Political memoirs and intimate confessions: Analysing four US gay liberation/gay rights militants’ memoirs

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 959-980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Marche

The US gay liberation and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s are a contested historical and sociological terrain. We analyse the narrative reconstruction of militant identities in the memoirs of four gay movement militants – Martin Duberman, Amy Hoffman, Karla Jay, Arnie Kantrowitz. The article focuses on the way authors account for the interplay between their self-discovery through sexuality and through militancy. We endeavour to fully appreciate the interaction of the personal and the social in order to gauge the degree to which confessions about sexuality take on a meaning that escapes authors’ control, or whether that meaning is a reflection of the authors’ agency. After a brief summary of how the authors tell about their sexual history, the article analyses the four authors’ distinctly different genders, generations, and political options as pertinent variables for comparison among the memoirs.

Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Julia Stępniewska ◽  
Piotr Zańko ◽  
Adam Fijałkowski

In this text, we ask about the relationship between sexual education in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s with the cultural contestation and the moral (including sexual) revolution in the West as seen through the eyes of Prof. Andrzej Jaczewski (1929–2020) – educationalist, who for many years in 1970s and 1980s conducted seminars at the University of Cologne, pediatrician, sexologist, one of the pioneers of sexual education in Poland. The movie “Sztuka kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej” (“The Art of Love. The Story of Michalina Wisłocka” [1921–2005]), directed in 2017 by Maria Sadowska, was the impulse for our interview. After watching it, we discovered that the counter-cultural background of the West in the 1960s and 1970s was completely absent both in the aforementioned film and in the discourse of Polish sex education at that time. Moreover, Andrzej Jaczewski’s statement (July 2020) indicates that the Polish concept of sexual education in the 1960s and 1970s did not arise under the influence of the social and moral revolution in the West at the same time, and its originality lay in the fact that it was dealt with by professional doctors-specialists. We put Andrzej Jaczewski’s voice in the spotlight. Our voice is usually muted in this text, it is more of an auxiliary function (Chase, 2009). Each of the readers may impose their own interpretative filter on the story presented here.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-67
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Johnson

During the 1960s and 1970s, Anita Bryant made a name for herself as a former beauty queen, a pop star, and a spokeswoman for national brands including Coca-Cola, Tupperware, and Florida Orange Juice. She was especially beloved among evangelical audiences, who also knew her for her frequent publication of small volumes of personal memoir and spiritual advice. In 1976, her public image shifted dramatically when she became the face of a backlash against the emerging gay liberation movement, first in Miami and then nationally. Her story demonstrates how some prominent evangelical women transformed their celebrity into a political platform during the rise of the New Christian Right in the 1970s. It also highlights the strategies that these women used to understand and justify their political roles in light of their sincere commitment to conservative gender and family norms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 195-240
Author(s):  
Phoebe S.K. Young

By the 1960s and 1970s, generational dynamics and modern environmentalism fostered new camping experiences that led away from amenity-rich and resource-heavy family campgrounds. Youth who came of age in this era shaped new forms of camping to support interests in self-discovery, countercultural values, and environmental awareness. Organizers and participants of the National Outdoor Leadership School, launched in 1965, began to link backcountry camping with countercultural mindsets, personal freedom, and connection with nature. In so doing they experimented with new social contracts in microcosm, and after 1970 increasingly began to align their mission with environmentalist agendas. Echoing the popular belief that the personal is political, many began to embrace specific forms of camping like backpacking as a way of expressing their identity and viewpoints. The new popularity of minimum-impact forms of camping in turn generated a growing market for high-tech outdoor gear intended to enhance experience and advance conservation.


Author(s):  
Jessica Stephenson

Born in 1934 in Bedford, Eastern Cape, South Africa, William (Bill) Stewart Ainslie was a painter and educator, and the founder of a number of visual art programs and workshops that countered discriminatory racial and educational policies in apartheid-era South Africa. These programs encouraged students to work in abstract and other modernist idioms not practiced in the country at the time. Until his untimely death at age 55, Ainslie melded his career as an artist with his vision of art as a means to combat apartheid. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ainslie fostered the only multiracial art programs in the country, culminating in a formal art school, the non-profit Johannesburg Art Foundation (1982). He helped found the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) and the art schools Fuba Academy (1978), Funda Center (1983) (funda means "learn" in Xhosa), and the Alexandra Arts Centre (1986). The generation of modern African artists and educators trained at these institutions shaped the course of art after apartheid. Ainslie also organized short-term workshops, most notably the Thupelo Art Workshop (thupelo means "to teach by example" in Southern Sotho) in 1983. Thupelo linked local and international artists and focused on abstraction, a radical departure from the social realist style expected of politically engaged South African art of the 1980s.


Author(s):  
Chantal Marazia ◽  
Heiner Fangerau ◽  
Thomas Becker ◽  
Felicitas Söhner

This chapter explores Franco Basaglia’s relation with German psychiatry, from his early infatuation with the anthropo-phenomenological tradition to the disputes with the social psychiatric movement during the 1960s and 1970s. After an overview of Basaglia’s criticism of German psychiatric schools and institutions, the chapter focuses on his personal links, most notably with progressive psychiatrists and with the anti-psychiatric movement SPK (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv). Finally, it analyses Basaglia’s reception, by both the medical establishment and the actors of psychiatric reform. Contrary to the current narrative of a mutual influence, the chapter argues that Basaglia can hardly be regarded as a genuine inspiration for German psychiatric reform, and was retrospectively refashioned as such.


1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulf Högberg ◽  
Stig Wall

SummaryThis report evaluates the decrease in maternal mortality and its relation to family planning methods in Sweden during the years 1911–80. In the 1930s fertility was low but illegal abortions were at a high level and the associated maternal death rate was 18·5 per 1000 women. With the legalization of abortion and the introduction of modern contraceptive methods, the crude reproductive mortality rate in 1965–70 was 1·7 per 100,000 women and this was reduced still further, especially for younger women, by the late 1970s. Standardized reproductive mortality was then 80% higher than the crude rate, indicating the importance of modern family planning methods. Mortality associated with oral contraceptive or IUD use in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s was lower than in England and the US. Mortality associated with sterilization was 6·2 per 100,000 procedures.


Author(s):  
Daniel Belgrad

In the 1960s and 1970s, improvisational artists explored the use of feedback, both as a creative method and a model of the self in relation to its social and physical environment. As an alternative to centralized authority structures, feedback loops could be used to organize decentralized events or activities. The result would be a self-informing system, or autopoiesis. This idea informed the new field of cybernetics and the social philosophy of Paul Goodman and Gregory Bateson. Max Neuhaus’s realization of John Cage’s composition,Fontana Mix—Feed, made use of this structure, as did his later broadcast works,Public SupplyandRadio Net, and the dance form of “contact improvisation” developed by Steve Paxton. In these works, attention to the dynamics of interaction (“deutero-learning”) fostered an improvisational style based on a heightened environmental awareness rather than an exteriorization of the internal psyche, thus pioneering the postmodern, networked self.


Author(s):  
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

The decades 1960–80 witnessed a seismic shift in modern drama. The rage that came to define, and fuel, much of the drama in the 1960s and 1970s is directed at the audience. ‘Absurdism, protest, and commitment’ shows it is a post-war rage stemming from many sources: the Vietnam War, the Cold War, a feeling of betrayal by government and politicians, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, gay rights, feminism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and ethnic oppression. It is all about denying the audience what it expects of a play, provoking it out of real or perceived complacency, startling, and offending it. The plays of Pinter, Shepard, Beckett, Stoppard, Friel, and Fugard are discussed.


Author(s):  
Stephan Haggard ◽  
Myung-Koo Kang

This article examines the political origins of South Korea’s rapid economic development in the 1960s and 1970s, with emphasis on the enduring effects of the developmental state era. It begins by considering developments since 1980, including the influence of democratization, the causes and consequences of the financial crisis of 1997–1998, and the market-oriented reforms pursued by the government in the wake of the crisis. It then discusses the legacy of the developmental state era in the coverage of the welfare state, along with the liberalization of the Korean economy beginning in the 1980s. The article documents South Korea’s transition into a market economy, marked by reforms in the financial sector and corporate governance, as well as reforms in foreign direct investment and even labor markets. Finally, it appraises a number of challenges that the Korean political economy must deal with, including growing economic and social polarization, inequality, and the social policy agenda.


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