In and Out of the Cage: Women's and Gender History Written in Hungary in the State-Socialist Period

Aspasia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Zimmermann
Author(s):  
Judith Bennett ◽  
Ruth Karras

This essay sets out the history and historiography of medieval women and gender as it stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It begins with a long view, tracing how approaches to medieval women have developed and changed from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. It then focuses on how feminist scholarship on the subject has developed since the 1970s. The essay addresses the importance of both women’s history and gender history; discusses topics explored and consensus conclusions; describes major debates in the field; and signals emerging topics and areas hitherto neglected. A summation of the state of the field, it both surveys what has been done to date and looks to what might be done in the future.


1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linzi Manicom

Although South African women's history has been growing in volume and sophistication over the past decade, the impact of gender analysis has yet to be felt in mainstream or radical historiography. One reason for this neglect is the way in which the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have been conceived – with ‘women’ assumed to have a stable referent and ‘gender’ treated as synonymous with women. Those areas of social life where women are not immediately present have thus remained unreconstructed by the theoretical implications of gender. This is particularly the case with the history of ‘the state’.The article identifies and looks critically at the major paradigms of South African women's and gender history in terms of how the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘women’ is implicitly or explicitly represented. It argues that the understanding of the category ‘women’ as socially and historically constructed (as evident in more recently published gender history) provides a way of moving beyond the more static or abstractly posed state-versus-women relationship. This requires too that ‘the South African state’ be understood not as unitary or coherent but as institutionally diverse with different objectives being taken up and produced as policy and practice. The project then becomes one of understanding South African state formation as a gendered and gendering process, of exploring the different institutional sites and ruling discourses in which gender identities and categories are constructed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-166
Author(s):  
Andrea. Pető ◽  
Judith. Szapor

Aspasia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. vi-viii
Author(s):  
Sharon A Kowalsky

When Peter Hallama approached the Aspasia editorial board about publishing the proceedings of a conference he was organizing on Socialist Masculinities, we jumped at the opportunity. It seemed that Aspasia, as a journal of women’s and gender history, would be the perfect venue to showcase the innovative and important historical scholarship being conducted on masculinities in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Although the COVID-19 pandemic delayed his plans and necessitated holding a virtual conference, the results that make up the contents of this volume do not disappoint. As Hallama mentions in his Introduction to the Special Forum articles, and as Marko Dumančić highlights in his concluding Comments, the works included here reflect a deep engagement with the lived experiences of men, assessed through memoirs, diaries, photographs, newspapers, and internal party documents. These articles explore some of the many and shifting masculinities constructed throughout the region during the socialist period, showing that individuals and the state constantly engaged in their negotiation and renegotiation.


Author(s):  
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes ◽  
Heather Norris Nicholson

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women Amateur Filmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-158
Author(s):  
A. V. Zhuchkova

The article deals with A. Bushkovsky’s novel Rymba that goes beyond the topics typical of Russian North prose. Rather than limiting himself to admiring nature and Russian character, the author portrays the northern Russian village of Rymba in the larger context of the country’s mentality, history, mythology, and gender politics. In the novel, myth clashes with reality, history with the present day, and an individual with the state. The critic draws a comparison between the novel and the traditions of village prose and Russian North prose. In particular, Bushkovsky’s Rymba is discussed alongside V. Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora [ Proshchanie s Matyoroy ] and R. Senchin’s The Flood Zone [ Zona zatopleniya ]. The novel’s central question is: what keeps the Russian world afloat? Depicting the Christian faith as such a bulwark, Bushkovsky links atheism with the social and spiritual roles played by contemporary men and women. The critic argues, however, that the reliance on Christianity in the novel verges on an affectation. The book’s main symbol is a drowning hawk: it perishes despite people’s efforts to save it.


Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta

The chapter on Poland focuses on two questions. Why, in contrast to all other state-socialist countries, did the church’s capacity for integration actually increase rather than decrease despite persecution and discrimination during the communist period? And why has this capacity also remained more or less constant (albeit to a lesser extent) in the period since the end of communist rule? The authors have identified four key factors in the remarkable resistance of the Polish Catholic Church during the period of communist persecution: the fusion of religious and national values, the specific conflict dynamics of the church’s struggle with the state, the structural conservatism of agricultural production in Poland, and the actions of Pope John Paul II. Explanations for the surprising stability of religiosity in Poland after 1990 point to the behaviour of the Church itself, to the internal pluralization of Catholicism, and to the impact of a homogeneous religious culture.


The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Ewa Okoń-Horodyńska ◽  
Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz

Abstract This paper deals with the attempt to search for the sources of creativity in the broad sense in solving problems. These creative solutions become innovations. The ability to develop innovation depends on the multi-dimensional predispositions to solve problems – those found in people, inspired by the market, organised or spontaneous, as well as facilitated or hampered by the state. Yet, the aforementioned factors should be supplemented with one more – gender. In the chapter attention is paid to the multi-dimensional differences stemming from gender, which should be perceived as a positive element, because they are the source of synergy resulting from collaboration among research or business teams in the process of innovation. The chapter introduces the concept of ‘innovative gender’ and its institutional framework. The methodological inspiration is the model known in the literature as the Innovation Genome, the conceptualization of which constitutes a major part of the study.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document