scholarly journals The Dichotomy of Intimate Garments: Women’s Stays and Pockets in Georgian Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Cotton Cornwall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women's Clothing ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Public Sphere

In John Collet’s 1777 print, Tight Lacing, or Fashion Before Ease a woman is depicted holding onto a bed poster as her maid and husband strain to tighten the lacing on her stays. Meanwhile, a large tie-on pocket can be seen hanging from the woman’s waist. Although they were worn closely together on the female body stays and pockets have been studied independently from each other. This is understandable, as at first glance, they appear incomparable. Stays were the precursor to nineteenth century corsets and they moulded the body into the desired and fashionable shape. Pockets on the other hand were utilitarian bags meant for carrying necessary items; separate from women’s clothing they were tied around the waist with string and were hidden under the skirts. Despite the initial differences, these garments did not function independently from each other. Using caricatures, etiquette books, and physical examples found in museum collections, this study demonstrates that when examined in tandem it becomes apparent that stays and pockets served distinct, yet overlapping functions in women’s lives. They informed women’s relationships with their surrounding environments, strengthened women’s connection to the domestic realm, yet also gave women freedom to move outside the home and participate within the public sphere. Furthermore, both items also acted as private spaces, which allowed women to actively partake in romantic courtship and sexual flirtations in a gender appropriate way. By juxtaposing stays and pockets this study contributes to the growing historical discussion surrounding these items, but also begins to piece together a larger picture of the role undergarments, as a whole, played in women’s lives.

scholarly journals The Public Sphere in the Field of Power

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

Publics and Participation: England, Britain, and Europe in the “Post-Reformation”

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Other ◽  
British History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractThis article responds to the pieces collected in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies, all of which seek to take some notion of the politics of the public sphere and either apply it to, or break it upon the wheel of, various versions of British history during the post-Reformation period. It seeks to bring the other articles into conversation both with one another as well as with existing work on the topic.

scholarly journals Progressive Social Movements and the Internet

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Public Sphere

Because of the field’s foundational concerns with both social power and media, communication scholars have long been at the center of scholarly thought at the intersection of social change and technology. Early critical scholarship in communication named media technologies as central in the creation and maintenance of dominant political ideologies and as a balm against dissent among the masses. This work detailed the marginalization of groups who faced restricted access to mass media creation and exclusion from representational discourse and images, alongside the connections of mass media institutions to political and cultural elites. Yet scholars also highlighted the ways collectives use media technologies for resistance inside their communities and as interventions in the public sphere. Following the advent of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, and the granting of public access to the Internet in 1991, communication scholars faced a medium that seemed to buck the one-way and gatekeeping norms of others. There was much optimism about the democratic potentials of this new technology. With the integration of Internet technology into everyday life, and its central role in shaping politics and culture in the 21st century, scholars face new questions about its role in dissent and collective efforts for social change. The Internet requires us to reconsider definitions of the public sphere and civil society, document the potentials and limitations of access to and creation of resistant and revolutionary media, and observe and predict the rapidly changing infrastructures and corresponding uses of technology—including the temporality of online messaging alongside the increasingly transnational reach of social movement organizing. Optimism remains, but it has been tempered by the realities of the Internet’s limitations as an activist tool and warnings of the Internet-enabled evolution of state suppression and surveillance of social movements. Across the body of critical work on these topics particular characteristics of the Internet, including its rapidly evolving infrastructures and individualized nature, have led scholars to explore new conceptualizations of collective action and power in a digital media landscape.

scholarly journals ”Kampagnen med Blæk i stedet for Blod”: Håndskrifter, trykk og opinionskamp i skandinavisk offentlighet, 1801–1814

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 106-128
Author(s):  
Ruth Hemstad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Monitoring Activities ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Secret War

“The campaign with ink instead of blood”: Manuscripts, print and the war of opinion in the Scandinavian public sphere, 1801–1814Handwritten pamphlets circulated to a high extend as part of the war of opinion which went on in the Norwegian-Swedish borderland around 1814. This ‘campaign with ink instead of blood’, as Danish writers soon characterized this detested activity, was a vital part of the Swedish policy of conquering Norway from Denmark through the means of propaganda. This ‘secret war of opinion’, as it was described in 1803, culminated around 1814, when Sweden accomplished its long-term goal of forming a union with Norway. In this article I am concerned with the role and scope of handwritten letters, actively distributed as pamphlets as part of the Swedish monitoring activities in the borderland, especially in the period 1812 to 1813. These manuscripts were integrated parts of the manifold of publications circulating within a common, although conflict oriented Scandinavian public sphere in the making at this time. The duplication and distribution of handwritten pamphlets, and the interaction with printed material, as Danish counter pamphlets quoting and discussing these manuscripts, illustrates that manuscripts remained important at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They coexisted and interacted with printed material of different kinds, and have to be taken into consideration when studying the public sphere and the print culture in this period.

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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Zachery A. Fry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Union Soldiers

The introduction offers context for the experiences of Union soldiers by examining mid-nineteenth century political culture. During the war itself, officers and men engaged in a spirited and highly publicized debate over the meaning of loyalty. Republicans came to identify true loyalty as obedience to the wartime measures of the Lincoln administration and vigorous engagement in the public sphere, while Democrats proclaimed loyalty to the Constitution and the cultural norms of an anti-partisan military.

scholarly journals Starving at the Laid Table? Journalism, Digitalization and Corporate Capitalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schnell
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Authority ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Severe Shortage

Professional journalism fulfills an important role in modern democracies, while always standing with one leg in the public sphere and the other in the private media economy. Within the era of digitalization, the limits of a market-driven professionalism become apparent. Since information appears to be easily accessible due to new media, journalism lost its role as a gatekeeper for “what the world needs to know”. But dropping an anachronistic idea of professional authority—as reform projects within the journalistic profession demanded for decades—does not necessarily lead to a more open and participatory public sphere. On the contrary, the chance for reliable news seems to shrink in the everyday flood of information. Facing a severe shortage of professionalism against the background of an oversupply in the field of journalism might indicate a general paradox of contemporary societies.  

scholarly journals This Is My Voice in a Mask

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-268
Author(s):  
Mickey Vallee
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Media Object ◽  
The Public Sphere

Our bodies have become attuned to a new regime of sensory experiences that now mediate our participation in the public sphere. This commentary is about the day I started to quarantine my voice and to wear a mask. In it, I explore the mask as a media object, and as a border between the body and the commons, including the ethics of communicable transmission. It marks some provisional thoughts in the context of a broader project on mask cultures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document