Gender and History最新文献

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.

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.

Drawing on archival materials from the Kinsey Institute, including letters of correspondence between medical professionals and transgender people during the 1950s–1970s, this article demonstrates how scientific and medical communities selectively employed old and new eugenics in their work with trans patients seeking hormonal and/or surgical interventions. Old eugenics helped providers control trans people's reproduction and family formations. New eugenics helped providers maintain social control over trans people's lives and solidify an ‘ideal’ patient who demonstrated their ‘value’ by upholding social fitness standards. This work contributes to histories of trans medicine by analysing this era through the lens of eugenics and expanding understandings of how medical and scientific communities sought to assert reproductive and social control over trans people.

Whether trans people – especially trans women – were persecuted by the Nazi regime remains a contested yet under-researched topic. But the wider political backdrop (including the culture wars and Holocaust memorialisation practices) steers this historical question with a monolithic value: victimisation. This hyper-focus on victimisation is underpinned by a ‘paranoia’ that pre-empts tragic historical narratives. Trans histories that do not neatly map onto tragic narration are therefore deemed unthinkable and remain absent from the nascent literature. In a move against paranoid anticipation, this article puts forward an argument for a ‘Camp reading’ practice that embraces ‘insincere’ and ironic material to recalibrate which trans stories are deigned to be given a history. The microhistory of Bella P. in Nazi-era Vienna acts as a case study in divesting from the politics of victimhood, that challenges the historian's anticipatory impulses, offering the trans feminine past under National Socialism a ‘reparative’ entry into the historical canon on its own terms.

This contribution examines the role of Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, the French representative in the UN Commission on the Status of Women between 1948 and 1953. By focusing on Lefaucheux's activism and connection with the French government, this article intends to analyse how French post-imperial policy carried out by reformist women's organisations pursued the expansion of women's and human rights whilst supporting the empire. Using a range of archival sources and the Commission's reports, this work argues that the role of reformist imperial women and organisations was crucial in influencing the Commission which was both a place of contestation and protection of the gendered and colonial order.

The article contributes to a genealogy of the global articulation of reproductive rights principles, as established at the 1994 United Nations (UN) Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo and the UN Women's Conference held in Beijing the following year. It highlights the key role played by an emerging global women's health movement in the 1970s–80s, in shaping UN debates on family planning, women's rights in procreative choice and women's roles in socio-economic development. The article focuses on the International Campaign for Abortion, Sterilisation and Contraception (est. London 1978) and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Amsterdam and Manila 1984; ECOSOC consultative status in 1992). Adopting an intersectional perspective, the paper highlights the local embeddedness of feminist positions, the shortcomings of Western feminism and the ways in which conflicts between women's organisations allowed for an original and evolving concept of reproductive rights to emerge. It is based on UN papers and the archives of the above organisations and family planning movements.