British Women Amateur Filmmakers

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.

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 975-990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Leow

Gail Hershatter's presidential addressat the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.


2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-700
Author(s):  
Jitka Malečková

Gender is a good place from which to start reflections on European history: gender history deliberately transcends borders and, at the same time, demonstrates the difficulties of writing European, or transnational, history. Focusing on recent syntheses of modern European history, both general works and those specifically devoted to gender, the article asks what kind of Europe emerges from the encounter between gender and history. It suggests that the writing of European history includes either Eastern Europe (and, sometimes, the Ottoman Empire) or a gender perspective, but seldom both. Thus, the projects of integrating a European dimension into gender history and gender into European history remain unfinished. The result is a history of a rather ‘small Europe’.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyne Alphonso

This study analyzes regional editorial content as produced by Vogue magazine. Vogue has developed an empire comprised of 22 international editions. Vogue Mexico & Latin America, and Vogue Arabia, are the only two editions that encompass numerous countries, cultures, and voices. Using discourse analysis through a cultural studies lens, this study analyzes six editorial spreads to uncover what cultural messages are being produced, how these images impact national identities, and who is or is not represented in the fashion image. Intersections of fashion with culture, identity, race, and gender, are analyzed through critical discourse analysis to address constructions of power, specifically within a cultural and postcolonial framework. Visual narratives in Vogue Arabia and Vogue Mexico & Latin America reflect values seemingly distinct to their region, but are charged with cultural assumptions and inaccuracies. For postcolonial cultures vying for identities independent of their colonial past, these marketable stereotypes continue to suppress their structural agency.


Author(s):  
Maria Sjöberg

In recent decades, gender perspectives have been adopted and elaborated in almost all research areas of history, apart from world history. A review of articles published in the Journal of World History during 2001–13 demonstrates a general pattern of gender blindness in the journal, with a few important exceptions. Several explanations for why world history neglects gender history are examined in this article. First, it has been claimed that world history has a strong materialist tradition, while gender historians work mostly with cultural perspectives. However, the articles in the Journal of World History show that world history is not unfamiliar with cultural issues or methodologies. Secondly, gender historians emphasize the complexity of gender relations, which do not accord well with prevailing explanations within world history that stress macro theories and general patterns. Thirdly, gender historians concentrate their research on women in their own countries, and this is of minor interest to scholars of world history. Fourthly, the absence of women and gender relations in writing and teaching on world history reflects the fact that almost every society in world history has had a gender order that discriminates against women in favour of men. What is lacking is a consciousness of this order. This opinion is easy to agree with, but it does not suggest ways of improving the gender consciousness of world historians. Fifthly, one opinion stresses that most women in history have lived their lives in families, while families do not play an important role in world history. This opinion relies on a view of gender history as exclusively women’s history. In order to emphasize and clarify gender as a structuring principle at the general level of societies, this article ends with an overview of a similarity of significance in almost all early modern political regencies. Dynastic thinking was established all over the world, from principalities to empires, and was everywhere constructed in terms of imagined family and kinship relations with superior masculinity and subordinated femininity. How can research in world history overlook this world-wide structure? 


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-319
Author(s):  
Joanna de Groot
Keyword(s):  

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