The LGBTQ Press in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland

2020 ◽  
pp. 483-501
Author(s):  
Alison Oram ◽  
Justin Bengry

This chapter examines the development of the ‘gay’ press in Britain and Ireland from the late nineteenth century. Early periodicals that directly addressed gender fluidity and same-sex love were privately circulated; caution and secrecy lasted well into the 1960s. Yet at the same time considerable queer content appeared in some mainstream publications, such as fashion, film and physique magazines in the pre-decriminalisation period. More recognisably lesbian and gay publications from the 1960s sought to achieve political and cultural change and to foster social contacts for lesbians and gay men. The Gay Liberation Movement marked a wealth of short- and longer-lived magazines, newspapers and periodicals, while feminism invigorated lesbian activism and publications. Differentiation in content characterises the gay press in the late twentieth century, from glossy arts magazines to political campaign news to specialist pornography. From the 1980s there was a discernible shift towards lifestyle magazines. Regional gay and lesbian magazines also appear in this period, often overlapping with the local alternative press, although censorship and persecution continued alongside the success of the LGBT press. The chapter further identifies the specific development of LGBTQ publications in Scotland and Ireland.

Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


Author(s):  
Gavin Miller

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.


Author(s):  
Ronald Labonté ◽  
Arne Ruckert

International health, a concern with the high burden of preventable disease in poorer countries, is long-standing. In late nineteenth century sanitary reforms and early twentieth century philanthropic financing to control infectious diseases in the Americas, this concern also foreshadows more contemporary debates over global health financing and the ‘health securitization’ of wealthier nations against diseases spreading from poorer ones. By the late twentieth century, however, there was a shift in discourse from ‘international’ to ‘global’ health underpinned by the growing awareness that there are inherently global reasons for why some countries are wealthier and healthier, while others remain poorer and sicker. Two different frameworks are used to unpack these causal pathways, in which globalization processes are regarded as meta-determinants of health inequities within and between nations. Although researchers argue that globalization processes have been good for health, others are much less sanguine on this claim.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


boundary 2 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Lea Spira

This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to flourish in their stead. The arc of Sosa’s work spans the transitions of the epoch and their attendant affective economies: from the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s–1970s, to the deep sorrows of the early military regimes, to the infinite deferrals of justice that animated the neoliberal project. In closing, I examine solidarity responses to the 2014 attack on Gaza. Embodying the rejuvenation of joint decolonial struggle, they rupture the Zionist stronghold that has shaped dominant structures of feeling, overwhelmingly laying purchase on the popular imagination.


Author(s):  
Karissa Haugeberg

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of the American antiabortion movement. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, women prolife activists founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on clinic records, oral histories, organizational records, and interviews with prominent figures, Women against Abortion examines American women's fight against abortion. It also elucidates the complicated relationship between gender politics, religion, and politics as notions of equality, secularism, and partisanship were recast in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, it looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward, it traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. The book also looks at the activism of Shelley Shannon, a prominent evangelical Protestant pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Women against Abortion explores important questions, including the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. e20200028
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher

Emerging in Toronto in the late 1960s, the Edmund Burke Society (ebs) became a leading far-right outlet. From picketing Model United Nations meetings and gatherings of left-wing groups to staging pro-Vietnam War protests and engaging in racially motivated vandalism, the ebs became a bellwether of what journalists and social scientists identified as a “virtual explosion” of Canadian right-wing extremism. The far right has a long history in Canada, and, in this regard, ebs members’ views reflected long-standing strains of extreme nationalism, racism, anti-statism, and anti-communism. However, the ebs and its successor organizations were very much concerned with issues that were current in late twentieth-century Canada: the expanding welfare state; changes in Canadian immigration policy; multiculturalism and a more civic-based nationalism; and the entrenchment of the rights revolution. Furthermore, the group’s activities were also a response to 1960s counterculture, a counter-counterculture in that it offered a radical challenge from the right, not only to the status quo but also to the New Left. While much of the history of Canada in the 1960s is focused on the left, the emergence of the ebs highlights the growth of activism at the other end of the political spectrum. Providing an important look at Canadian far-right extremism, this examination of the ebs serves as a reminder that the 1960s were not all Trudeaumania and flower power and that societal changes in the later decades of the century did not go uncontested.


2004 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 107-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Rowland ◽  
Melissa Hicks

A consortium dominated by archaeocyaths and calcified microorganisms (calcimicrobes) constructed the first metazoan reefs during an eleven-million-year interval of the Early Cambrian. However, archaeocyaths were not the first metazoan reef dwellers; the weakly calcified organismNamacalathus, and the more heavily biomineralized organismNamapoikia, occupied microbial reef environments during the late Neoproterozoic, but they were not involved in reef construction. Throughout the late nineteenth century, and during most of the twentieth century, the biological affinities of archaeocyaths were unsettled, which caused paleobiologists to avoid including them in analyses of the Cambrian fauna. However, in the late twentieth century the discovery of living, aspiculate sponges led to a consensus among archaeocyathan workers that these fossils represent an extinct class of aspiculate, calcareous sponges. The majority of archaeocyathan-calcimicrobial reefs are relatively small, lenticular mounds, typically about a meter thick and a few meters in diameter, but the archaeocyathan-calcimicrobial consortium also constructed massive, ecologically zoned, wave-resistant, framework reefs. The Great Siberian Cambrian Reef Complex is 200-300 km wide and stretches for 1500 km across northern Siberia. A consensus has not yet been found among Cambrian reef workers concerning photosymbiosis, which is such an important aspect of the ecology of modern coralgal reefs. Two extinction events hit during the Early Cambrian, the second of which is associated with a eustatic sea-level drop. The attendant marine regression eliminated reefs, and the archaeocyathan-calcimicrobial reef community disappeared. While the disappearance of reefs at this time is perfectly understandable, it is nevertheless surprising that the metazoan-calcimicrobe reef-building consortium was not able to recover within a few million years. Approximately forty million years passed æ from the end of the Early Cambrian to the beginning of the Middle Ordovician æ before metazoans finally returned to reef-building. We present seven hypotheses to explain this metazoan-reef-free window. The testing of these hypotheses will, in part, be the challenge of the next phase of research on Early Cambrian reefs.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>


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