scholarly journals «Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
Serena Guarracino

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.


Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Griffin

In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of ‘breaking through’, as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini’s secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the ‘hundred years since the foundation of Fascism’? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ailish Wallace-Buckland

<p>In January 1932, the Sydney-based lifestyle magazine Health and Physical Culture published an article titled ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’. This article, written by Carl Hertzig, and read by magazine-subscribers across the Tasman, documented anxieties around the state of men and masculinity following the upheaval of the Great War. Touching on topics such as gender, psychology, eugenics, and sexuality this article and its concerns represent those that this thesis explores in order to understand what the ‘fear of effeminacy’ actually meant for New Zealanders during the interwar years (c.1918-1939). This thesis documents and analyses contemporary discussions of male sexuality and masculinity through a series of sources in order to establish the ways in which these concepts were understood in interwar New Zealand. Firstly, it examines some of the key pieces of legislation and reports that demonstrated official approaches, and ways of thinking, towards mental defectives, sexual offenders, and those with war neuroses. It then explores medical journals, and the dissertations of medical students; and finally, it analyses parts of popular print culture in Aotearoa/New Zealand, such as magazines and newspapers, in order to investigate and piece together the landscape in which said anxieties around effeminacy, masculinity, mental stability, and other deviations from the societally prescribed norm met. This thesis approaches these primary sources in such a way that acknowledges the evolutionary framework of understanding that was pervasive in medical circles during this era.  By thus examining the connections between constructions of the male body, homosexuality and effeminacy, late nineteenth to early twentieth century ideas around eugenics, and psychology and psychiatry, this work further uncovers the state of masculinity and male sexuality in New Zealand during the interwar period. This thesis argues that the ‘threat’ to masculinity perceived in a variety of venues was a mixture of anxieties around physical and mental wounds inflicted by the Great War; population concerns exacerbated by the exposure of the health-standards of troops, and worries of how to recover and reconstruct a virile society following four years of strife; concerns at the apparent loosening of sexual mores, and the changing manifestations of both masculinity and femininity; and ever increasing interest in the psychology of self, sexuality, and society. It adds to existing work on post-World War One masculinity by centring New Zealand discussions and understandings in a way that contributes to the broader literature on New Zealand twentieth-century masculinity, psychology and psychiatry, eugenics, and male sexuality.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Erin Keenan

<p>Māori urbanisation and urban migrations have been the subject of much discussion and research, especially following World War Two when Māori individuals, whānau and communities increasingly became residents of towns and cities that were overwhelmingly Pākehā populated. However, Māori urbanisation experiences and urban migrations are difficult topics to address because kaumātua are reluctant to discuss ‘urban Māori’, especially considering its implications for Māori identities. The original contribution this thesis makes to histories of Māori urban migrations is that it explores these and other understandings of urbanisations to discover some of their historical influences. By discussing urbanisations directly with kaumātua and exploring historical sources of Māori living in, and moving to, the urban spaces of Wellington and the Hutt Valley through the twentieth century, this thesis is a ‘meeting place’ for a range of perspectives on the meanings of urbanisations from the past and the present. Although urbanisation was an incredible time of material change for the individuals and whānau who chose to move into cities such as Wellington, the histories of urban migration experiences exist within a scope of Māori and iwi worldviews that gave rise to multiple experiences and understandings of urbanisations. The Wellington region is used to show that Māori in towns and cities used Māori social and cultural forms in urban areas so that they could, through the many challenges of becoming urban-dwelling, ensure the persistence of their Māoritanga. Urbanisations also allowed Māori to both use traditional identities in urban areas, as well as develop new relationships modelled on kinship. The Ngāti Pōneke community is used as an example of the complex interactions between these identities and how many Māori became active residents in but not conceptually ‘of’ cities. As a result, the multiple and layered Māori identities that permeate throughout Māori experiences of the present and the past are important considerations in approaching and discussing urbanisations. Urban Māori communities have emphasised the significance of varied and layered Māori identities, and this became particularly pronounced through the Māori urban migrations of the twentieth century.</p>


Author(s):  
Cristiano Casalini

One key to the success of Jesuit education has been the tension between the recognizable mark of uniformity that long distinguished the methods, contents, and practices of Jesuit schools and their ability to adapt to different contexts and times. Both of the aspects could be said to have found explicit support in that unique foundational document, the Ratio Studiorum, which retained some sway up until the middle of the twentieth century despite the many variations and complexities that had arisen since early modernity. Soon after the Ratio fell into oblivion, Jesuit schools began to think about what made them distinctively Jesuit. There was a need to clarify the profile of their mission in the contemporary world. This chapter will sketch a history of Jesuit education, focusing on both the permanent and changing traits of its distinctive pedagogy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.


Author(s):  
Lila Caimari

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.


Author(s):  
P. J. E. Peebles

This introductory chapter provides an overview of cosmology. The starting assumption for cosmology, as in all branches of natural science, is that nature operates by kinds of logic and rules that one can discover by careful examination of what is observed, informed by past experience of what has worked. But despite the many demonstrations of its power, physics, along with all the rest of natural science, is incomplete. Research in cosmology in the twentieth century usually was done in small groups, often an individual working alone or maybe with a colleague or a student or two. In the twenty-first century, ongoing research in cosmology grew richer and called for larger groups to develop special-purpose equipment for data acquisition, which in turn called for groups of comparable size to reduce the data and interpret it. Big Science has become important to this subject: One has to get used to gathering data in vast amounts, analyzing these data, and employing massive numerical simulations that help bridge the gap between theory and observation. This book provides an account of how cosmology grew, presenting histories of six lines of research that were developing more or less separately.


2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.


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