Gender and History最新文献

The processes by which diasporic colonised Indian women were constituted as anti-colonial military subjects offer a valuable corrective to the neglected role of colonised women in the scholarship on decolonisation and war. This article addresses how female officers of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment staged and performed anti-colonial gendered military identities across several novel sites. Reworking Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, it investigates the punitive consequences and agential possibilities of militarised anti-colonial performance of gender and considers how anti-colonial military identities, performed through the body and emotion, reproduced and disrupted gender norms.

American anarchist-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre created a radical vision of liberation informed by her experiences of chronic illness, depression, poverty and misogyny. This article traces the connections between de Cleyre's embodied experiences and her theorisations of anarchism. Drawing on feminist and disability theories, it argues that de Cleyre's suffering led her to an empathetic vision of anarchism which prioritised freedom from suffering, highlighting the role of embodiment in social movements and political theory. Anarchism provided de Cleyre both a means to understand her own pain as well as its remedy.

This article aims to discuss the conversations around men's clothing and appearance in Leningrad during the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1950s, fashion became an important ideological issue in the Soviet Union. The policy of isolationism of late Stalinism alongside the rise of youth subculture stiliagi produced the emergence of formal and informal mechanisms and regimes of regulation of appearance of the Soviet population for the next decade. The system of fashion houses aimed to provide Soviet citizens with contemporary and comfortable clothing and teach them the rules of ‘good taste’ and a proper appearance. The Leningrad Fashion House designed and produced clothing and discussed the variants of appearance of the city residents at official meetings and in fashion magazines. Although fashion was considered as woman's prerogative at the time, the fashion house took into account male customers’ needs and provided them with various clothing items. This article argues that the fashion house in Leningrad constructed its own vision of masculinity that was not significantly influenced by the authorities and to which most male citizens could not adhere.

Scholars have only paid limited attention to petite feet as a US fashion and as a cross-cultural beauty ideal. Framed as a visual metaphor of Chinese alterity, traditionalism and patriarchal oppression, footbinding served as a crucial terrain in which the USA asserted its supremacy through a racialised discourse of difference at the turn of the twentieth century. Through a comparative lens, this article spotlights powerful details about shared ideologies of women's bodies in the USA and China. By tracing how women's feet were discussed in newspaper and magazine coverage of US small foot fashion and foot contests, and locating these narratives in a global context, it uncovers the ways in which the discourse of modernity, ideology of white superiority and imperialism naturalised Western women's foot beauty norm as an aesthetic ideal, which obscured the convergences of feminine beauty standards in different parts of the world. Ironically, this racialised global hierarchy of beauty under the guise of modernity tapped into a traditional form of femininity and upset efforts to reflect on the limits of white women's agency both in a traditional patriarchal culture and in a modernising US society, which ultimately constrained possibilities of local and global transformations.

During the First World War, the Rev. Charles S. Donald, warden of the London-based Rugby Club, sent several war time circulars to current and former club members. This article examines how Donald used the circular's photographs to sustain pre-war links. It will therefore consider how snapshots from their annual camping trips and boxing heroes inscribed male intimacy and friendship. Touch will be shown to be a vehicle through which homosocial intimacy was expressed both in the moment the photograph was captured and during the war.

The late eighteenth century has often been portrayed as a pivotal period in the genesis of modern awareness and use of time. Despite this, empirical research to bolster such claims remains relatively thin. The same holds true for gender differences as surprisingly little is known about women's timekeeping and time-use in early modern Europe. Drawing on evidence from the late eighteenth-century diary of Clara Cornelia van Eijck, a Dutch burgeres who spent her days in exile in Ghent, this article provides a fresh perspective on some of the key debates on early modern awareness of time.

This article identifies a specific historiographical gap obfuscating communist women, namely, a ‘double blind spot’ rooted in the combined effect of the scant consideration of women in histories of communism and of communist activists in accounts of the women's movement. It traces this pattern of invisibilisation back to the paradigm of communist women's ‘instrumentalisation’ and to the resulting paradox of an ‘activism without agency’. The article then provides a critique of this received image; first, through an analysis of emerging scholarship on the female communist experience; second, through recourse to actors’ own perspective on the rapport between communism and feminism and the possibilities of ‘double militancy’, drawn from sources of the post-1968 Italian context. It closes with an argument for relocating communist women as an unexpectedly transgressive subject of twentieth-century history.

This article builds on previous literary scholarship to analyse the social and publication history of the enormously successful Lettres portugaises (1669), five letters published in the voice of an anonymous Portuguese nun to a French officer. Although the letters were based on an ancient model, this article suggests that their references to contemporary gendered constructions of biology and love, especially for enclosed women, were successfully used by publishers to commercialise a historically recurring gender binary of heterosexual love: men were rejected and women were abandoned. The popularity of the text was such that it entrenched notions of women's helplessness in matters of the heart for almost three centuries. This article argues that the Lettres portugaises’ success was as much the result of the text's literary qualities as it was of the canny paratextual strategies deployed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publishers to sell the book, its sequels and its imitations.