Gender and History最新文献

The article traces the performative, familial, women-centric, intergenerational storytelling tradition through studying Punjabi domestic tales collected in a private, intimate archive, in an ambience of mourning and celebration. Deploying the ‘archival turn’ in history-writing, the author argues to include personal archive as a valid source in disciplinary history. Using the idea of ‘genders as genres’, the article argues that in female-centred folktales, told to women and children, women assert their point of view, speak of their needs and desires, and hold their own. Though they may not dismantle caste-specific patriarchies, patriarchies in folktales are also unable to subdue women.

This article re-examines the evidence about childbirth and related topics in the posthumous miracle collections of English saints. It finds forty-eight such miracles in collections of thirteen English saints, mostly from the century or so after 1170. The article argues that the context in which the stories were composed is vitally important to understanding how they can be used. Contemporary concerns with miracles that could be verified constrained what stories the hagiographers could use. The nature of pregnancy and birth also limited what information could come to the keepers at the shrine in charge of collecting such stories. However, the writers were not acting as an elite vetting the information, but rather cooperated with their informants and had a sympathetic and positive view of the pregnant women. The miracula reveal that, unfazed by even gruesome gynaecological issues, the male hagiographers showed some knowledge about the birthing process. By examining the body of stories, we show what the miracula can and cannot tell us about pregnancy and childbirth.

This article examines the dress of female civic rights activist Théroigne de Méricourt and its political significance in Revolutionary Paris. The first section discusses the symbolism of her iconic scarlet riding habit. The second section explores the role of equestrian fashions in Théroigne's strategy of self-fashioning as a political actor. The third section considers the change of Théroigne's habit into a tricolour ensemble, traditionally interpreted as a parody of military garb. The fourth section argues that this new dress instead constituted a political uniform adopted by Théroigne and other militant women to further their campaign to acquire full citizenship rights.

LGBTQ people and the Evangelical Lutheran Church have a long history of tension in Finland. Christian queer activists have fought this tension since the late 1960s. This article asks how Christian queer activism was born and personally experienced in Finland from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Theoretically, this article builds on queer history and affect theory. My data contains autobiographical texts and oral history interviews of the activists and their contemporaries, as well as statements by the Church, newspaper articles and a TV debate that help to contextualise the personal activist narratives. Using the method of close reading, I pay attention to affective circulation and moments in which activism emerged or started to decline. I argue that a wide circulation of negative affects attached to homosexuality in Finland in this era created an atmosphere that both inspired Christian queer activists to act, but as time went on, also caught them up in political despair when nothing seemed to change, making them reorient their activist hope.

Traces of trans feminine pasts are scattered all across the colonial archive. In New Spain, glimpses of Indigenous trans women's lives can be found in the records of conquistadors as early as the sixteenth century. While such early colonial representations of trans femininity span myriad religious, imperial and literary contexts, they are all underpinned by one harrowing reality: the widespread, colonial pursuit of trans feminine death. To ‘re-member’ – á la Saylesh Wesley – trans feminine pasts in the colonial archive, this article traces structures of, and resistance to, colonial trans misogyny in the sodomy criminal trials of Mexico (1604–1771) and the Catholic missions of California (1769–1821). Pushing against an extant ‘cistoriography’ that has simply archived these stories within the history of sexuality, I ask: What may be gleaned by centring trans femininity and womanhood as core to not only the lives of historical subjects, but the reason many of their lives were so violently taken? By re-membering trans misogyny in this way, we may finally name and centre the long-erased trans feminine historical subject, illuminate the complex, changing structures of her past worlds and trace the oft-forgotten lineages of not just trans feminine death, but trans feminine survivance in its face.

Texts that prohibit laywomen from accessing the supernatural appear in the Libri duo of Regino of Prüm (c.906 CE) and the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (c.1020 CE). Regino and Burchard designed their handbooks for bishops to use as they visited their diocese. The handbooks forbade laywomen from accessing the supernatural through informal practices, which the texts contrasted to the male clergy's ritual access to supernatural authority. This article highlights that Regino's and Burchard's texts created a gendered hierarchy, one which associated women with illicit access to the supernatural and emphasised male clerical authority.

This article analyses under-studied women suppliers to medieval courts, with a focus on Burgundian and French courts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Through its archival research, it identifies over a hundred women involved in creating, supplying and repairing objects. Starting from the objects supplied, provisioned or repaired by women, the article seeks to understand women suppliers as significant actors in ducal and royal households through the way in which the objects they supplied became visible and meaningful expressions of ducal and royal power.

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.

Utilising interviews conducted with two transgender women, Chanel Hati and ‘CJ’, this article will explore trans activism from 1974 to 1987. Though both were members of politically active trans communities with shared priorities around community building and trans pride, the intersections of race and class meant these communities operated in vastly different ways. Hati and her fellow trans sex workers practiced a politics of difference, while CJ's community, largely white and middle class, prioritised inclusion. This article will explore the relationships between these communities, highlighting their practices of resistance, as well as the implications of intersectionality on the historicising of these trans pasts.

This article explores a series of newspaper articles from 1908, describing Miss C. – a Copenhagen woman who, apparently, hosted carnal orgies in which she ‘converted’ young women into sapphism. While most historical sources only hint at female same-sex relationships or describe women's romantic (platonic) feelings for one another, these articles are explicit in their descriptions of lust and carnal sex. For this reason, they add nuance to our historical perceptions of (Western) female same-sex relations during the turn of the twentieth century. Methodologically, I use my renovation of a Copenhagen flat as an entry point into the articles. I see both projects (the renovation and the analysis) through the lens of a palimpsest, understanding the surface to hide deeper layers of meaning. Thus, the renovation serves as an allegory of my search for knowledge about Miss C. and her lovers, which I attempt to uncover by engaging in reparative readings. As I develop the analysis, I reflect upon my longing to find historical characters who mirror my own identity, as well as the challenge faced by historians researching sexuality in their attempts to write about the past in ways that respect subjects without castrating them or depriving them of agency.