Gender and History最新文献

Contradicting heteropatriarchal romance narratives in the historical archive, Bachman-Sanders reads the diary of a woman cyclist from Leeds, UK written between 1893 and 1896 against the grain to reveal an identity for the diarist that is relationally and spatially constructed. She utilises feminist inter-subjective reading practices and a queer interpretive framework to investigate the personal, genealogical, geographical and historical context surrounding this diary and to interrogate her own attachment to the research subject. Bachman-Sanders produces a collection of images and maps that explore the intimate connections and non-linearity of bicycle tourism and feminist historical research, pushing the limits of the ‘queer object’.

This article considers the well-crafted but often overlooked gender politics of the Integralistas, Brazil's largest fascist movement of the 1930s. Led by writer Plínio Salgado, the Integralistas, who allegedly reached one million members by 1935, became Brazil's first-ever mass political organisation. They envisioned what they called a Christian holistic state (Estado Integral), one in which corporatism, nationalism and faith would sustain the country's very existence in opposition to communism, materialism and liberalism. Largely unexplored iconographic material reveal that gender appeared at the very heart of their political ambitions: a sexualised type of hypermasculinity pointed to an ideal Brazil rooted in Christian-based notions of masculinity and femininity, having men as nation-builders and women as family-nurturers, and a racialised version of expected membership, with Blacks and the indigenous population welcomed only as infantilised male and female beings who depended upon much tutoring from self-proclaimed grown-up white Brazilian men. As this article explores, the politics of the Integralistas were not alone in 1930s Brazil.

In December 1946, college student Shen Chong was raped by an inebriated US Marine in Peking. Although the initial trial by the court martial in China found the Marine guilty, the verdict was overturned by Judge Advocate General of the Navy in Washington. Student protests quickly turned into a nationwide anti-American movement. In contrast to previous studies that emphasise the event's political impacts from the perspective of American imperialism and Chinese nationalism, this article shifts both the focus and scale of inquiry from the macro of national and international politics to the micro of a Chinese woman's body, investigating the particular mechanisms through which injustice towards a Chinese woman was executed in the US justice system. Probing along and against the ‘archival grain’ in both countries and languages, this article argues that such injustice was not only grounded in the political hegemony of the US military empire, but also resulted from a flawed legal system steeped in racial and sexual biases against Chinese women. This article further suggests that in order to understand this key chapter of Sino–US history, we must bring back to the centre of our study the injured woman, a figure that has remained largely invisible in the grand narratives of conventional political and diplomatic history.

This article sheds light on male identities in interwar Belgian Congo by using the colony's largest palm oil concession as a case study. Based on colonial archives and oral testimonies, it shows how vernacular and colonial understandings of masculinity interplayed and keep on influencing ways to ‘be a man’ in the present. This article is divided into four parts. First, it highlights how vigorous male bodies supposedly constituted entry points in the colonial ‘civilizing mission’. Second, it addresses the convergences between coming-of-age rituals and of palm oil labour as markers of adulthood. Third, it nuances the association of dominant masculinity with brute force by showing how the ‘strongest’ palm oil workers were suspected to use witchcraft. Fourth, it addresses the apparent contradiction between recollection of colonial labour as an experience of hardships and paternalist ‘pampering’.

This article examines performances of identity (as daughter, mother and widow) by Isabella d'Aragona (1470–1524) in three of her letters. Isabella's construction of self, drew on her status as a dynast of the House of Aragon and aimed at securing her future and promote the interests of her children. The analysis of the language of letters, their context and their outcomes will contribute to the understanding of the use of letter-writing as an effective rhetorical device, thus demonstrating that the epistolary genre was used by women to engage their male recipients in a persuasive negotiation.