Exposes complex intersections between genders and other identities in medieval cultures.
Nothing less than a rethinking of what we mean when we talk about "men" and "women" of the medieval period, this volume demonstrates how the idea of gender-in the Middle Ages no less than now-intersected in subtle and complex ways with other categories of difference. Responding to the insights of postcolonial and feminist theory, the authors show that medieval identities emerged through shifting paradigms-that fluidity, conflict, and contingency characterized not only gender, but also sexuality, social status, and religion. This view emerges through essays that delve into a wide variety of cultures and draw on a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies consider gendered hierarchies in western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic areas of the medieval world.
Contributors: Daniel Boyarin, U of California, Berkeley; Ruth Mazo Karras, U of Minnesota; Mathew Kuefler, San Diego State U; Martha Newman, U of Texas; Kathryn M. Ringrose, U of California, San Diego; Elizabeth Robertson, U of Colorado; Everett Rowson, U of Pennsylvania; Michael Uebel, U of Kentucky; Ulrike Wiethaus, Wake Forest U.Contributors. Beverly Bossler, Guy Halsall, Nicholas Howe, Clare A. Lees, Fred Orton, Gilian R. Overing, D. Fairchild Ruggles, David Townsend, and Ulrike Wiethaus.
Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion.
The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.
Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion.
The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.
In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body.
Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."
Moving back and forth between a critique of modern discourses on Heian literature and close analyses of the Heian texts themselves, Yoda sheds light on some of the most persistent interpretive models underwriting Japanese literary studies, particularly the modern paradigm of a masculine national subject. She proposes new directions for disciplinary critique and suggests that historicized understandings of premodern texts offer significant insights into contemporary feminist theories of subjectivity and agency.
Increasingly, experts recognize that gender has affected urban planning and the design of the spaces where we live and work. Too often, urban and suburban spaces support stereotypically male activities and planning methodologies reflect a male-dominated society.
To document and analyze the connection between gender and planning, the editors of this volume have assembled an interdisciplinary collection of influential essays by leading scholars. Contributors point to the ubiquitous single-family home, which prevents women from sharing tasks or pooling services. Similarly, they argue that public transportation routes are usually designed for the (male) worker's commute from home to the central city, and do not help the suburban dweller running errands. In addition to these practical considerations, many contributors offer theoretical perspectives on issues such as planning discourse and the construction of concepts of rationality.
While the essays call for an awareness of gender in matters of planning, they do not over-simplify the issue by moving toward a single feminist solution. Contributors realize that not all women gravitate toward communal opportunities, that many women now share the supposedly male commute, and that considerations of race and class need to influence planning as well. Among various recommendations, contributors urge urban planners to provide opportunities that facilitate women's needs, such as childcare on the way to work and jobs that are decentralized so that women can be close to their children.
Bringing together the most important writings of the last twenty-five years, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of planning theory as well as anyone concerned with gender and diversity.
Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped, but did not set, adult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from male through female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies.
This landmark book offers the first comprehensive description and analysis of gender and power relations in prehispanic Mesoamerica from the Formative Period Olmec world (ca. 1500-500 BC) through the Postclassic Maya and Aztec societies of the sixteenth century AD. Using approaches from contemporary gender theory, Rosemary Joyce explores how Mesoamericans created human images to represent idealized notions of what it meant to be male and female and to depict proper gender roles. She then juxtaposes these images with archaeological evidence from burials, house sites, and body ornaments, which reveals that real gender roles were more fluid and variable than the stereotyped images suggest.
Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or “parlor” traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class woman as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space—and the debate about who should occupy that space—Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman’s proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years.
While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women’s words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American woman to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge the white middle class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman’s place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife.
Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women’s roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the “quiet woman” must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women’s space in historical discourse.
Contributors. Sueann Caulfield, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Gilbert M. Joseph, Thomas J. Klubock, Martin Nesvig, Pablo Piccato, Cristina Rivera Garza, Karin Rosemblatt, Heidi Tinsman
Offering detailed analyses of slave emancipation in specific societies, the contributors discuss all of the diverse actors in emancipation: slaves, abolitionists, free people of color, state officials, and slave owners. Whether considering the construction of a postslavery masculine subjectivity in Jamaica, the work of two white U.S. abolitionist women with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, freedwomen’s negotiations of labor rights in Puerto Rico, slave women’s contributions to the slow unraveling of slavery in French West Africa, or the ways that Brazilian abolitionists deployed representations of femininity as virtuous and moral, these essays demonstrate the gains that a gendered approach offers to understanding the complex processes of emancipation. Some chapters also explore theories and methodologies that enable a gendered reading of postslavery archives. The editors’ substantial introduction traces the reasons for and patterns of women’s and men’s different experiences of emancipation throughout the Atlantic world.
Contributors. Martha Abreu, Sheena Boa, Bridget Brereton, Carol Faulkner, Roger Kittleson, Martin Klein, Melanie Newton, Diana Paton, Sue Peabody, Richard Roberts, Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva, Hannah Rosen, Pamela Scully, Mimi Sheller, Marek Steedman, Michael Zeuske
"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return to constitutional democracy and elimination of censorship to show how these issues arise from and comment on the sociohistorical reality of contemporary Brazilian society.
Foster organizes his study around three broad themes: construction of masculinity, constructions of feminine and feminist identities, and same-sex positionings and social power. Within his discussions of individual films ranging from Jorge um brasileiro to A hora da estrela to Beijo no asfalto, he offers new ways of understanding national ideals and stereotypes, sexual dissidence (homoeroticism and transgenderism), heroic models, U.S./Brazilian relations, revolutionary struggle, and human rights violations. As the first study of Brazilian cinematic representations of gender ideology in English or Portuguese, this book will be important reading in film and cultural studies.
Set in Arequipa during Peru's recent years of crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress creates gendered bodies. It explores why people wear clothes, why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. Blenda Femenías argues that women's clothes are key symbols of gender identity and resistance to racism.
Moving between metropolitan Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province, the central characters are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking maize farmers and alpaca herders of the Colca Valley. Their identification as Indians, whites, and mestizos emerges through locally produced garments called bordados. Because the artists who create these beautiful objects are also producers who carve an economic foothold, family workshops are vital in a nation where jobs are as scarce as peace. But ambiguity permeates all practices shaping bordados' significance. Femenías traces contemporary political and ritual applications, not only Caylloma's long-standing and violent ethnic conflicts, to the historical importance of cloth since Inca times.
This is the only book about expressive culture in an Andean nation that centers on gender. In this feminist contribution to ethnography, based on twenty years' experience with Peru, including two years of intensive fieldwork, Femenías reflects on the ways gender shapes relationships among subjects, research, and representation.
An investigation into Wharton’s extensive use and adaptation of the Gothic in her fiction.
Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton’s male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton’s imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements as a way to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them
Edith Wharton’s contradictory views of women and men—her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine—reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve and alternative to the dualism.
Fedorko’s work is unique in its careful consideration of Whartons’s sixteen Gothic works which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.
A classic in gender studies in music
Marcia J. Citron's comprehensive, balanced work lays a broad foundation for the study of women composers and their music. Drawing on a diverse body of feminist and interdisciplinary theory, Citron shows how the western art canon is not intellectually pure but the result of a complex mixture of attitudes, practices, and interests that often go unacknowledged and unchallenged.
Winner of the Pauline Alderman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music, Gender and the Musical Canon explores important elements of canon formation, such as notions of creativity, professionalism, and reception. Citron surveys the institutions of power, from performing organizations and the academy to critics and the publishing and recording industries, that affect what goes into the canon and what is kept out. She also documents the nurturing role played by women, including mothers, in cultivating female composers. In a new introduction, she assesses the book's reception by composers and critics, especially the reactions to her controversial reading of Cécile Chaminade's sonata for piano.
A key volume in establishing how the concepts and assumptions that form the western art music canon affect female composers and their music, Gender and the Musical Canon also reveals how these dynamics underpin many of the major issues that affect musicology as a discipline.
How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific claims about differences between "male" and "female" brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires and behaviors? Gender and the Science of Difference examines how contemporary science shapes and is shaped by gender ideals and images.
Prior scholarship has illustrated how past cultures of science were infused with patriarchal norms and values that influenced the kinds of research that was conducted and the interpretation of findings about differences between men and women. This interdisciplinary volume presents empirical inquiries into today's science, including examples of gendered scientific inquiry and medical interventions and research. It analyzes how scientific and medical knowledge produces gender norms through an emphasis on sex differences, and includes both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and examples.
Do women express their feelings more than men? Popular stereotypes say they do, but in this provocative book, Leslie Brody breaks with conventional wisdom. Integrating a wealth of perspectives and research--biological, sociocultural, developmental--her work explores the nature and extent of gender differences in emotional expression, as well as the endlessly complex question of how such differences come about.
Nurture, far more than nature, emerges here as the stronger force in fashioning gender differences in emotional expression. Brody shows that whether and how men and women express their feelings varies widely from situation to situation and from culture to culture, and depends on a number of particular characteristics including age, ethnicity, cultural background, power, and status.
Especially pertinent is the organization of the family, in which boys and girls elicit and absorb different emotional strategies. Brody also examines the importance of gender roles, whether in the family, the peer group, or the culture at large, as men and women use various patterns of emotional expression to adapt to power and status imbalances.
Lucid and level-headed, Gender, Emotion, and the Family offers an unusually rich and nuanced picture of the great range of male and female emotional styles, and the variety of the human character.
Family-related migration is moving to the center of political debates on migration, integration, and multiculturalism in Europe. Still, strands of academic research on family migrations and migrant families remain separate from—and sometimes ignorant of—each other. This volume seeks to bridge the disciplinary divide. Collectively, the authors address the need to better understand the diversity of family-related migration and its resulting family forms and practices, to question simplistic assumptions about migrant families in public discourse, to study family migration from a mix of disciplinary perspectives, and to acknowledge the state’s role in shaping family-related migration, practices, and lives.
In Latin America, gender is a fundamental dimension of virtually every aspect of contemporary social, economic, and political life. Gender in Latin America is a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of gender in the region at the start of the twenty-first century. The authors draw on a wide range of research, including their own field-based expertise, to illuminate the importance of diversity in gender in this region. Debunking traditional stereotypes, the book charts changes and continuities in gender roles, relations and identities associated with the growing evidence produced by feminist scholarship and activism in the continent.
Chapters are arranged around themes such as gender and poverty, gender and population, gender and health, and gender and employment. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the core issues, and debates in the relevant field in order to set specific regional experiences within their global as well as regional contexts. The authors also refer to new bodies of literature on the subject, including those on men and masculinity, fatherhood, and sexuality.
Gender in Pre-Hispanic America offers rich opportunities for comprehending current trends and considering future directions in research. It is unique in that it puts social theory at the forefront of the discussion. The book has a special intellectual presence and contemporary relevance in its engagement with the social lives and constructs of its authors and readers alike. The consideration of the role of gender in our daily lives, including in our professions, becomes inescapable when reading this book. It is not simply a question of men's roles having been possibly overemphasized and overstudied to the detriment of women's. The fact that genders, as opposed to sexes, are socially constructed categories focuses our attention on the ways in which these and other social constructs have shaped our present understanding of the past and informed past peoples' understand of their present.
In various articles in this book, the reader will not find unanimity in what is meant by "gender" or how to go about studying it. What will be found, however, is a collection of interesting, informed, thought-provoking, and often lively essays. It is hoped that this volume will mark a stage in an evolving study of this field and provoke new research in the future.
Two leading social scientists examine the gender wealth gap in countries with officially egalitarian property law, showing how legal professionals—wittingly and unwittingly—help rich families and men maintain their privilege.
In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital explains how and why, in every class of society, women are economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The reasons lie with the unfair economic arrangements that play out in divorce proceedings, estate planning, and other crucial situations where law and family life intersect.
Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac argue that, whatever the law intends, too many outcomes are imprinted with unthought sexism. In private decisions, old habits die hard: families continue to allocate resources disproportionately to benefit boys and men. Meanwhile, the legal profession remains in thrall to assumptions that reinforce gender inequality. Bessière and Gollac marshal a range of economic data documenting these biases. They also examine scores of family histories and interview family members, lawyers, and notaries to identify the accounting tricks that tip the scales in favor of men.
Women across the class spectrum—from poor single mothers to MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—can face systematic economic disadvantages in divorce cases. The same is true in matters of inheritance and succession in family-owned businesses. Moreover, these disadvantages perpetuate broader social disparities beyond gender inequality. As Bessière and Gollac make clear, the appropriation of capital by men has helped to secure the rigid hierarchies of contemporary class society itself.
In this pathbreaking study of the gendering of the practices of history, Bonnie Smith resurrects the amateur history written by women in the nineteenth century--a type of history condemned as trivial by "scientific" male historians. She demonstrates the degree to which the profession defined itself in opposition to amateurism, femininity, and alternative ways of writing history. The male historians of the archive and the seminar claimed to be searching for "genderless universal truth," which in reality prioritized men's history over women's, white history over nonwhite, and the political history of Western governments over any other. Meanwhile, women amateurs wrote vivid histories of queens and accomplished women, of manners and mores, and of everyday life.
Following the profession up to 1940, The Gender of History traces the emergence of a renewed interest in social and cultural history which had been demeaned in the nineteenth century, when professional historians viewed themselves as supermen who could see through the surface of events to invisible meanings and motives. But Smith doesn't let late twentieth-century historians off the hook. She demonstrates how, even today, the practice of history is propelled by fantasies of power in which researchers imagine themselves as heroic rescuers of the inarticulate lower classes. The professionals' legacy is still with us, as Smith's extraordinary work proves.
In an innovative and invigorating exploration of the complex relations between women and the modern, Rita Felski challenges conventional male-centered theories of modernity. She also calls into question those feminist perspectives that have either demonized the modern as inherently patriarchal, or else assumed a simple opposition between men’s and women’s experiences of the modern world.
Combining cultural history with cultural theory, and focusing on the fin de siècle, Felski examines the gendered meanings of such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime, evolution, revolution, and perversion. Her approach is comparative and interdisciplinary, covering a wide variety of texts from the English, French, and German traditions: sociological theory, realist and naturalist novels, decadent literature, political essays and speeches, sexological discourse, and sentimental popular fiction. Male and female writers from Simmel, Zola, Sacher-Masoch, and Rachilde to Marie Corelli, Wilde, and Olive Schreiner come under Felski’s scrutiny as she exposes the varied and often contradictory connections between femininity and modernity.
Seen through the lens of Felski’s discerning eye, the last fin de siècle provides illuminating parallels with our own. And Felski’s keen analysis of the matrix of modernism offers needed insight into the sense of cultural crisis brought on by postmodernism.
The Gender of Piety is an intimate history of the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe, or BICC, as related through six individual life histories that extend from the early colonial years through the first decade after independence. Taken together, these six lives show how men and women of the BICC experienced and sequenced their piety in different ways. Women usually remained tied to the church throughout their lives, while men often had a more strained relationship with it. Church doctrine was not always flexible enough to accommodate expected masculine gender roles, particularly male membership in political and economic institutions or participation in important male communal practices.
The study is based on more than fifteen years of extensive oral history research supported by archival work in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The oral accounts make it clear, official versions to the contrary, that the church was led by spiritually powerful women and that maleness and mission-church notions of piety were often incompatible.
The life-history approach illustrates how the tension of gender roles both within and without the church manifested itself in sometimes unexpected ways: for example, how a single family could produce both a legendary woman pastor credited with mediating multiple miracles and a man—her son—who joined the armed wing of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union nationalist political party and fought in Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s. Investigating the lives of men and women in equal measure, The Gender of Piety uses a gendered interpretive lens to analyze the complex relationship between the church and broader social change in this region of southern Africa.
Gender on Campus is the first book to combine solid analyses of the broad range of gender issues for women in college with realistic approaches to heighten awareness and alleviate problems. Written for students, the book first clarifies the concept of feminism and then examines gender dynamics in a variety of settings and contexts-from the classroom to the sports field and from language to social life. Sharon Gmelch probes sexism, racism, and homophobia on campus and surveys the special issues facing diverse women students. The book also addresses issues relating to body image and sexuality. Its final chapters analyze the role gender continues to play after college-in the media, workplace, and politics.
After a thorough discussion of a topic, each chapter concludes with possibilities for action ("What You Can Do") as well as a selected bibliography of books, videos, and organizations that students can consult. Gender on Campus is an invaluable resource for students, parents, and administrators, as well as an excellent text for women's studies courses.
Bloom focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early twentieth century to the present.
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.
In commemorating the uprising, revolutionaries and conservatives used the same methods to promote radically different political agendas: they deployed religious imagery to characterize the political situation as a battle between good and evil, with the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, and exploited traditional gender stereotypes to portray themselves as the defenders of social order against chaos. The resulting atmosphere of polarization combined with increasing political violence to plunge the country into civil war.
In this intriguing ethnography, Ellen Fuller investigates how issues of gender and identity as they relate to authority are addressed in a globalizing corporate culture. Going Global goes behind the office politics, turf wars and day-to-day workings of a transnational American company in Japan in the late 1990s as employees try to establish a comfortable place within the company.
Fuller looks at how relationships among Asians and between Asians and Americans are tested as individuals are promoted to positions of power and authority. Is there pressure for the Japanese to be more “American” to get ahead in business? Do female employees have to subscribe to certain stereotypes to be promoted or respected? How these American and Japanese workers assess one another raises important questions about international business management and human resources.
"All traders are thieves, especially women traders," people often assured social anthropologist Tuulikki Pietilä during her field work in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in the mid-1990s. Equally common were stories about businessmen who had "bought a spirit" for their enrichment. Pietilä places these and similar comments in the context of the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy that began in the 1980s, when many men and women found themselves newly enmeshed in the burgeoning market economy. Even as emerging private markets strengthened the position of enterprising people, economic resources did not automatically lead to heightened social position. Instead, social recognition remained tied to a complex cultural negotiation through stories and gossip in markets, bars, and neighborhoods.
With its rich ethnographic detail, Gossip, Markets, and Gender shows how gossip and the responses to it form an ongoing dialogue through which the moral reputations of trading women and businessmen, and cultural ideas about moral value and gender, are constructed and rethought. By combining a sociolinguistic study of talk, storytelling, and conversation with analysis of gender, the political economy of trading, and the moral economy of personhood, Pietilä reveals a new perspective on the globalization of the market economy and its meaning and impact on the local level.
Winner, Aidoo-Snyder Prize, African Studies Association Women’s Caucus
For about a decade, one of the most influential forces in US anti-immigrant politics was the Minuteman Project. The armed volunteers made headlines patrolling the southern border. What drove their ethno-nationalist politics?
Jennifer L. Johnson spent hundreds of hours observing and interviewing Minutemen, hoping to answer that question. She reached surprising conclusions. While the public face of border politics is hypermasculine—men in uniforms, fatigues, and suits—older women were central to the Minutemen. Women mobilized support and took part in border missions. These women compel us to look beyond ideological commitments and material benefits in seeking to understand the appeal of right-wing politics. Johnson argues that the women of the Minutemen were motivated in part by the gendered experience of aging in America. In a society that makes old women irrelevant, aging white women found their place through anti-immigrant activism, which wedded native politics to their concern for the safety of their families. Grandmothers on Guard emphasizes another side of nationalism: the yearning for inclusion. The nation the Minutemen imagined was not only a space of exclusion but also one in which these women could belong.
In Graphic Migrations, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India. She explores how stories of Partition migrations shape and influence the political and cultural imagination of secularism and contribute to gendered citizenship for South Asians in India and its diasporas.
Daiya analyzes modern literature, Bollywood films, Margaret Bourke-White’s photography, advertising, and print culture to show how they memorialize or erase refugee experiences. She also uses oral testimonies of Partition refugees from Hong Kong, South Asia, and North America to draw out the tensions of the nation-state, ethnic discrimination, and religious difference. Employing both Critical Refugee Studies and Feminist Postcolonial Studies frameworks, Daiya traces the cultural, affective, and political legacies of Partition migrations.
The precarity generated by modern migration and expressed through public culture prompts a rethinking of how dominant media represents gendered migrants and refugees. Graphic Migrations demands that we redraw the boundaries of how we tell the story of modern world history and the intricately interwoven, intimate production of statelessness and citizenship across the world’s communities.
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