Am I Normal? American Vernacular Psychology and the Tomboy Body, 1900–1940

2013 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
Allison Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Help ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
Selection Of

This essay argues for the existence of a vernacular psychology in the United States centered on understandings of the body, gender, and sexuality. This was not pop psychology, which we might think of as a product of mass culture, but a complex amalgam of such influences as psychoanalysis, religion, ethics, and self-help that took shape in the first decades of the twentieth century. Analyzing a selection of sexological interviews of 295 women conducted in the 1930s, this article uncovers a childhood concept of gender that may be called “affinity”: a delight in the similarities of sexed bodies alongside conscious acknowledgment of difference, an area of play in which two sexes could become one. Rendered visible by the vernacular psychology of the 1930s, affinity played an important role in the interviews given by self-described tomboys born between 1900 and 1920. Even when they knew about gross anatomical differences, tomboys had so much in common with their boy comrades that they were able to shrug off distinctions not only of gender but of sex as well. Paradoxically, even though vernacular psychology made it possible for tomboys to describe affinity, it did not embrace affinity as normal.

The Informational Economy of Vaudeville and the Business of American Entertainment

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-446
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Backer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Market ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Informational Economy ◽  
Analyze Data

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.

Islam and Race in American History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliane Hammer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
Moorish Science ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
The Relationship

American Muslims are often seen as either unassimilable immigrants or as African Americans who only “adopted” Islam as rebellion against Christian-sanctioned racist exclusion. This chapter brings into meaningful conversation these two often divided arenas of definition, agency, and political space by focusing on the categories of “Islam” and “race” and how they have been negotiated, applied, rejected, and forced by and onto various people since the eighteenth century. It shows how Muslims in the United States are both American and transnational, since the relationship between race and religion is globally negotiated. It also considers the intersections of religion and race with gender and sexuality, surveying research on Muslim slaves, naturalization cases in the early twentieth century, Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, the racialization of Muslims after 9/11, and the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative.

scholarly journals The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Lepecki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Washington Square

Laurence Louppe once advanced the intriguing notion that the dancer is “the veritable avatar of Orpheus: he has no right to turn back on his course, lest he be denied the object of his quest” (Louppe 1994, 32). However, looking across the contemporary dance scene in Europe and the United States, one cannot escape the fact that dancers—contrary to Orpheus, contrary to Louppe's assertion—are increasingly turning back on their and dance history's tracks in order to find the “object of their quest.” Indeed, contemporary dancers and choreographers in the United States and Europe have in recent years been actively engaged in creating re-enactments of sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure, dance works of the twentieth century. Examples abound: we can think of Fabian Barba's Schwingende Landschaft (2008), an evening-length piece where the Ecuadorian choreographer returns to Mary Wigman's seven solo pieces created in 1929 and performed during Wigman's first U.S. tour in 1930; of Elliot Mercer returning in 2009 and 2010 to several of Simone Forti's Construction Pieces (1961/62), performing them at Washington Square Park in New York City; or Anne Collod's 2008 return to Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes (1965), among many other examples.

Whiteness and United States History: An Assessment

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Working Class

Scholarly interest in “whiteness,” white racial identity, and the social construction of race in general has grown dramatically over the past decade. ILWCH decided to examine whiteness because we thought that the body of work associated with the idea had not been critically assessed. Although David Brody correctly notes that the first book to use the idea was Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990), David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), a study about antebellum Irish workers, class, and blackface in the United States, popularized the notion among historians. Subsequently, Roediger and others have used the concept to analyze the consciousness and behavior of other groups of workers and immigrants. Whiteness has not populated every nook and cranny of the history of the United States. The geography of whiteness studies has been uneven. Take the field of Southern history. With several exceptions, whiteness scholarship has not challenged more established approaches. No one questions James Oakes's contention in The Rule Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), that Southern planters conceived of themselves as a “ruling race.” But debates about the planters center on whether they were capitalists, lords, or farmers, not their racial identity. And debates about white Andrew Carnegie have not involved his whiteness.

Gender and Sexuality: A Global Tour and Compass

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Minna Stern
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The Family ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship

This article considers the adjacent analytics of gender and sexuality and explores the emergence, consolidation, and persistence of eugenics over the twentieth century with keen attention to transnational variations and networks. It seeks to synthesize the growing body of literature on gender, sexuality, and eugenics and discusses various examples for hereditarian ideas and practices in the United States and Latin America. Furthermore, it turns to three substantive areas and discusses women's ambivalent relationship to eugenics, with emphasis on how female reformers navigated the tensions between breeding as an act of empowerment versus a biological burden. It examines the complicated relationship between sexology and eugenic thought, which ultimately supports an overwhelmingly hetero-normative interpretation of the family, despite scattered subversive possibilities. Finally, it concludes with a brief discussion about eugenic continuities into the twenty-first century, especially in regard to debates over the gay gene and the demonization of same-sex relationships and families.

scholarly journals “Cartooning Capitalism”: Radical Cartooning and the Making of American Popular Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (S15) ◽  
pp. 35-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Active Force ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Corporate Capitalism ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Masses

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, a mass culture of popular radicalism – consisting of various socialist, industrial unionist, anarchist, Progressive, feminist, black radical and other movements – arose to challenge the legitimacy of corporate capitalism in the United States. This article considers the role of radical cartoonists in propagandizing for, and forging unity within, this culture of popular radicalism. By articulating a common set of anti-capitalist values and providing a recognizable series of icons and enemies, radical cartoonists worked to generate a class politics of laugher that was at once entertaining and didactic. Through a discussion of the works of Art Young for The Masses, Ryan Walker's cartoons for the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, and the proletarian humor of Joe Hill and the IWW, this article argues that radical cartooning did not merely provide comic relief for the movements, but was an active force in framing socialist ideology and goals in a revolutionary age.

scholarly journals *Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind-Body Healing, *Yoga for the West & *Science of Stretching

1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-55
Author(s):  
Donna Martin ◽  
Jim Dreaver ◽  
Willow Rain
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Yoga Practice ◽  
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ◽  
The West ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Selection Of

Deepak Chopra, author of Quantum Healing, a practicing endocrinologist who trained both in India and the United States, brings together in this book both Western medical understanding and research with the insights of Ayurveda as given to him by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. *Ian Rawlinson's Yoga for the West is a beautifully presented, easy-to-read manual for the serious yoga student. The book opens with a foreword by T.K.V. Desikachar, one of India's leading yoga teachers and the main inspiration behind the author's work. *Deconditioning the body, relaxing the mind, freeing perception: these are some of the benefits of a regular yoga practice. Studying for intellectual clarity is an essential part of that practice, and information is available from a dizzying selection of sources and disciplines. The subject of this book is flexibility within the context of gymnastics and kinesiology. Author Michael J. Alter, of theScience of Stretching, is a former gymnast, coach and nationally certified men's gymnastics judge. Then reading this book from the perspective of a yoga teacher and therapist

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