Gender, History and ‘Small Europe’

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-700
Author(s):  
Jitka Malečková
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
European History ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Good Place ◽  
European Dimension ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Gender is a good place from which to start reflections on European history: gender history deliberately transcends borders and, at the same time, demonstrates the difficulties of writing European, or transnational, history. Focusing on recent syntheses of modern European history, both general works and those specifically devoted to gender, the article asks what kind of Europe emerges from the encounter between gender and history. It suggests that the writing of European history includes either Eastern Europe (and, sometimes, the Ottoman Empire) or a gender perspective, but seldom both. Thus, the projects of integrating a European dimension into gender history and gender into European history remain unfinished. The result is a history of a rather ‘small Europe’.

Crossing borders in transnational gender history

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Matter Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Migration ◽  
New Research

AbstractTransnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

Going West

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Zahra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
European History ◽  
East European ◽  
European Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Eastern Europe radiated beyond the region in the twentieth century.

Class vs. Citizenship: Keywords in German Gender History

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Canning
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Language And Gender ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

Thereis perhaps no more fitting way to honor Vernon Lidtke than to demonstrate, in the form of this essay, that the questions he posed to his students years ago continue to provide a grid for contemplating and analyzing historical subjects, both familiar and new. One such question involved the impact of one concept's transformation upon another: would class persist as a crucial historical category once it had confronted the differences of gender? This question preoccupied me in previous work and I return to it here, taking stock of that which has changed since I first contemplated this question, in the fields of both German and European gender history. Another question that remains an object of debate is the longer-term trajectory of the history of women and gender: how might we define the point at which its work of subversion or revision is complete? What directions might this field take once “mainstream” histories have successfully incorporated its findings? This essay aims to compare the ways in which the keywords class, citizenship, and welfare state have been redefined, expanded, or circumscribed through the turn to culture, language, and gender. This comparative exercise allows me to expand Vernon's original questions to include citizenship, the critical concept in my more recent scholarship, and to review the potentials and promises of main-streaming across the so-called Atlantic divide.

scholarly journals “Male” and “Female”: Gender in the Focus of Domestic Historical Research (Course Materials “Fundamentals of Cultural Anthropology”)

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
Maria V. Vasekha ◽  
Elena F. Fursova
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Course Materials ◽  
The Social ◽  
European Part Of Russia ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Purpose. The article presents a brief overview of the 30-year period of the development of Russian gender studies and reviews the state of gender studies in Siberia in the last decade. Results. The authors came to the conclusion that the gender approach in Russia was very successful in the field of historical disciplines, especially in historical feminology and women’s studies. The authors analyze the emergence of various areas within this issue, the key topics and approaches that have been developed in the Russian humanities. The main directions were reflected in the anniversary collection digest on gender history and anthropology “Gender in the focus of anthropology, family ethnography and the social history of everyday life” (2019). Conclusion. The authors describe the current position of Siberian gender studies and conclude that gender issues in Siberia are less active in comparison with the European part of Russia. In recent years, Siberian researchers have increasingly replaced the category of “gender” with neutral categories of “family research”, “female”, “male”, and so on. More often researchers choose “classical” historical problems raised in historical science before the “humanitarian renaissance”, which began in the 1990s in Russia. In modern gender studies in the Siberian region, the capabilities of critical feminist optics and gender methodology are rarely used, and queer-issues are not developed.

scholarly journals A Sentimental and Sexual Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 216-242
Author(s):  
Anne Rubenstein
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Sex Partners ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Movie Theaters ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Sex With Men ◽  
Heterosexual Sex

Alongside all the other functions of movie theaters over the past century, in Mexico City men have used them as sexual spaces. A few cinemas like the Cine Teresa became notorious as sites in which men could find male sex partners. Yet even there, behaviors of and narratives by men who had sex with men mirrored those by men who had sex with women. This article focuses on the history of masculine sexuality in Mexico City movie houses from 1920 to 2010. The presence of women in these houses, either as workers, on the screen, or in men’s memories, along with the presence of men who went there to watch heterosexual sex on the movie screen, suggests that moviegoing in Mexico City can be analyzed through the lens of gender history as much as through that of the history of sexuality. Despite major social, cultural and technological changes over the twentieth century, examining movie audiences in terms of the histories of sexuality and gender reveals a startling amount of continuity in movie theaters as spaces of male sexuality.

Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linzi Manicom
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Social Life ◽  
African State ◽  
The State ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Although South African women's history has been growing in volume and sophistication over the past decade, the impact of gender analysis has yet to be felt in mainstream or radical historiography. One reason for this neglect is the way in which the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have been conceived – with ‘women’ assumed to have a stable referent and ‘gender’ treated as synonymous with women. Those areas of social life where women are not immediately present have thus remained unreconstructed by the theoretical implications of gender. This is particularly the case with the history of ‘the state’.The article identifies and looks critically at the major paradigms of South African women's and gender history in terms of how the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘women’ is implicitly or explicitly represented. It argues that the understanding of the category ‘women’ as socially and historically constructed (as evident in more recently published gender history) provides a way of moving beyond the more static or abstractly posed state-versus-women relationship. This requires too that ‘the South African state’ be understood not as unitary or coherent but as institutionally diverse with different objectives being taken up and produced as policy and practice. The project then becomes one of understanding South African state formation as a gendered and gendering process, of exploring the different institutional sites and ruling discourses in which gender identities and categories are constructed.

A Prolonged Abrogation? The Capitulations, the 1917 Law of Family Rights, and the Ottoman Quest for Sovereignty during World War 1

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-260
Author(s):  
Kate Dannies ◽  
Stefan Hock
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Family Law ◽  
World War ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
The Family ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThe 1917 promulgation of a new Ottoman family law is recognized as a landmark moment in the history of Islamic law by scholars of women and gender in the Middle East. Yet the significance of the 1917 law in the struggle over religious jurisdiction, political power, and Ottoman sovereignty has been overlooked in the scholarship on both Ottoman legal reform and World War 1. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, German, French, and English sources linking internal interpretations of the law and external reactions to its passage, we reinterpret adoption of the family law as a key moment in the geopolitics of World War 1. We demonstrate that passage of the law was a critical turning point in the wartime process of abrogating the capitulations and eliminating the last vestiges of legal extraterritoriality in the Ottoman Empire. The law is situated in its wartime political context and the geopolitical milieu of larger Europe to demonstrate that, although short-lived, the 1917 family law was a centerpiece of the wartime struggle to define extraterritorial rights of the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and their protégés within the empire.

scholarly journals Gendering Central European History: Changing Representations of Women and Gender in Comparison, 1968–2017

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Hagemann ◽  
Donna Harsch
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
European History ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Central European ◽  
Founding Editor ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Representations Of Women

A jubilee is the perfect time for a critical stocktaking, and this essay uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Central European History (CEH), the leading American journal of the history of “German-speaking Central Europe,” to explore the changing representations of women and gender in this journal since its founding in 1968. The declared aim of CEH was, according to the founding editor, Douglas A. Unfug, to become a “broadly rather than narrowly defined” journal that covers “all periods from the Middle Ages to the present” and includes, next to “traditional approaches to history,” innovative and “experimental methodological approaches.” As Kenneth F. Ledford, the third CEH editor (after Unfug and Kenneth D. Barkin), wrote in 2005, the journal should simultaneously reflect and drive “the intellectual direction(s) of its eponymous field.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document