scholarly journals Charlotte Charke’s Gun: Queering Material Culture and Gender Performance

Author(s):  
Jade Higa ◽  
Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Bardavío Estevan

AbstractDespite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.


Author(s):  
Károly Mesterházy

The author collected the material of ca. 250 find places by types. He examined the material, manufacturing technique, and chronology of the bracelets, as well as their distribution by social layers and gender, and their direct analogies in Russia and the Balkans. The ancient Hungarians of the Conquest period appeared in the Carpathian Basin with a new archaeological culture in the turn of the 9th and the 10th centuries. Band bracelets were characteristic pieces of this material culture. Today they are represented by three main types: 1. band with rounded terminals, 2. band with coiled terminals, 3. hinged band. The first type has many variants. The terminal of the bracelet can be disc-like rounded, but mostly it just ends in a semicircular form. The band can be undecorated, decorated with punched palmette-tendril ornaments, or sometimes with geometric (zigzag) motifs, and applied decoration can also appear at the end of the band. In the beginning of the 11th century only bronze bands occurred, with various punched dotted circle decorations. A punched hole can often be observed at both ends of the bands. This might have served for sewing the band on, however, others believe that a string threaded through the holes pulled the band together. The most frequent decorations of bracelets with coiled terminals are punched zigzag motifs, and sometimes palmette-tendrils also occurs. While the former type is frequent by both men and women, bracelets with twisted terminals rarely occur by men. Hinged bracelets either copied Byzantine antecedents, or they arrived as imports. The ends of the sleeves of the funerary dress, the cuffs were decorated by thin silver or gold ribbons that were sewed on the hem of the dress.


2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-169
Author(s):  
Peter Christensen

No Mediterranean city witnessed as dramatic a demographic shift as Salonica following the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia in 1492. This article explores the specific concept of placemaking in the context of this transformation, examining how the industries, devotional spaces, mythology, and material traditions of Iberian Jews tactically engaged with extant forms of Ottoman multicultural governance and social systems. Drawing upon a broad array of visual and textual information, this article argues that under the evolving mechanics of the millet and dhimmi systems, the nimbler aspects of material culture–color, fabric, dress, spoliation–proved to be the most effective in articulating and developing diasporic Sephardic identity within both the city and the empire. This article further analyzes the ways in which this identity was capable of, if not inclined to, the delimiting of regional, class, and gender groups, ultimately contouring and challenging notions of a monolithic minority culture within the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Charlie Athill

This narrative case study explores how material culture, in the form of dress, grooming and accessories, is utilized to establish a gender-fluid presentation of the self. It focuses on Tim Mustoe, a 42-year-old heterosexual creative living and working in London, whose embodied practice contributes to the problematization of gender normativity through a disruption of culturally established links between appearance, gender and sex. The study considers how a particular form of non-spectacular cross dressing is used to integrate into a work environment and also operate within a non-queer social environment. The study explores the affective power of material culture in the reification of subject position and as a means of resilience and empowerment through everyday practice and also considers its significance on a social, intersubjective level. The methodology used for this case draws on sensory ethnography and includes a queer reflexive turn to consider parallels and contrasts between my own and Tim’s experience and practice. Conceptualizations of subjectivity, sex, gender are considered in relation to those on material culture, and the study draws on scholarship related to cross-dressing in the United Kingdom. Tim identifies as a man, as do I; however, his embodied practice and gender identification proffer a particular response to culturally embedded norms relating to the binaries of sex and gender. Therefore, in relation to male femininity, I propose the notion of feminizing as an amendment to the concept of femaling, which assumes the identification with or transition to a cisgender position. This study explores the phenomenology of dress as an expressive tool of gratification and as a means of integration for which the imperatives of professionalism, age and respectability are key factors.


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (25) ◽  
pp. 12220-12225 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kantner ◽  
David McKinney ◽  
Michele Pierson ◽  
Shaza Wester

An understanding of the division of labor in different societies, and especially how it evolved in the human species, is fundamental to most analyses of social, political, and economic systems. The ability to reconstruct how labor was organized, however, especially in ancient societies that left behind few material remains, is challenged by the paucity of direct evidence demonstrating who was involved in production. This is particularly true for identifying divisions of labor along lines of age, sex, and gender, for which archaeological interpretations mostly rely upon inferences derived from modern examples with uncertain applicability to ancient societies. Drawing upon biometric studies of human fingerprints showing statistically distinct ridge breadth measurements for juveniles, males, and females, this study reports a method for collecting fingerprint impressions left on ancient material culture and using them to distinguish the sex of the artifacts’ producers. The method is applied to a sample of 985 ceramic sherds from a 1,000-y-old Ancestral Puebloan community in the US Southwest, a period characterized by the rapid emergence of a highly influential religious and political center at Chaco Canyon. The fingerprint evidence demonstrates that both males and females were significantly involved in pottery production and further suggests that the contributions of each sex varied over time and even among different social groups in the same community. The results indicate that despite long-standing assumptions that pottery production in Ancient Puebloan societies was primarily a female activity, labor was not strictly divided and instead was likely quite dynamic.


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