Beauty Standards in Egypt

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-394
Author(s):  
Mona L. Russell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
World War ◽  
Canal Zone ◽  
The Public ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Push And Pull

Abstract The creation of a hybrid beauty in the cartoon sphere and in advertising intersected with popular and consumer culture at a moment when women’s roles in the public sphere were changing. Politically the nation was at a crossroads: the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 removed most impediments toward Egyptian independence; however, British troops remained in the Suez Canal zone. With respect to economic history, multinationals were expanding in Egypt, while an emerging bourgeoisie worked to establish local industries. With World War II came economic crisis: inflation, profiteering, black markets, rising inequality, and the return of British troops to strategic locations around the country. This article argues that the hybrid beauty represents the push and pull between women’s emerging roles in public spaces and traditional values, imperialism versus authenticity, local industry competing against multinationals, and a negotiation of new roles for husbands and wives in companionate marriage.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

The Invisible Other

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Vetter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Other ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Existential Psychology ◽  
World War ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Other Woman

Chapter 8 turns to the figure of the spy, a recurrent trope of her 1956 novel Magic Mirror and the accompanying memoir Compassionate Friendship. If the “other woman” is predicated on a position of alterity, the therapist-spy feigns an identification—and an empathetic connection—that does not in fact exist. At the level of the private sphere, H.D. uses espionage as a mode of critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis, offering in its stead the short-lived existential psychology, a movement which grew out of the trauma of World War II and emphasized an empathetic rather than transferential model of therapy. Shifting outward to the public sphere, her analysis of the figure of the spy becomes an examination of the politics of nationalism.

Churchill, women and the politics of gender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toye
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Post War

This chapter investigates how Churchill related to women at the political level, and how women voters in turn related to him. Churchill had a blurred Conservative-Liberal identity, and this affected his approach to ‘the woman question’. Hostile to female enfranchisement at the start of his career, he became a reluctant convert during his Edwardian Liberal phase, provided that it could be done in such a way as to benefit his own party electorally. As a renegade Tory during the 1930s he drew on the services of a range of female anti-appeasers such as Shiela Grant Duff. During World War II, however, he controversially opposed equal pay for women teachers. It is well-established that, in the post-war years, the Conservative Party benefitted from its gendered approach to rationing and austerity, Churchill himself did little to appeal explicitly to women voters. Although he did accept a role for a limited number of ‘exceptional’ women in the public sphere, he was never an enthusiast for substantive gender equality.

scholarly journals “The Peculiar Anomaly”: Same-Sex Infidelity in Postwar Divorce Courts

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Lefkovitz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Local Police ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Military

It was a simple tale of betrayal. In 1950, a Pennsylvania husband returned home from a business trip to find his wife—known to us today only by her initials CD—having sex with the female athletic director of a local school. This wife was only one of many women caught having sex with other women in the era following World War II. Although many closeted men and women enjoyed vibrant sexual and social lives in gay and lesbian communities, sometimes commanding officers, bosses, and police officers caught and punished men and women engaging in “deviant” sexual activity. Punishments ranged from arrests during a bar raid to a dismissal from a job. A double life in the public sphere was fragile. Scholars have paid less attention, however, to the insecure closeted lives of husbands and wives such as CD. Although certainly not all men and women who engaged in same-sex encounters entered traditional heterosexual marriages, many did. Their motivations for marrying ranged from the hope that marriage would cure same-sex desire to financial concerns. Sometimes, a husband or wife discovered his or her spouse's homosexual infidelity. A potential punitive outcome for this encounter was not an arrest, pink slip, or a dishonorable discharge; instead a spouse could end up in divorce court. Like the federal government, the military, the local police, and private employers, then, divorce courts also had to devise strategies and philosophies with which to deal with the problem of homosexuality.

Editor's Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
World History ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

It is tempting to tell the story of Europe in the twentieth century in two halves: the first, a sorry, bleak tale of poverty, war, and genocide; and the second, a happy narrative of stability and the triumph of boring normality over dangerous activism and exuberant politics. When one examines the ‘return of memories’ which could not be articulated in the public sphere during the Cold War, one can see that the years since 1989 are intimately connected to World War II and its aftermath. In many ways, we are only now living through the postwar period. The impact of World War II, the largest and bloodiest conflict in world history, did not end in 1945. This book modifies the emphasis usually placed on the Cold War as the main historical framework for understanding the postwar period. It questions the extent to which 1945 was really a ‘zero hour’ and examines various facets of postwar life – from high politics to economics to tourism and consumerism.

Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Linder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gottfried Benn ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
City State

This chapter focuses on Carl Schmitt’s years in post–World War II Germany. After being released from the Nuremberg prison for war criminals, Schmitt returned to his birthplace, Plettenberg, and named his house “San Casciano,” invoking a village in Tuscany where Machiavelli spent his final years. Like Schmitt, Machiavelli too was deprived of public office, in the Florentine city-state. While other intellectuals who had sympathized with the Nazis—Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Jünger, among others—returned to the public sphere soon after 1945, Schmitt’s fate was different. This chapter reconstructs Schmitt’s Plettenberg years in letters, journals, and reports from companions and shows how his reputation changed from a “monster” to a myth. Even in his private years, Schmitt remained a public figure, fascinating to friends and foes. The controversies with his fiercest enemies in particular renewed his fame.

The Roots of Global Health Inequity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joia S. Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Primary Health Care ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Primary Health ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines the historical roots of health inequities. It focuses on the African continent, where life expectancy is the shortest and health systems are weakest. The chapter describes the impoverishment of countries by colonial powers, the development of the global human rights framework in the post-World War II era, the impact of the Cold War on African liberation struggles, and the challenges faced by newly liberated African governments to deliver health care through the public sector. The influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s neoliberal economic policies is also discussed. The chapter highlights the shift from the aspiration of “health for all” voiced at the Alma Ata Conference on Primary Health Care in 1978, to the more narrowly defined “selective primary health care.” Finally, the chapter explains the challenges inherent in financing health in impoverished countries and how user fees became standard practice.

Adjusting to Financial Instability in the Interwar Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giandomenico Piluso
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Adaptive Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Monetary Authorities ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Special Committees ◽  
First World

The chapter provides a reconstruction and analysis of adjustment processes in the Italian financial system after the major cleavage of the First World War. It considers how pressures exerted by external factors entailed a progressive adaptive strategy to a changing international environment. Financial and monetary instability called for a more intensive regulation reallocating responsibilities and powers from the private sector to the public sphere. Accordingly, financial elites changed their contours and boundaries. As the demand for technical competences and bargaining abilities rose, Italian governments and central monetary authorities tended to co-opt competent representatives from the private sector onto special committees at home, at international conferences, or in bilateral negotiations. A telling tale of such processes is represented by changes within the composition of the Italian delegations at major international economic and financial conferences from the Brussels Conference in 1920 to the London Economic and Monetary Conference in 1933.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

An ‘Age of Commerce’ in Southeast Asian History

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Reid
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Economic History ◽  
External Factors ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Increased Sensitivity ◽  
Asian History

Since the end of World War II the study of Southeast Asia has changed unrecognizably. The often bitter end of colonialism caused a sharp break with older scholarly traditions, and their tendency to see Southeast Asia as a receptacle for external influences—first Indian, Persian, Islamic or Chinese, later European. The greatest gain over the past forty years has probably been a much increased sensitivity to the cultural distinctiveness of Southeast Asia both as a whole and in its parts. If there has been a loss, on the other hand, it has been the failure of economic history to advance beyond the work of the generation of Furnivall, van Leur, Schrieke and Boeke. Perhaps because economic factors were difficult to disentangle from external factors they were seen by very few Southeast Asianists as the major challenge.

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