Gender and History最新文献

This article explores male popular culture in Australia in the mid-1940s, particularly men's magazines of the period, to illuminate aspects of the psycho-sexual dimensions of Australian veterans returning to civil society. The sexual landscape of Australian society had undergone considerable transformation, especially through an increasing sexualisation of popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This provided a context for considerable sexual anxiety and tension, especially in the context of numerous stories of Australian women consorting with American servicemen during the war. Men's popular culture, especially short fiction, where more lurid fantasies could play out, often depicted women as sexually voracious and duplicitous. Many of the short stories involved love triangles where the men were betrayed by women. But the resolution of these rivalries often pathologised women while preserving the male bonds of war. Homosocial bonds were a bulwark in the troubled transition from war to peace.

As a historian of sex work, I analyse the power dynamics in the archiving practices and interpretation of sex worker lives, deconstructing the historic and current discourses shaping the possibilities for sex workers. In this article, I explore the legends of nineteenth-century Madams Annie Cook and Annie Chambers. According to the remaining historical record, Cook and Chambers transformed from sinners to angels prior to death – using sacrifice to eschew their lives of alleged immorality – and in the process, became worthy of historical remembrance and archiving. In recognising the politics of archiving certain documents but not others, I deconstruct the histories of Cook and Chambers to show how discourse and historical memory function to simplify sex worker lives. These tropes serve a larger purpose of constructing white sex worker lives as redeemable and valuable and Black sex workers as unworthy of historical memory, shaping not only the history of sex work but also current debates about sex worker lives, sex trafficking, legal rights and belonging.

The memoir of Kenan Çinili, a transgender person who was widely covered by newspapers in Turkey in the second half of the 1930s, sheds light on the historically and geographically unique workings of cisheteronormativity. Through a self-reflexive reading of the memoir and newspaper accounts from this period, this article explores how a narrative transgender subjectivity emerges from the appropriation and negotiation of tropes, figures and discourses that make this subjectivity intelligible. Through the use of the medium of photography, which exposed and spectacularised gender nonconformity, Kenan was able to performatively embody and visually present a masculine gender identity. However, the space Kenan created for narrative and visual self-constitution was conditioned by their privileges based on class, urban–rural hierarchy, ethnicity and normative sexual dimorphism.

In this article, I contextualise and explain the restriction of what I term ‘trans potential’ in later hagiography on the Spanish visionary abbess Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534). The first written work on Juana included a functionally transmasculine narrative (Juana passed briefly as a man) and a functionally transfeminine narrative (God miraculously feminised the previously male Juana prior to her birth, leaving her with an Adam's apple). In later works, the transmasculine narrative appears significantly modified, and the transfeminine narrative does not appear at all. These textual reformulations, I conclude, are most legible within the framework of transmisogyny.

This article focuses on the relationship between psychiatry and homosexuality in the People's Republic of China from the Mao era to early Deng era (1949–c.90). I argue that, entangled with the multi-centred global psychopathological regime of homosexuality, the psychiatric discourse in China perpetuated a medicalised concept of homosexuality from the Mao period through the early Deng years. This article further situates homosexuality in Mao's China in the socialist camp to call for a decentring historiography of modern homosexuality. It also contributes to the understanding of the continuity between the Mao era and the Deng era.

In the spring of 1898, Emily Edith Uzielli, a married member of the London elite, underwent an abortion, which was illegal at the time. Mrs Uzielli died as a result of the procedure, and the abortionist, Dr Collins, was accused of murder. This article examines the interconnectivity between conceptions of femininity and ideas on consumerism and the criminality of abortions in late Victorian England. It demonstrates that contemporary discourses of gender and high-powered consumption infiltrated and shaped the popular discourse of the criminality of abortions, which was depicted as closely linked to transgressions of domesticity. Through the exploration of press representations of the Uzielli case, I show that women's newly acquired liberty of promenading West End streets and shopping centres were paralleled with their alleged freedom to control family size, independently of their husbands, through the means of abortion. Abortion procuring was portrayed as yet another manifestation of such ‘feminine’ consumer practices.

Elizabeth Schlappa, “‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England”, Gender & History 35 (2023), pp. 452–471. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12594

In the above article, the title was incorrectly published as “‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England”.

The correct title should read as follows:

‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in Early Eighteenth Century England

We apologize for this error.

This short essay introduces the forum on ‛Women's Rights as Human Rights: Global Contestations over the Longue Durée’. It briefly outlines the state of the field, a new agenda for research in the area and the topics of the articles in the forum. The forum derives from a symposium on the same topic sponsored by Gender & History and held at the University of Sheffield in spring 2022.

This article offers a microhistorical reading of a criminal case of sexual violence in 1908 St Petersburg. It traces the re-interpretation of underage girls from innocent victims to potential prostitutes and carriers of debauchery and disease. Furthermore, after this case, the perceptions shifted from pitied victim to source of threatening vengeance. This discursive shift took place in newspapers, court procedures but also in charity organisations encountering victims of sexual violence. While vengeance is usually reserved as a trope for framing the actions of adult victims of sexual violence, here it was explicitly applied to underage girls, thereby rendering victims of sexual violence a threat to Russian society.