Gender and History最新文献

This article demonstrates that objects, more specifically the trans usage of objects that disrupted and rearticulated the normative alignment of objects, sexed bodies and gender embodiments, served a formative role in helping male-assigned individuals to cross gender boundaries and achieve trans-femininity in Ming-Qing China. The examined objects include the foot-binding cloth for the feminine bodily image of bound feet, the embroidery needle for ‘womanly work’ and concealing underwear for feminine, penetrated sexual acts. This object-oriented heuristic offers a new culturally specific approach to trans history beyond identarian frameworks and foregrounds the material multiplicity of trans formations and embodiments in Ming-Qing China.

The name-change petitions housed in the New York City Civil Court allow us to see the ways that Jewish families, cisgender women and transgender people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries used state mechanisms to challenge institutionalised antisemitism and traditional definitions of family and gender. At the same time, however, the petitions also indicate the oppressive elements of the state, as these groups increasingly felt it necessary to undertake the emotional and physical labour entailed in official name changing to establish the personal identity and familial authority that cisgender men are granted automatically in US legal tradition.

This article explores gendered notions of modernity in late socialist Poland in the context of the household. It examines the scenarios of modernity for the household that were developed by various expert bodies and popularised by the mass media, and women's memoirs written as competition entries that describe their everyday practices. The main aim of this analysis is to examine how the memoirists responded to expert discourses about gendered modernity at home. The article shows that although they appear to have understood how to produce their life stories to interweave their experiences with official political discourse, the memoirs can be considered a valuable source that describes how individuals understood modernity, and how expert discourses affected their value system.

This article draws into comparative conversation Rumer Godden's 1939 novel about nuns in the Himalayas, Black Narcissus, and the records of real-world nuns from the Loreto order in India. Through this comparison, we shed light on the under-studied field of nuns in India and on the intersection of gender and colonialism during the later period of colonial rule. Reading fiction against historical archives, we find that a novel that has been lauded for its anti-imperialist stance in fact retains elements of orientalism that dovetail with a misogynistic outlook. Meanwhile, an order that exhibited racist and colonialist tendencies also, despite and because of these, engineered a project with significant feminist purpose. This juxtaposition of Godden's novel and Loreto's internal archives reveals the ways in which white feminist goals can be at odds with anti-colonialist ones, but it also shows how the standard portrayal of nuns – represented by Godden's novel – as regressive and lacking agency does not hold up in the face of the historical record.

This article proposes a methodology of reaching in historicity. It does so by tracing the technical object of synthetic testosterone as it has been used by trans people for gender affirming care. To show the usefulness of the method, this article employs it first in relation to mentions of synthetic testosterone in the South African Medical Journal as a primer to understanding its relationship to the state and the law in South Africa from 1963 to 2003, reaching an apex in the Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Groups advocacy for self-identification, much of which hinged on the role of synthetic testosterone.

As a trans intervention in Victorian studies and historical extension of recent work in trans studies, this article argues that the theorisation of natural laws in mid-nineteenth century, British physiology produces a ‘preliminary cisness’ in Victorian sexual science. By then juxtaposing George Eliot's Adam Bede with work by Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes and undertaking a close study of the characters Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, this article suggests that Eliot offers social sympathy as a non-cis, epistemological alternative to the ethical risks of pre-cis sex.

This article explores the intersections between gender, disability and care labour in the slaveholding societies of the British Caribbean from 1788 to 1834. Considered economic burdens by slaveholders, aged and disabled bondswomen were made productive through caring for their enslaved peers, many of whom were themselves temporarily unproductive due to pregnancy, illness, age or impairment. Although slaveowners devalued aged and disabled bondswomen, and assigned them inferior labour positions, in actuality, slaveowners concealed an economic logic: disabled and aged bondspeople were efficient but of a different kind, and their productivity was essential to the healthscape of the plantation. This article explores The History of Mary Prince as a first-hand account of an enslaved woman who experienced episodic impairment and long-term disability and who practiced self-care and received care from multiple different women.