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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2024

        Premodern ruling sexualities

        Representation, identity, and power

        by Gabrielle Storey, Zita Eva Rohr

        This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2023

        Becoming a mother

        An Australian history

        by Carla Pascoe Leahy

        Becoming a mother charts the diverse and complex history of Australian mothering for the first time, exposing the ways it has been both connected to and distinct from parallel developments in other industrialised societies. In many respects, the historical context in which Australian women come to motherhood has changed dramatically since 1945. And yet examination of the memories of multiple maternal generations reveals surprising continuities in the emotions and experiences of first-time motherhood. Drawing upon interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, history, psychology and sociology, Carla Pascoe Leahy unpacks this multifaceted rite of passage through more than 60 oral history interviews, demonstrating how maternal memories continue to influence motherhood today. Despite radical shifts in understandings of gender, care and subjectivity, becoming a mother remains one of the most personally and culturally significant moments in a woman's life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine
        January 2025

        Nursing the English from plague to Peterloo, 1665-1820

        by Alannah Tomkins

        This book studies the negative stereotypes around the women who worked as sick nurses in this period and contrasts them with the lived experience of both domestic and institutional nursing staff. Furthermore, it integrates nursing by men into the broader history of care as a constant if little-recognised presence. It finds that women and men undertook caring work to the best of their ability, and often performed well, despite multiple threats to nurse reputations on the grounds of gender norms and social status. Chapters consider nursing in the home, in general hospitals, in specialist institutions like the Royal Chelsea Hospital and asylums, plus during wartime, illuminated by multiple accounts of individual nurses. In these settings, it employs the sociological concept of 'dirty work' to contextualise the challenges to nurses and nursing identities.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2024

        Thierry and Theodoret

        John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and Nathan Field

        by Domenico Lovascio

        Enthusiastically praised by Charles Lamb and A. C. Swinburne but unjustly neglected since the early twentieth century, Thierry and Theodoret dramatizes events from medieval French history. With its disenchanted depiction of royalty, its eerie instability in terms of genre, and its black comic overtones, Thierry and Theodoret strikes as a distinctive specimen of tragic drama in the Jacobean mould and ranks as one of the most powerful plays in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. This Revels Plays volume is the first fully annotated critical edition of the play, and the first to attribute it to Nathan Field alongside Fletcher and Philip Massinger. It provides a thorough introduction reassessing the play's engagement with its sources - including Shakespeare - and discusses the dating, authorship, and reception of this bizarrely captivating play, pointing the way for future scholarship, especially of a historical or gender-based nature.

      • Trusted Partner
        2018

        Rediscovering Sex

        From pressure to pleasure in bed - an excersise book for men

        by Michael Sztenc

        Penises are clever guys, sensitive and touchy. At least that’s what Michael Sztenc says. And as a sex and couples’ therapist who has worked on male sexuality for over 25 years, he should know. With practical exercises that have been tried and tested for years, he helps the men who come to him with their problems to develop a sense for their bodies and their own eroticism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2023

        Poison on the early modern English stage

        Plants, paints and potions

        by Lisa Hopkins, Bill Angus

        Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans' relationship to the environment.

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        June 2024

        Gendered urban violence among Brazilians

        Painful truths from Rio de Janeiro and London

        by Cathy McIlwaine, Paul Heritage, Miriam Krenzinger Azambuja, Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Eliana Sousa Silva, Yara Evans

        This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.

      • Trusted Partner
        Sociology: family & relationships
        July 2016

        Changing gender roles and attitudes to family formation in Ireland

        by Series edited by Rob Kitchin, Margret Fine-Davis

        Recent decades have witnessed major changes in gender roles and family patterns, as well as a falling birth rate in Ireland and the rest of Europe. While the traditional family is now being replaced in many cases by new family forms, we do not know the reasons why people are making the choices they are and whether or not these choices are leading to greater well-being. While demographic research has attempted to explain the new trends in family formation and fertility, there has been little research on people's attitudes to family formation and having children. This book presents the results of the first major study to examine people's attitudes to family formation and childbearing in Ireland. Based on a nationwide representative sample of 1,404 men and women in the childbearing age group, the study was carried out against a backdrop of changing gender role attitudes and behaviour as well as significant demographic change.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2003

        Women, gender and fascism in Europe, 1919–45

        by Kevin Passmore

        What attracts women to far-right movements that appear to denigrate their rights? This question has vexed feminist scholars for decades and has led to many lively debates in the academy. In this context, during the 1980s, the study of women, gender, and fascism in twentieth-century Europe took off, pioneered by historians such as Claudia Koonz and Victoria de Grazia. This volume makes an exciting contribution to the evolving body of work based upon these earlier studies, bringing emerging scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe alongside that of more established Western European historiography on the topic. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45 features fourteen essays covering Serbia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Poland in addition to Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and Britain, and a conclusion that pulls together a European-wide perspective. As a whole, the volume provides a compelling comparative examination of this important topic through current research, literature reviews, and dialogue with existing debates. The essays cast new light on questions such as women's responsibility for the collapse of democracy in interwar Europe, the interaction between the women's movement and the extreme right, and the relationships between conceptions of national identity and gender. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2025

        Straight nation

        Heteronormativity and other exigencies of postcolonial nationalism

        by Pavan Mano

        In Straight Nation, Pavan Mano reveals the logic of straightness that sits at the heart of postcolonial nationalism in Singapore. Mano rejects the romantic notion of the nation as a haven of belonging, showing it to be a relentless force that is allied with heteronormativity to create a host of minoritized and xenologized figures. Through meticulous exploration and close reading of a swathe of texts, Mano unveils the instrumental role of sexuality in structuring the national imaginary. The book adroitly demonstrates how queerness is rendered foreign in postcolonial Singapore and functions alongside technologies of "race", gender, and class. A provocative critique of narrow contemporary identity politics and its concomitant stymying of a more ambitious political critique, Straight Nation sets out an argument that moves beyond the negativity of traditional critique into a space of (re)thinking, (re)building and (re)imagining.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2024

        Sexual politics in revolutionary England

        by Sam Fullerton

        Sexual politics in revolutionary England recounts a dramatic transformation in English sexual polemic that unfolded during the kingdom's mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. In early Stuart England, explicit sexual language was largely confined to manuscript and oral forms by the combined regulatory pressures of ecclesiastical press licensing and powerful cultural notions of civility and decorum. During the early 1640s, however, graphic sex-talk exploded into polemical print for the first time in English history. Over the next two decades, sexual politics evolved into a vital component of public discourse, as contemporaries utilized sexual satire to reframe the English Revolution as a battle between licentious Stuart tyrants and their lecherous puritan enemies. By the time that Charles II regained the throne in 1660, this book argues, sex was already a routine element of English political culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2023

        The gift of narrative in medieval England

        by Nicholas Perkins

        This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2013

        Gender, artWork and the global imperative

        A materialist feminist critique

        by Angela Dimitrakaki

        Is gender implicated in how art does its work in the world created by global capital? Is a global imperative exclusive to capital's planetary expansion or also witnessed in oppositional practices in art and curating? And what is new in the gendered paradigms of art after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Angela Dimitrakaki addresses these questions in an insightful and highly original analysis of travel as artistic labour, the sexualisation of migration as a relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, the rise of female collectives, masculinity and globalisation's 'bad boys', the emergence of a gendered economic subject that has dethroned postmodernism, and the need for a renewed materialist feminism. This is a theoretically astute overview of developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s and the first study to attempt a critical refocusing of feminist politics in art history in the wake of globalisation. It will be essential reading in art history, gender, feminist and globalisation studies, curatorial theory, cultural studies and beyond. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2023

        Now that's what I call a history of the 1980s

        by Lucy Robinson

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 1998

        Gender and imperialism

        by Clare Midgley, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        This book marks an important new intervention into a vibrant area of scholarship, creating a dialogue between the histories of imperialism and of women and gender. By engaging critically with both traditional British imperial history and colonial discourse analysis, the essays demonstrate how feminist historians can play a central role in creating new histories of British imperialism. Chronologically, the focus is on the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, while geographically the essays range from the Caribbean to Australia and span India, Africa, Ireland and Britain itself. Topics explored include the question of female agency in imperial contexts, the relationships between feminism and nationalism, and questions of sexuality, masculinity and imperial power. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Engendering whiteness

        White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865

        by Cecily Jones

        Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities. Crucially, as the biological reproducers of whiteness, and hence the symbolic and literal embodiment and bearers of the state of freedom, they were critical to the maintenance and reproduction of the cultural boundaries of 'whiteness', and consequently the subjects of patriarchal measures to limit and control their social and sexual freedoms. Engendering whiteness draws on a wide variety of sources including property deeds, wills, court transcripts, and interrogates the ways in which white women could be simultaneously socially positioned within plantation societies as both agents and as victims. It also reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, to challenge the ideological and social constraints that sought to restrict their lives to the private domestic sphere, to protect the limited rights afforded to them, to secure independent livelihoods, and to create meaningful existences. A fascinating study that with be welcomed by historians of imperialism as well as scholars of gender history and women's studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2022

        Class, work and whiteness

        Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79

        by Nicola Ginsburgh

        This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.

      • Trusted Partner
        Social & cultural history
        January 2016

        Gender, rhetoric and regulation

        Women's work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55

        by Helen Glew

        The Civil Service and the London County Council employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers these institutions influenced both each other and private organisations, thereby serving as a barometer or benchmark for the conditions of women's white-collar employment. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources - including policy documents, trade union records, women's movement campaign literature and employees' personal testimony - this is the first book-length study of women's public service employment in this period. It examines three aspects of their working lives - inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality of opportunity - and demonstrates how far wider cultural assumptions about womanhood shaped policies towards women's employment and experiences. Scholars and students with interests in gender, British social and cultural history and labour history will find this an invaluable text.

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