Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Sex, politics and empire

        A postcolonial geography

        by Richard Phillips

        Colonial governments, institutions and companies recognised that in many ways the effective operation of the Empire depended upon sexual arrangements. For example, nuclear families serving agricultural colonization, and prostitutes working for single men who powered armies and plantations, mines and bureaucracies. For this reason they devised elaborate systems of sexual governance, such as attending to marriage and the family. However, they also devoted disproportionate energy to marking and policing the sexual margins. In Sex, Politics and Empire, Richard Phillips investigates controversies surrounding prostitution, homosexuality and the age of consent in the British Empire, and revolutionises our notions about the importance of sex as a nexus of imperial power relations.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2025

        Before Gender

        Lost stories from trans history 1850-1950

        by Eli Erlick

        Discover the trailblazing lives of thirty trans people who will radically change everything you've been told about transgender history. Highlighting influential individuals from 1850 to 1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares thirty remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term. Organised into four parts, paralleling today's controversies over gender identity - kids, activists, workers and athletes - Before Gender introduces figures whose forgotten stories transform the discussion. These ground-breaking histories include two of the first teens to access gender-affirming medical treatment, a countess who instigated an LGBTQ+ riot forty years before Stonewall and the greatest female billiards player of the 1910s. Bold and visionary, Erlick's debut uncovers these lost stories from the depths of the archives to narrate trans lives in a way that has never been attempted before.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers

        Theory, practice and difference

        by Parvati Nair, Julian Gutierrez-Albilla

        This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers. Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US. With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies.

      • 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
        May 2025

        Women’s Troubles

        Gender and feminist politics in post-Agreement Northern Ireland

        by Claire Pierson

        How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement. Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Claire Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women's Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2006

        Sex, politics and empire

        A postcolonial geography

        by Richard Phillips, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie, Caroline Wilding

        Colonial governments, institutions and companies recognised that in many ways the effective operation of the Empire depended upon sexual arrangements. For example, nuclear families serving agricultural colonization, and prostitutes working for single men who powered armies and plantations, mines and bureaucracies. For this reason they devised elaborate systems of sexual governance, such as attending to marriage and the family. However, they also devoted disproportionate energy to marking and policing the sexual margins. In Sex, Politics and Empire, Richard Phillips investigates controversies surrounding prostitution, homosexuality and the age of consent in the British Empire, and revolutionises our notions about the importance of sex as a nexus of imperial power relations. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • 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
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Migrant races

        Empire,Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji

        by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, Satadru Sen

        This book is a study of mobility, image and identity in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a model for studies of migrant figures like K.S. Ranjitsinhji who emerged during the imperial period. Ranjitsinhji is an important figure in the history of modern India and the British empire because he was recognized as a great athlete and described as such. The book focuses on four aspects of Ranjitsinhji's life as a colonial subject: race, money, loyalty and gender. It touches upon Ranjitsinhji's career as a cricketer in the race section. The issue of money gave Indian critics of Ranjitsinhji's regime the language they needed to condemn his personal and administrative priorities, and to portray him as self-indulgent. Ranjitsinhji lived his life as a player of multiple gender roles: sometimes serially, and on occasion simultaneously. His status as a "prince" - while not entirely fake - was fragile enough to be unreliable, and he worked hard to reinforce it even as he constructed his Englishness. Any Indian attempt to transcend race, culture, climate and political place by imitating an English institution and its product must be an unnatural act of insurgency. The disdain for colonial politics that was manifest in the "small rebellions" at the end of the world war converged with the colonized/Indian identity that was evident at the League of Nations. Between the war and his death, it is clear, Ranjitsinhji moved to maximize his autonomy in Nawanagar.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2026

        The cultural politics of food in South Africa

        Media, nourishment, inequality

        by Mehita Iqani, Sarah Gibson

        Food is both a material system of nourishment, necessary for human survival, and a communicative system that signifies multiple meanings across human cultures. This book explores the cultural politics of food in the South African context, bringing together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the links between media, nourishment, and inequality. The chapters all highlight the multiplicity of meanings that food has in South African society. These include historical perspectives on the impact of colonialism, migration and apartheid had on food and foodways in South Africa; sociological interventions on food and society; aesthetic practices in relation to food; and mediated food cultures in South Africa. Taken together, the book critically explores the multiple ways in which food is never just food, and always linked to complex and shifting modalities of meaning and knowledge in the South African context.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2024

        Peace and the politics of memory

        by Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Stefanie Kappler, Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, Timothy Williams

        This important book provides new understandings of how the politics of memory impacts peace in societies transitioning from a violent past. It does so by developing a theoretical approach focusing on the intersection of sites, agency, narratives, and events in memory-making. Drawing on rich empirical studies of mnemonic formations in Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, South Africa and Cambodia, the book speaks to a broad audience. The in-depth, cross-case analysis shows that inclusivity, pluralism, and dignity in memory politics are key to the construction of a just peace. The book contributes crucial and timely knowledge about societies that grapple with the painful legacies of the past and advances the study of memory and peace.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2020

        US politics today

        by Edward Ashbee, Bill Jones

      • 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
        Biography & True Stories
        July 2026

        Q is for garden

        Tending the histories of queer cultivation

        by Jenny Chamarette

        A bold, tender exploration of how queerness and nature entwine - and what happens when we step beyond the binaries that fence us in. There is a Q in garden, but you can't always see it. When Jenny Chamarette faced a devastating health crisis, they found themselves unmoored from the rules of gender, sexuality and productivity. In a small South London garden, Jenny began to imagine another way of living: porous, unruly, rooted in the lessons of soil and plant life. Gardens, like identities, are usually bounded - but what if those limits can be re-drawn? Blending memoir and cultural criticism, this book asks whether the categories we inherit - colonial, patriarchal, conventions of sexuality and gender - still serve us, or whether they confine us. From illness and recovery to queer love and ecological wonder, Q is for garden invites readers to reimagine how we inhabit land, culture and each other. An eloquent work of nature writing and queer thought, Q is for garden digs into the rich history of queer gardeners, botanists, artists and agriculturalists. It offers a hopeful vision of belonging, if we are curious enough to unearth it.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2026

        Revolutionary anxieties

        Defending privilege in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

        by Liina Mustonen

        Revolutionary anxieties sheds light on an unexplored dimension of the 2011 Egyptian revolution: the anxieties experienced by Cairo-based liberal elite, socialites, and cultural actors who opposed the rise of the new political actors, the Muslim Brotherhood. This book provides fresh insights into the failure of the Egyptian revolution by examining the perspectives of those who had a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo. It engages with post-colonial theory and examines the elite milieu in Cairo through the lenses of gender and race. Based on over two years of ethnographic research in various elite locations such as the Cairo Opera House, an Egyptian-European film festival, and an elite sporting club in Cairo, the book illustrates how members of Egyptian liberal upper class insisted on their privilege in a moment when the country's class hierarchies were challenged. By revealing the prevalence of counter-revolutionary sentiment among Cairo's liberal and affluent elite, the book tells an untold story of the Arab Spring.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2026

        The politics of Middle English parables

        Fiction, theology, and social practice

        by Mary Raschko

        The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.

      • Trusted Partner
        Social welfare & social services
        June 2015

        Between two worlds of father politics

        USA or Sweden?

        by Michael Rush

        The essential message of the 'two regimes' model is that the social politics of fatherhood have taken on a global significance and that the USA and Sweden represent two ends of an international continuum of ways of thinking about fatherhood. The key selling points of the two regimes model are its topicality, originality, its global appeal, and its particularised appeal to readers in the USA, the Nordic countries, Great Britain, Ireland, the European Union, Japan and China. The book offers students a comparative analytical framework and new insights into why some welfare states have 'father-friendly' social policies and others do not. The book makes an original contribution to the growing fields of welfare regime and gender studies by linking the epochal decline of patriarchal fatherhood to welfare state expansion over the course of the twentieth century and it raises new questions about the legitimacy of religiously inspired neo-patriarchy.

      • Trusted Partner
        August 2025

        Wer hat Angst vor Gender?

        Eine Verteidigung und Einführung der Gender-Theorie in einem

        by Judith Butler, Katrin Harlaß, Anne Emmert

        Ein kämpferisches Buch in dunklen Zeiten, um wieder aus der Defensive zu kommen Für den globalen Rechtsruck spielt der Kampf gegen »Gender« eine zentrale Rolle. Ob in der Hinterfragung geschlechtlicher Normen nun eine Gefährdung von Kindern, die Zerstörung der Familie oder ein Angriff auf die natürliche Ordnung gesehen wird – in nichts sind sich Rechtspopulisten, religiöse Frömmler und Anti-Trans-Feministinnen so einig, nichts sonst bringen sie solche Ablehnung entgegen. Judith Butler hat unser Denken über Geschlecht revolutioniert und wurde zur globalen Ikone. Nun erklärt Butler, welche politische Funktion das Schreckgespenst »Gender« in der rechten Agenda besitzt. Dabei thematisiert Butler nicht nur, wie es ist, selbst zum Hassobjekt zu werden, sondern argumentiert zudem, dass queere Politik nur in einer breiten Koalition der Bewegungen gegen verschiedene Ungerechtigkeiten gelingen kann.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter