Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660–1830

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara M. Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
The Public ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public World ◽  
Medical Marketplace ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ambiguous Position

This essay asks when and how did early periodical advertisements identify or solicit consumers by gender? In response to this question, Barbara Benedict analyses the representations and self-representation of women medical practitioners (physicians and apothecaries) and the female body in handbills and newspaper advertisements from 1650 to 1751. It argues that the rough-and-tumble world of advertisement provided women with opportunities to capitalise on their gendered physicality, despite the social and gender prejudices this move entailed. Benedict illuminates how medical ads by women physicians occupy an ambiguous position as simultaneously participants in the public world, the printed marketplace, and as privileged or limited by their special connection to domesticity, and particularly to the body. Print, the essay concludes, enabled early female medical practitioners to compete in the medical marketplace.

Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Krasner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
West African ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
And Gender

Although Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) belonged to the same generation of turn-of-the-century African American performers as did Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bert Williams, and George Walker, she had a rather different view of how best to represent her race and gender in the performing arts. Walker taught white society in New York City how to do the Cakewalk, a celebratory dance with links to West African festival dance. In Walker's choreography of it, it was reconfigured with some ingenuity to accommodate race, gender, and class identities in an era in which all three were in flux. Her strategy depended on being flexible, on being able to make the transition from one cultural milieu to another, and on adjusting to new patterns of thinking. Walker had to elaborate her choreography as hybrid, merging her interpretation of cakewalking with the preconceptions of a white culture that became captivated by its form. To complicate matters, Walker's choreography developed during a particularly unstable and volatile period. As Anna Julia Cooper remarked in 1892.

scholarly journals The Politics of Gendered Spatializations: A Study of Cityscapes in Manu Joseph’s Novels

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.S. Parvathi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Body ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
City Image ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

Burton Pike (1981) terms the cityscapes represented in literature as word-cities whose depiction captures the spatial significance evoked by the city-image and simultaneously, articulates the social psychology of its inhabitants (pp. 243). This intertwining of the social and the spatial animates the concept of spatiality, which informs the positionality of urban subjects, (be it the verticality of the city or the horizonality of the landscape) and determines their standpoint (Keith and Pile, 1993). The spatial politics underlying cityscapes, thus, determine the modes of social production of sexed corporeality. In turn, the body as a cultural product modifies and reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing demographic needs. The dialectic relationship between the city and the bodies embedded in them orient familial, social, and sexual relations and inform the discursive practices underlying the division of urban spaces into public and private domains. The geographical and social positioning of the bodies within the paradigm of the public/private binary regulates the process of individuation of the bodies into subjects. The distinction between the public and the private is deeply rooted in spatial practices that isolate a private sphere of domestic, embodied activity from the putatively disembodied political, public sphere. Historically, women have been treated as private and embodied and the politics of the demarcated spaces are employed to control and limit women’s mobility. This gendered politics underlying the situating practices apropos public and private spaces inform the representations of space in literary texts. Manu Joseph’s novels, Serious Men (2010) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), are situated in the word-cities of Mumbai and Chennai respectively whose urban spaces are structured by such spatial practices underlying the politics of location. The paper attempts to problematize the nature of gendered spatializations informing the location of characters in Serious Men and The Illicit Happiness of Other People.

Crimes against the body: causing harm

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alannah Tomkins
Keyword(s):  
Violent Crime ◽  
Expert Witness ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Lay Public

Medical practitioners who were accused of committing violent crime against the bodies of people other than patients presented both the profession and the public with a problem. Both professional bodies and the lay public desired doctors to be social heroes, inhabiting the role of expert witness and protecting the body rather than appearing as a defendant. This study of practitioners accused of either rape or murder finds the limits of medical competition, as men accused of rape were likely to be acquitted to courtroom applause. Medical murderers, on the other hand, offered the profession viable scapegoats to reinforce the impression that the medical fraternity was willing to admit to limited instances of wrong-doing.

Habitus and Field

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Heuristic Devices

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.

scholarly journals Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

scholarly journals Rethinking Language and Gender in African Fiction: Towards De-gendering and Re-gendering

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. p132
Author(s):  
Andrew T. Ngeh ◽  
Sarah M. Nalova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Women In Literature ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Feasible Solutions

The recognition and acceptance of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist discourse which challenges the subjugation of the woman. G.D. Nyamndi, therefore, in his Facing Meamba attempts to address these concerns and proffer feasible solutions. The representation of women in literature, the role of gender in both literary creation and literary criticism, as studied ingynocriticism, the connection between gender and various aspects of literary form in such genre and metre embody masculine values of heroism, war, and adventure. This androcentric stand has compromised the rights of the woman, resulting in her marginalization, alienation and exclusion from socio-cultural activities. She is maligned with a sense of inadequacy. The patriarchal centre prevails and dominates the woman who has been pushed to the margin of the society. In this regard, Nyamndi demonstrates that, the African woman still has a place within the postcolonial context even though the man is imbued with more powers than the woman. Informed by the postcolonial theory, this study argues that, gendering constitutes a grave danger to a harmonious existence between the two genders. The study revealed that, de-gendering and re-gendering can create harmony between the man and woman because the two concepts are basis for gender equality. To achieve this, language which constitutes a semiotic mould has been exploited to deploy themes like, gender inequality and cultural issues.

scholarly journals Courtesan Singers as Courtiers: Power, Political Pawns, and the Arrest of virtuosa Nina Barcarola

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-267
Author(s):  
Amy Brosius
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Symbolic Extension ◽  
Male Dependents ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

This article gives a close reading of the “avvisi di Roma”—unpublished archival documents reporting on daily life in the city—that record the arrest in 1645 of famous Roman courtesan singer Nina Barcarola. Organized by the political enemies of Nina's main protector, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the arrest was orchestrated so as to compromise the public honor of both. The reports of the arrest reflect a growing elite interest in female vocal performance in Rome, and attest to a rise in the social value of courtesan singers. Examining details provided in these reports, the article explores various aspects of Nina's life and courtesan singing culture more generally: the public honor and social practices of courtesan singers; the positive effect of singing on courtesan honor; the types of gatherings hosted by Nina; and her politically satirical public performances. It also analyzes Nina's relationship to various areas of contemporary politics—social, state, familial, and gender. The reports reveal that, in the public sphere, Nina, like Barberini's male dependents, served as a symbolic extension of the cardinal. By introducing courtesan singers—a significant, marginalized population—into musicological discourse on seventeenth-century Rome, the article broadens our understanding of Roman singing culture in this period.

Biopolitics of Beauty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Jarrín
Keyword(s):  
Public Health System ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Affective Value ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Patients Experience

Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, this book shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation's racial improvement. From here, the book explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that the book calls “affective capital,” which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery. This book explores not only the biopolitical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Bray
Keyword(s):  
Military Personnel ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
East Asian Region ◽  
Medical Associations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gender And Health ◽  
And Gender

This volume breaks new ground in the history of East Asian biopolitics, offering the first broad-based exploration of gender and health in the region during the long twentieth century. The core theme is the complex meshing of biology, body, and citizen that underpins projects of biological nation building and molds the forms of modern subjectivity. The nine case studies presented here, spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation building throughout the period. Colonial powers and medical associations, government bureaucrats, military personnel, and pharmaceutical companies as well as scientists, educators, and medical practitioners contributed to the legitimation and popularization of evolving scientific discourses and interpretations of the gendered body, sex, and reproductive health. As novel visions of the body and its possibilities took shape, new expressions of individuality, sociality, transgression or resistance, new desires, and fears emerged. Across the region and over the decades, norms and ideals, techniques, terminology, and forms of scientific or cultural authority circulated and converged, faded and resurfaced. In mapping such flows, influences, and reactions, the volume highlights the prominent role that the biopolitics of health and gender has played in knitting and shaping the East Asian region as we know it today....

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