Gender and History最新文献

This article explores the little-known story of the métis children of a well-known figure in French history – Dr Eugène Jamot, who was a medical doctor who had served in the colonial service in French West Africa (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF) in the early-twentieth century. Jamot fathered three multiracial children with an African Fulani woman named Fatima Labané who originated from AEF. In patriating them to France, Jamot established a de facto acknowledgement of paternity and fostered domestic life with/for and paternal care for his children. His death in April 1937 left his three children in a state of legal, social and economic vulnerability. Over the course of several years, his oldest son Louis Desnaute, Jamot's White French male friends and professional colleagues and Labané endeavoured to form a safety net, care consisting of money, the mobilisation of citizenship law and the exercise of social resources of citizenship rights for the children to secure and affirm their belonging in/to France. This article argues that an infrastructure of feelings – paternalism, maternalism, loyalty, vulnerability, pathos, affection, shame, anger, despair and anxiety – facilitated relational rupture and repair for the three children and their children from the colonial to postcolonial periods.

The American men's rights movement cohered in the early 1960s to reclaim men's allegedly lost legal rights and social privileges. Activists focused on men's perceived exploitation in the family courts, protesting alimony payments in particular. By the 1980s, a sub-movement focused on ‘fathers rights’ had emerged. Fathers' rights activists emphasized the issues of child custody placements and child support payments, arguing that mothers received preferential treatment.

These intertwined movements advancing a narrative of anti-male discrimination benefitted from strategic deployments of emotion. Leveraging narratives of anger, sadness, and deprivation allowed these movements to gain new members as well as sympathetic press coverage, while masking the financial motivations underlying some of their desired reforms. The closely related men's and fathers' rights movements thus comprised an emotional constituency, a group united by a shared emotional experience that orients itself toward political and legal systems. In their late-twentieth-century organizing efforts, the emotional constituency of men's and fathers' rights activism pushed for legal and policy changes alongside cultural reevaluations of modern men.

Drawing on oral history interviews, organisational ephemera, television talk shows and published materials, ‘Nothing to Lose’ uncovers gay and bisexual men's leadership in the male survivors’ movement between 1985 and 1995. In the mid-1980s, male survivors of sexual abuse were just starting to come together in grassroots self-help groups and therapists’ offices. By the early 1990s, a growing number of books and memoirs as well as formalised organisations existed to support them. Despite interlocking stereotypes of sexually abused boys as destined to become both gay and abusive, gay and bisexual men served as leaders in this movement because they had already defied the gender and norms that made it so difficult for male survivors to come forward. Due to their experience in other activist struggles, they also had the skills and knowledge needed to organise groups and events, write self-help literature and speak to the media. By facilitating public expressions of male pain and vulnerability, as well as greater recognition of male sexual victimisation, the men discussed here complicated and enriched feminist analyses of childhood sexual abuse, while also helping to transform broader understandings of masculinity and the family.