in Southeastern Europe. I argue among other things that nationalism and its impact on culture and scholarship has been a major stumbling block for the conceptualisation of a shared ‘Balkan mentality’. Secondly, I go on to examine one possible context in which a shared mentality could be said to have existed among the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. I suggest that such a context could be located in the pre-nationalist Balkan society of the eighteenth century, a period in which the region was politically united by Ottoman rule. To illustrate the content of the mental outlook shared by the Balkan Orthodox in the eighteenth century I examine the autobiographical writings of three major authors, one writing in Greek (Caisarios Depontes), one in Bulgarian (Sofroni Vra?anski) and one in Serbian (Matija Nenadovi?). I identify the shared mental elements reflected in their texts and point out how the transition to a national self-conception taking place at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Balkans, marked the end of this shared ‘Balkan mentality’. The study is thus an exploration in the ‘prehistory’, as it were, of nationalism in the Balkans, an exploration which also looks at the symbolic origins nationalism in the region as reflected in the texts of two of the three authors.     

An angel’s power in a bishop’s body: the making of the cult of Aubert of Avranches at Mont-Saint-Michel

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Benedictine monks of Mont-Saint Michel promoted the cult of Aubert of Avranches, the abbey’s legendary co-founder, and used his newly rediscovered relics as a means of accessing the patronage and power of the elusive, incorporeal archangel Michael, the community’s other founder. Texts, images, the strategic placement of Aubert’s relics throughout the abbey church reinforced the association between these two saints, rendering Aubert more powerful and Michael more accessible. This local study of the interaction between these two cults at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel suggests that medieval monastic uses of relics were more creative and varied than is generally recognized and that relationships between saints within a single cultic environment could be extremely complex and unstable.     

Before History Had an End: Soviet-American Relations, 1941–1947

Edward M. Bennett. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Search for Victory: American-Soviet Relations, 1939–1945 .
James L. Gormly. From Potsdam to the Cold War: Big Three Diplomacy, 1945–1947 .     

‘Benchmarking’ and Participatory Development: The Case of Fiji’s Sugar Industry Reforms

Since the mid‐1970s, opposition has grown within developing countries to the use of ‘top‐down’ development approaches by foreign consultants. Disenchantment with these development strategies, it is often claimed, has led to the current incorporation of participation in consultants’ development practices. This study is concerned with the practice and methods of participatory development planning. It evaluates the Strategic Plan adopted by the Fiji sugar industry in 1997 in response to challenges that are attributed to the pressures of globalization and international competitiveness. The authors assess the external consultant’s self‐proclaimed ‘participatory methods’ in the articulation of these challenges, in the design of restructuring programmes, and in shaping the discourses of reform more generally. The consultant’s use of the fashionable ‘benchmarking’ methodology is seen to be one of the most problematic features of the ‘participatory’ process.     

Children’s Diminishing Play Space: a Study of Inter-generational Change in Children’s Use of their Neighbourhoods

A survey of 421 children and 165 parents from three suburban primary schools in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia has provided information on the nature and location of children’s play, both at present and a generation ago. Although modern children have greater access to individual transport in the form of higher bicycle ownership, other constraints appear to have restricted their play space. These include the availability of home-based leisure technology such as computer games and greater parental restriction on where children might play. The results of the survey would appear to indicate that children prefer to play at home. However, analysis of the children’s stories and drawings suggests that, given the chance, a majority of children would choose to engage in outdoor activities in the bush, in parks or on the beach. Their actual choice of play space may thus be determined by a knowledge of parental constraints.     

Friends Farm: Australia’s First Quaker Commune

Australia has a long and rich history of religious groups trying to establish some sort of utopia by removing themselves from urban centres to rural idylls. The first of these was H errnhut, in western Victoria (1853–1889), and today there are many such as D anthonia B ruderhof and N ew G ovardhana, in NSW, C henrezig, in Queensland and R ocky C ape H utterites in Tasmania. While Quakers in the UK and USA have a tradition of forming rural communes starting from the seventeenth century, the first, and most important of such in Australia was F riends F arm, established in 1869 on what is now Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. This group was led by the charismatic Alfred Allen, a radical Quaker from Sydney. He believed that he had been reborn, held Christ within him, and had achieved sin‐free perfection. He was disowned, twice, by Sydney Quakers after when he led his small band of would‐be communards to the “wilderness” of Queensland where they sought to create a perfect society. Not surprisingly, it did not quite work out that way.     

Peter Berger’s Early Work on Baha’i Studies

At the very beginning of his academic career, Peter Berger made an important contribution to the sociological study of the Babi and Baha’i religions. This article provides an overview of (1) Berger’s early ideas in the sociology of religion; (2) his overall analysis of the Babi and Baha’i movements; (3) his account of the contemporary Iranian Baha’i community; and (4) his impressions of the American Baha’i community of the time. A brief discussion of the continuing value of Berger’s Babi‐Baha’i study in the Sociology of Religion and in Baha’i Studies is also offered.     

Shakespeare in the Original Klingon: Star Trek and the End of History

Abstract

Maisel, L. Sandy, ed. The Parties Respond: Changes in the American Party System Boulder, CO: Westview Press 363 pp., $50.00, ISBN 0–8133–0881-X Publication Date: October 1990

Jelen, Ted G. The Political Mobilization of Religious Beliefs New York: Praeger 208 pp., $39.95, ISBN 0–275–93439-X Publication Date: March 1991

Seiden, Martin H. Access to the American Mind: The Damaging Impact of the New Mass Media New York: Shapolsky 232 pp., $18.95, ISBN 0–944007–71–6 Publication Date: May 1991

DeMott, Benjamin The Imperial Middle: Why American Can't Think Straight about Class New York: William Morrow and Company 264 pp., $18.95, ISBN 1–55710–023–3 Publication Date: October 1990

Alexander, Yonah and Richard Latter, eds. Terrorism and the Media: Dilemmas for Government, Journalists and the Public McLean, VA: Brassey's 147 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0–08–037442–5 Publication Date: December 1990

Manheim, Jarol B. All of the People All of the Time: Strategic Communication and American Politics Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe 255 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0–87332–796–9 Publication Date: March 1991

Johnson, Haynes Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years New York: W. W. Norton 500 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0–393–02937–9 Publication Date: March 1991

Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 235 pp., $10.95, ISBN 0–8018–4051–1 Publication Date: November 1990

Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press 333 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0–299–12810–5 Publication Date: April 1991

Heale, M. J. American Anticemmualsm: Combating the Enermy Within, 1930–1970 Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 235 pp., $10.95, ISBN 08018–4051–1 Publications Date: November 1990

Kellerman, Barbara and Ryan J. Barilleaux The President as World Leader New York: St. Martin's Press 225 pp., ISBN 0–312–03603–5 Publication Date: 1991

Stephenson, D. Grier, Jr., ed.An Essential Safeguard: Essays on the United States Supreme Court and Its Justices Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 192 pp., $42.95, ISBN 0–313–27438-X Publication Date: March 1991

Koocher, Gerald P. and Patricia C. Keith-Spiegel Children, Ethics, and the Law: Professional Issues and Cases Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 230 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0–8032–4731–1 Publication Date: September 1990

Darling, Arthur B. The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 509 pp., $17.50, ISBN 0–271–00717–6 Publication Date: November 1990

Marston, David W. Malice Aforethought: How Lawyers Use Our Secret Rules to Get Rich, Get Sex, Get Even … and Get Away With It New York: William Morrow and Company 264 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0–688–07705–6 Publication Date: March 1991

Sutter, Robert G. The Cambodian Crisis and U.S. Policy Dilemmas Boulder, CO: Westview Press 135 pp., $22.50, ISBN 0–8133–8047–2 Publication Date: December 1990

Lowenthal, Abraham F., ed. Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 422 pp., $55.00, ISBN 0–8018–4131–3 Publication Date: April 1991

Koster, R. M. and Guillermo Sánchez In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968–1990 New York: W. W. Norton 448 pp., $22.95, ISBN 0–393–02696–5 Publication Date: October 1990

Morales-Gómez, Daniel A. and Carlos Alberto Torres The State, Corporatists Politics, and Educational Policy Making in Mexico New York: Praeger 197 pp., $39.95, ISBN 0–275–93484–5 Publication Date: 1990

Mitchell, R. Judson Getting to the Top: Cyclical Patterns in the Leadership Succession Process Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press 237 pp., $23.95, ISBN 0–8179–8922–6 Publication Date: 1990

Brown, J. F. Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe Durham, NC: Duke University Press 338 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0–8223–1145–3 Publication Date: May 1991

Peters, B. Guy European Politics Reconsidered New York: Holmes &; Meier 293 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0–8419–1161–4 Publication Date: February 1991

Freedman, Robert O., ed. The Middle East from the Iran-Contra Affair to the Intifada Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 441 pp., $18.95, ISBN 0–8156–2502–2 Publication Date: February 1991

Lee, Manwoo The Odyssey of Korean Democracy: Korean Politics, 1987–1990 New York: Praeger 184 pp., $39.95, ISBN 0–275–93660–0 Publication Date: September 1990

Menashri, David, ed. The Iranlan Revolution and the Muslim World Boulder, CO: Westview Press 282 pp., $32.00, ISBN 0–8133–7751-X Publication Date: November 1990

Genther, Phyllis A. A History of Japan's Government-Business Relationship: The Passenger Car Industry Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan 242 pp., $14.95, ISBN 0–939512–40–8 Publication Date: 1990

Liska, George The Ways of Power New York: Basil Blackwell 511 pp., $39.95, ISBN 0–631–17188–6 Publication Date: 1990

Kimmel, Michael S. Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press 252 pp., $44.95 cloth, $15.95 paper ISBN 0–87722–736–3 cloth ISBN 0–87722–741–1 paper Publication Date: December 1990

Freedman, Lawrence, ed. Europe Transformed: Documents on the End of the Cold War New York: St. Martin's Press 512 pp., $45.00, ISBN 0–312–05225–1 Publication Date: October 1990

Kinney, Douglas National Interest/National Honor: The Diplomacy of the Falklands Crisis New York: Praeger 372 pp., $49.95, ISBN 0–275–92425–4 Publication Date: 1989

Lodge, Juliet, ed. The 1989 Election of the European Parliament New York: St. Martin's Press 249 pp., $49.95, ISBN 0–312–04494–1 Publication Date: September 1990

Strom, Kaare Minority Government and Majority Rule New York: Cambridge University Press 293 pp., $39.50, ISBN 0–521–37431–6 Publication Date: July 1990

Scharpe, Fritz W., trans, by Ruth Crowley and Fred Thompson Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 303 pp., $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper ISBN 0–8014–2221–3 paper Publication Date: May 1991

Smart, Paul Mill and Marx: Individual Liberty and the Roads to Freedom New York: St. Martin's Press 202 pp., ISBN 0–7190–3333–0 Publication Date: 1991

Maxwell, Kenneth, ed. Spanish Foreign and Defense Policy Boulder, CO: Westview Press 265 pp., $31.50, ISBN 0–8133–1113–6 Publication Date: May 1991

Derogy, Jacques Resistance &; Revenge: The Armenian Assassination of the Turkish Leaders Responsible for the 1915 Massacres and Deportations New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 206 pp., ISBN 0–88738–338–6 Publication Date: 1990

Procter, David E. Enacting Political Culture: Rhetorical Transformations of Liberty Weekend 1986 New York: Praeger 144 pp., $37.95, ISBN 0–275–93489–6 Publication Date: October 1990