The Science of Sexual Difference

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michiko Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
New Ideas

This chapter examines theories of male–female difference and female identity in Japan by focusing on the intersection of sexology and feminism in the country during the early twentieth century. In particular, it shows how sexologist Ogura Seizaburō and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō drew upon European conceptions of sexual difference, especially those developed by Havelock Ellis, to proffer new ideas about female characteristics and sexuality. The chapter also offers a fresh perspective on Ogura's contribution to the development of early feminism in Japan and considers how he and Hiratsuka strategically used sexology for their own purposes. It argues that while theories of sexual difference have more often supported a maternalist ideology, their use also served other purposes, such as the prioritizing of sex over racial difference.

The Only Wonderful Things

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
Advertising Agency ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Park Avenue ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Time

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

Sound of Body: Music, Sports and Health in Victorian Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Exercise ◽  
Physical Fitness ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
New Ideas

ABSTRACTThis article explores ways in which music intersected with the growth of sports in Victorian Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there have been valuable studies of music and sports recently, their main emphasis has been on popular music and contemporary sporting events; a study of the period when playing and watching sports began to acquire its present-day shape has yet to be undertaken. This article moves towards that by examining connections between music and sports through broader social and cultural developments, in particular new ideas about morality, health and physical fitness. It situates commentaries about the healthfulness of music in relation to nineteenth-century discourses about sport, in addition to contextualizing notions of singing and health in the increasing professionalization of Victorian medicine. Finally, this article extends and relocates early twentieth-century encapsulations of singing as physical exercise in the context of concern over degeneration in national fitness.

‘The Most Beautiful Factory in the World’: the power of the garden image

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Chance
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of

An analysis of the extensive collections of photographs, illustrations, films and ephemera in company archives provides a fresh perspective on the factory gardens and parks. By means of illustrated lectures, publications and factory tours, in which the landscapes featured prominently, industrialists presented their enterprises as places of status, community, opportunity, health and hygiene and their products as authentic and modern. The landscapes and their representations defined this utopianist portrayal of working conditions and labour, and motivated myths about the commodities they produced. The advertising and packaging images from the early twentieth century of the companies discussed here are now iconic in the history of marketing and advertising, for it was largely through effective publicity that they became household names.

Selling Home

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
Abigail McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Home Deliveries ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Window Displays ◽  
Market Density ◽  
The City

This essay explores the emergence of new forms of retail in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bombay, an era which saw the development of new shopping districts, department stores, showrooms, and retail culture in the city. In a city known for its market density and commercial vibrancy, elite retailers tried to reach out to consumers in new ways, enticing them in from the street with window displays, standardized product lines, and novel assemblages of goods, while also contacting consumers directly through catalogues, flyers, designs sent on request, and home deliveries. Focusing on major department stores like the Army and Navy Stores and Whiteaway Laidlaw, major nationalist concerns like the Bombay Swadeshi Store and Godrej and Boyce, as well as smaller showrooms featuring fewer ranges of goods, the essay argues that novel retail strategies efforts helped to shape not just how things were sold but what was desired in Bombay—noting in particular how efforts to sell domestic furnishings promoted new ideas about what the home should be.

Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 1022-1041 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Anlin Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Race Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Is the fetish the only way to understand glamour, especially when it comes to the glamour of racialized women? How do we talk about agency and embodiment for a mediated figure? How does celebrity affect a subject whose body has been overembodied yet depersonalized? This essay suggests that the unlikely conjunction among celebrity, glamour, and racial difference may be the place where we are compelled to confront the intimacy, rather than opposition, between person-hood and objectification. Turning to Anna May Wong, an iconic “race beauty” in the early twentieth century, this essay argues that Wong's glamour is achieved neither through her apparently racialized performances nor through her uncomplicated assumption of female agency but rather through a paradoxical staging and erasure of her own body and skin. By asking how a celebrated body might operate subjunctively rather than materially, we can begin to question the imperatives of personhood that drive both celebrity and race studies.

Towards the Inner History of the Nation: Defining ‘Cultural History’ in Nineteenth-Century Finland

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heli Rantala
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Official History ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of

This article contributes to the discussion on the European roots of cultural history by exploring the nineteenth-century understanding of cultural history from a Finnish perspective. The article argues that the Finnish case opens a fresh perspective to the history of cultural history by connecting it with the French historiography instead of German Kulturgeschichte. In Finland there is a special tradition of cultural history dating back to the early twentieth century, inspired by the German tradition of Kulturgeschichte. This article focuses on the earlier period, on the mid-nineteenth-century discussion concerning the scope of history and the ways the works of several European historians were reviewed in Finland. In this discussion the orientation was not so much in the German tradition but towards the French way of writing history. An important element in the Finnish discussion was the separation of political or official history from the so called inner history of the people, which was considered as more fundamental and comprehensive than political history. This orientation towards the history of the people was considered as cultural history. The article explores the question of ‘cultural history’ in Finland by drawing on the writings of influential Finnish thinker Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881).

“What’s in a Name?”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene R. Garthwaite
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
Political Geographies

This chapter focuses on framing and contexts for the eighteenth century as a period of history. While eighteenth-century Iran has been neglected, partly due to its political fragmentation, it can be fitted into an early modern context of Eurasia, one that was part of Iran’s post-Mongol legacy—and one that continued through the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Qajar dynasty. Key changes here include new elites; the emergence of a vernacular language and populist religion; reshaping of political geographies, especially the role of pastoral nomadic tribal confederations; and the emergence of “simultaneous rulership,” in which the ruler’s persona embodied new ideas and constituencies.

Living in the Material World: Cosmopolitanism and trade in early twentieth century Ladakh

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE H. FEWKES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Material World ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Multiple Cultures ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Philosophical Framework

AbstractThe historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community—largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated—was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan.

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