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      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        February 2025

        Assemblages of cancer

        Experiences and contexts of breast cancer in the UK, France and Italy

        by Cinzia Greco

        Assemblages of cancer illustrates the tensions in the experiences and context of breast cancer in Western Europe. Breast cancer is presented as a success story in oncology, especially in countries with advanced, universal healthcare systems. At the same time, individual experiences are shaped by uncertainty, local variability of healthcare provisions, and the need for patients to assemble information about the treatments, knowledge on healthcare systems navigation, and different processes of meaning-making to manage the uncertainty and variability characterising individual outcomes. The book explores both how individual bodies and experiences are transformed by different local medical practices, institutions and discourses of breast cancer and how patients need to find their own way in these contexts. Assemblages of cancer is based on ten years of ethnographic work with patients and medical professionals in the UK, France and Italy.

      • Trusted Partner
        October 2022

        From Dream to Trauma: Mental abuse in partnerships

        by Caroline Wenzel

        The level of domestic abuse has been increasing for years, but often only cases of physical abuse hit the headlines. Hardly anyone talks about the mental, or psychological, abuse that usually precedes a physical or sexual assault. Those affected do not usually recognise the destructive dynamic in their relationship until far too late. In this book, three case histories illustrate the typical forms of mental abuse in relationships. In addition, experts explain the topic from psychological, therapeutic, political and legal perspectives, and the head of a counselling centre for male victims of mental abuse also has his say. An important and startling book.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2023

        Intimacy and mobility in an era of hardening borders

        Gender, reproduction, regulation

        by Haldis Haukanes, Frances Pine

        This book is a collection of articles by anthropologists and social scientists concerned with gendered labour, care, intimacy and sexuality, in relation to mobility and the hardening of borders in Europe. Interrogating the relation between physical, geopolitical borders and ideological, conceptual boundaries, it offers a range of vivid and original ethnographic case studies that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in gendered migration, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and regulation of reproduction and intimacy. The book presents ethnographic and phenomenological discussions of people's changing lives as they cross borders, how people transgress and reshape moral boundaries of proper gender and kinship behaviour, and moral economies of intimacy and sexuality. It also focuses on migrants' navigation of social and financial services in their destination countries, putting questions about rights and limitations on citizenship at the core.

      • 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
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Gender and imperialism

        by Clare Midgley

        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
        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
        April 2024

        The elementary structuring of patriarchy

        Bolivian women and transborder mobilities in the Andes

        by Menara Guizardi

        Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile's northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are constructed in the (multi)situated experience of these transborder women. By building a bridge between classical anthropological studies on kinship and contemporary debates on transnational and transborder mobility, the book invites us to rethink structuralist theoretical assertions on the elementary character of family alliances.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2024

        Politicising and gendering care for older people

        Multidisciplinary perspectives from Europe

        by Anca Dohotariu, Ana Paula Gil, Lubica Volanská

        This book offers a new critical framework for understanding the processes of politicising and gendering care for older people and their manifestations in several European contexts. It interrogates how care for older adults varies across time and place while searching for an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy in different countries and at various societal and political levels. It brings together multidisciplinary contributions that examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels.

      • 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
        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
      • Trusted Partner
        History
        February 2017

        Gendered transactions

        The white woman in colonial India, c.1820–1930

        by Series edited by Andrew S. Thompson, Indrani Sen

        This book seeks to capture the complex experience of the white woman in colonial India through an exploration of gendered interactions over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines missionary and memsahibs' colonial writings, both literary and non-literary, probing their construction of Indian women of different classes and regions, such as zenana women, peasants, ayahs and wet-nurses. Also examined are delineations of European female health issues in male authored colonial medical handbooks, which underline the misogyny undergirding this discourse. Giving voice to the Indian woman, this book also scrutinises the fiction of the first generation of western-educated Indian women who wrote in English, exploring their construction of white women and their negotiations with colonial modernities. This fascinating book will be of interest to the general reader and to experts and students of gender studies, colonial history, literary and cultural studies as well as the social history of health and medicine.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2024

        States of enmity

        The politics of hatred in the early modern Kingdom of Naples

        by Stephen Cummins

        State of enmity explores how relations of hatred and enmity played political and social roles in the early modern Kingdom of Naples. Exploring the pervasive notion of enmity and practices of reconciliation, the book provides new insight into the social dynamics of southern Italy in the early modern period. In particular, widespread banditry and the violent tenor of local politics are analysed through a wide variety of criminal trials and other sources.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2003

        Step-daughters of England

        British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary

        by Jane Garrity

        Jane Garrity shows how four British women modernists - Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf - used experimental literary techniques in order to situate themselves as national subjects. Reading literary texts through the lens of material culture, this book makes a major contribution to the new modernist studies by arguing that women's imaginative work is inseparable from their ambivalent and complicated relation to Britain's imperial history. Drawing on extensive archival research, Garrity takes as her point of departure the ubiquitous maternal and racial link to national identification during the interwar period. Each chapter foregrounds a different range of cultural developments that coincided with the rise of modernism, such as emerging visual techniques, the revival of British neo-medievalism, ethnographic work on primitive mysticism, and nostalgia for English ruralism. By locating both canonical and non-canonical works of female literary modernism within broader cultural discourses, Garrity demonstrates the intersections among nationalism, imperialism, gender and sexuality in the construction of English national culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Martial races

        The military, race and masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857–1914

        by Heather Streets

        This book explores how and why Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs, and Nepalese Gurkhas became identified as the British Empire's fiercest, most manly soldiers in nineteenth century discourse. As 'martial races' these men were believed to possess a biological or cultural disposition to the racial and masculine qualities necessary for the arts of war. Because of this, they were used as icons to promote recruitment in British and Indian armies - a phenomenon with important social and political effects in India, in Britain, and in the armies of the Empire. Martial Races bridges regional studies of South Asia and Britain while straddling the fields of racial theory, masculinity, imperialism, identity politics, and military studies. Of particular importance is the way it exposes the historical instability of racial categories based on colour and its insistence that historically specific ideologies of masculinity helped form the logic of imperial defence, thus wedding gender theory with military studies in unique ways. Moreover, Martial Races challenges the marginalisation of the British Army in histories of Victorian popular culture, and demonstrates the army's enduring impact on the regional cultures of the Highlands, the Punjab and Nepal. This unique study will make fascinating reading for higher level students and experts in imperial history, military history and gender history.

      • 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
        The Arts
        November 2024

        'The industrialized designer'

        Gender, identity and professionalization in Britain and the United States, 1930-80

        by Leah Armstrong

        What does it mean to be called an industrial designer? This book traces the remarkable rise of this professional identity in historical perspective from a position of anonymity in the early twentieth century, to mid-century professionalisation, to decline and disintegration by 1980. Drawing on new, extensive, original archival research, it uncovers the history of a profession in a state of re-invention, 1930-1980 in Britain and the United States. The book tests assumptions about the relationship between the professions in the two countries, bringing them into comparative historical perspective for the first time. The gendered dynamics of professionalisation and their interaction with the representation of the heroic male designer are interrogated and critically examined. Building on new gender perspectives to the history of the industrial design profession, the book calls for a re-examination of the limits and boundaries of what constitutes professional identity and work.

      • Trusted Partner

        SEX CULTURE

        What is sex? Or: why don't we just let it be?

        by Bettina Stangneth

        Above all else, and despite all the enlightenment of the age, sex in the 21st century seems to be a problem. Abuse, MeToo, human trafficking, circumcision, role-playing, body cult... But if sex is a mere abyss for modern humans, then why not just let it be? We are the first generation that could actually do it without endangering the survival of the species. And voices are getting louder that once again call for abstinence in a supposedly over-sexualised society. Artificial insemination and artificially intelligent technology for the safe removal of instincts should finally pacify what humans cannot control: instinctive nature. Sex is not the epitome of our animal nature. Every attempt to control the animal in us, either by taming it or by freeing it from tamers in a sexual revolution, inevitably misses the point. Bettina Stangneth asks the quite simple question: what is sex? If every culture of prohibition has failed so far, clearer ideas are obviously needed. Even if we prefer to ignore it, attempts to establish a culture through desire instead of the cultivation of desire have been around for a long time. After all, if you don't want to learn to talk positively about sex, you can't talk meaningfully about coercion and violence.

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