Identities, Ethnicities and Gender in Antiquity


Book Description

The question of ‘identity’ arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one’s own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very ‘different’. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of ‘gender’ is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in the evaluation of the norms and values of other cultures. The object of this book is to analyze, at the beginning Western culture, various examples of the ways the Greeks and Romans deployed these three parameters in the definition of their identity, both cultural and gendered, by reference to their neighbours and foreign nations at different times in their history. This study also aims to enrich contemporary debates by showing that we have yet to learn from the ancients’ discussions of social and cultural issues that are still relevant today.




Framing Intersectionality


Book Description

Originally conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 as a tool for the analysis of the ways in which different forms of social inequality, oppression and discrimination interact and overlap in multidimensional ways, the concept of 'intersectionality' has attracted much attention in international feminist debates over the last decade. Framing Intersectionality brings together proponents and critics of the concept, to discuss the 'state of the art' with those that have been influential in the debates that surround it. Engaging with the historical roots of intersectionality in the US-based 'race-class-gender' debate, this book also considers the European adoption of this concept in different national contexts, to explore issues such as migration, identity, media coverage of sexual violence against men and transnational livelihoods of high and low skilled migrants. Thematically arranged around the themes of the transatlantic migration of intersectionality, the development of intersectionality as a theory, men's studies and masculinities, and the body and embodiment, this book draws on empirical case studies as well as theoretical deliberations to investigate the capacity and the sustainability of the concept and shed light on the current state of intersectionality research. Presenting the latest work from a team of leading feminist scholars from the US and Europe, Framing Intersectionality will be of interest to all those with interests in gender, women's studies, masculinity, inequalities and feminist thought.




Violence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences across Europe


Book Description

This book draws together both: theory and practice on minority/migrant women and gendered violence. The interplay of gender, ethnicity, religion, class, generation and sexuality in shaping the lives, experiences and choices of minority/migrant women affected by violence has not always been adequately theorised within much of the existing writing on violence against women. Feminist theory, especially the insights provided by the concept of intersectionality, are central to the editors’ conceptual frameworks.




Class and Other Identities


Book Description

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.




Locating Gender in Modernism


Book Description

This book visits modernism within a comparative, gendered, and third-world framework, questioning current scholarly categorisations of modernism and reframing our conception of what constitutes modernist aesthetics. It describes the construction of modernist studies and argues that despite a range of interventions which suggest that philosophical and material articulations with the third world shaped modernism, an emphasis on modernist "universals" persists. Ramanathan argues that women and third-world authors have reshaped received notions of the modern and revised orthodox ideas on the modern aesthetic. Authors such as Bessie Head, Josiane Racine, T.Obinkaram Echewa, Raja Rao, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sembene Ousmane, Salman Rushdie, Ana Castillo, Attia Hossain, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Sahar Khalifeh, are visited in their specific cultural contexts and use some form of realism, a mode that western modernism relegates to the nineteenth century. A comparative methodology and extensive research on intersecting topics such as post-coloniality and the articulation between gender and modernist aesthetics facilitates readings of the modern in twentieth century literature that fall outside standards of western modernism. Considering the relationship between aesthetics and ideology, Ramanathan lays out a critical apparatus to enhance our understanding of the modern, thus suggesting that form is not universal, but that the history of forms, like the history of colonialism and of women, indicates very specific modalities of the modern.




Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives


Book Description

This book covers a range of issues and phenomena around gender-related violence in specific cultural and regional conditions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it discusses historical and contemporary developments that trigger violence while highlighting the social conditions, practices, discourses, and cultural experiences of gender-related violence in India. Beginning with the issues of gender-based violence within the traditional context of Indian history and colonial encounters, it moves on to explore the connections between gender, minorities, marginalisation, sexuality, and violence, especially violence against Dalit women, disabled women, and transgender people. It traces and interprets similarities and differences as well as identifies social causes of potential conflicts. Further, it investigates the forms and mechanisms of political, economic, and institutional violence in the legitimation or de-legitimation of traditional gender roles. The chapters deal with sexual violence, violence within marriage and family, influence of patriarchal forces within factory-based gender violence, and global processes such as demand-driven surrogacy and the politics of literary and cinematic representations of gender-based violence. The book situates relevant debates about India and underlines the global context in the making of the gender bias that leads to violence both in the public and private domains. An important contribution to feminist scholarship, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, history, sociology, and political science.




Global Gender Research


Book Description

Readers of Global Gender Research will learn to compare and contrast feminist concerns globally, gain familiarity with the breadth of gender research, and understand the national contexts that produced it. This volume provides an in-depth comparative picture of the current state of feminist sociological gender and women's studies research in four regions of the world—Africa, Asia, Latin America/the Caribbean, and Europe—as represented by many countries. The introductory essay to each region explains how social science research on women and/or gender issues has been shaped by economics, politics, and culture, and by trends that are simultaneously local, regional, and global. It familiarizes readers with the wide range of salient issues, research methods, writing styles, and leading authors from around the globe. Each regional section includes several chapters on gender research in specific countries that represent the region's diversity and cover the major theoretical and empirical trends that have emerged over time, as well as the relationship of key research questions to feminist activism and women’s or gender studies. Next, the editors illustrate this new wave of gender scholarship with translated/reprinted samples of research articles from additional countries in the region, that cover a wide range of important global topics—such as work, sexuality, masculinities, childcare and family issues, religion, violence, law and gender policies. Finally, this volume provides scholars with extensive bibliographies and a listing of web sites for women’s and gender research centers in 85 countries.




Engendering Realism and Postmodernism


Book Description

This volume assembles critical essays on, and excerpts from, works of contemporary women writers in Britain. Its focus is the interaction of aesthetic play and ethical commitment in the fictional work of women writers whose interest in testing and transgressing textual boundaries is rooted in a specific awareness of a gendered multicultural reality. This position calls for a distinctly critical impetus of their writing involving the interaction of the political and the literary as expressed in innovative combinations of realist and postmodern techniques in works by A. S. Byatt, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Penelope Lively, Sara Maitland, Suniti Namjoshi, Ravinder Randhawa, Joan Riley, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant, Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson. All contributions to this volume address aspects of these writers' positions and techniques with a clear focus on their interest in transgressing boundaries of genre, gender and (post)colonial identity. The special quality of these interpretations, first given in the presence of writers at a symposium in Potsdam, derives from the creative and prosperous interactions between authors and critics. The volume concludes with excerpts from the works of the participating writers which exemplify the range of concrete concerns and technical accomplisments discussed in the essays. They are taken from fictional works by Debjani Chatterjee, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Sara Maitland, and Ravinder Randhawa. They also include the creative interactions of Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe in their joint writing and Paul Magrs' critical engagement with Sara Maitland.




Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism


Book Description

Based on theoretical developments in research on world-systems analysis, transnational migration, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, whilst considering continuities of inequality patterns in the context of colonial and postcolonial realities, Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism proposes an original framework for the study of the long-term reproduction of inequalities under global capitalism. With attention to the critical assessment of both Marxist and Weberian perspectives, this book examines the wider implications of transferring classical approaches to inequality to a twenty-first-century context, calling for a reconceptualisation of inequality that is both theoretically informed and methodologically consistent, and able to cater for the implications of shifts from national and Western structures to global structures. Engaging with approaches to the study of class, gender, racial and ethnic inequalities at the global level, this innovative work adopts a relational perspective in the study of social inequalities that is able to reveal how historical interdependencies between world regions have translated as processes of inequality production and reproduction. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, political and social theory and anthropology concerned with questions of globalisation and inequality.