tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78580545716235130182024-03-13T01:25:39.247-07:00Gender Book ReviewsSouthwest Journal of CulturesBridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-44214337568878172132010-09-07T09:31:00.001-07:002010-09-07T09:31:55.004-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCiDoWAm74rQOk1BEpUtpPgGEHT_V3ws_DdCiWjfhSZNVkFkqRVsH81VzuvzAyEvRHYSuUmpgVu-FehCkSjYuSYPnm9RJ0TsJebuUDVCuBWlR6gBz4kznpPsbs8B0S9sJ07_II9lbvvC8/s1600/31WsrIMQj5L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495337026074635682" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCiDoWAm74rQOk1BEpUtpPgGEHT_V3ws_DdCiWjfhSZNVkFkqRVsH81VzuvzAyEvRHYSuUmpgVu-FehCkSjYuSYPnm9RJ0TsJebuUDVCuBWlR6gBz4kznpPsbs8B0S9sJ07_II9lbvvC8/s400/31WsrIMQj5L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 300px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 300px;" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950</span></b></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">.</span> Edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Burlington, VT: Ashgate, December 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0754665380, $99.95. 296 pages.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Review by Julia Hudson-Richards, Pennsylvania State University-Altoona College</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This collection of essays is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on material cultures not only as texts, but also as artifacts in their own rights.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Much of the historical literature on women’s roles in the production of textiles in the west has focused on the shift from home-based to factory production, but the scope of this book is far greater.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The editors’ selections prove that the production of needlework and textiles—women’s primary entry point into material culture—was a pivotal intersection where the “social, political, economic, ethnic, and cultural facets of humanity” converged (1).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The “world of the needle,” however, has been a blind spot for a number of scholars, and the essays in this work enhance not only to the history of material cultures, but also the construction of gender and ethnic identities, feminine culture, and the development of consumer economies.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The collection begins with an essay by Heather Pristash, Inez Schaechterle, and Sue Carter Wood that establishes a solid theoretical basis for needlework and textile production as text—a location for oftentimes coded discourses of dissent or protest, or even of gender and community identity.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The discussion culminates in the analysis of the legendary “Willard Dress,” a pattern for a dress with concealed trousers published by the American Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the 19</span></span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">th</span></span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> century.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Willard Dress, though we cannot find any surviving examples, represented the ways that the personal – sewing – could take on not only practical but political dimensions, in the ways that women attempted to balance their own political agendas, like suffrage, with appearances in order to maintain a certain propriety in a hostile political environment.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">These political themes are traced more explicitly in Part III, “Politics and Design in Yarn and Thread.”</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The editors define politics quite broadly here, to their credit, noting the politics of the private behind knitting for soldiers during wartime (Susan M. Strawn) as well the untold story of Florence Cory as a medium for recovering the history of women in industrial design (Sarah Johnson).</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">A number of essays trace the ways that textile making shifted from a woman’s necessity—as in making her trousseau, for example—to the creation of material objects encompassing a vast array of meanings.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">For example, Marcia McLean’s essay “’I Dearly Loved that Machine’” (69-89) investigated the introduction of the home sewing machine into rural post-World War II Canada, allowing women to not only economize their own home’s resources, but also to keep up with the latest fashions for themselves and their families.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Women took tremendous pride in their creations, noting the ways that they altered the patterns to make them individual, demonstrating their own professionalism in their craft(s).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Beverly Gordon and Laurel Horton’s essay about quilting at the turn of the twentieth century also falls into this category.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">They argue that quilting, increasingly democratized through an abundance of cheap fabric in the last decades of the nineteenth century, allowed women to stitch family records, records of participation in societies, and even the popular culture of the period.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">They also served as records of family history, and even of women’s lives—they “embodied” their makers and the cultures in which they lived.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cynthia Culver Prescott tells a similar story through the spread of the trendy “crazy quilts” all the way to the Pacific Northwest, as the daughters of the first settlers from the East adopted middle-class domesticity and Eastern consumer cultures, transforming them to fit their own needs (112-13).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In short, these quilts serve as a unique text we can use to read women’s cultures in turn of the century America.</span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Perhaps most interesting, however, were the examinations of the intersections of race/ethnicity and textiles as discussed by Marsha MacDowell in “Native Quiltmaking” (129-48) and “</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mundillo</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and Identity” by Ellen Fernandez-Socco (149-66).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">MacDowell notes that Native women’s quilting flew under the radar for scholars, but like in many other contexts, this same quiltmaking, introduced by western missionaries and other do-gooders, served as a record of contact, oppression, and material and cultural expressions for Native women, though nonetheless subjected to similar stereotypes as other Native arts.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Similarly, a revival in art of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">mundillo</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, “the traditional Puerto Rican art of handmade bobbin lace,” represented a revival in Puerto Rican ethnic identity that has helped spur the island’s tourist industry (149).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Interestingly, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">mundillo</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> also continues to articulate Puerto Rico’s long history of migration and the clashes and relationships between indigenous, African, and European cultures.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Further, the creation of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">mundillo</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> for American consumption indicates the island’s place in a larger history of labor exploitation in the twentieth century, as the creation of market goods began to move to cheaper, and less easily regulated, locales.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Though this review cannot claim to be exhaustive, the work under consideration is an excellent contribution to the expanding field of material culture studies.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The contributors represent a wide range of disciplines—the editors’ decisions to include several museum curators in the ranks of these authors, for example, provides the work with a unique perspective.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The beautiful illustrations—of quilts, of outfits sewn by interview subjects—also offer an added dimension to each author’s discussion. Though there are certainly stories that still remain—an explicit discussion of the role of women in sweatshop labor in the late twentieth century comes to mind—the essays in this volume would nonetheless serve not only as an excellent additions to upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses in history, folklore, women’s studies, or museum studies.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">From a scholarly perspective, they offer interesting insights into the vast realm of meaning of women’s work, and the shifts in women’s work over time.</span></span></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-61821767573302488752010-09-07T09:17:00.001-07:002010-09-07T09:17:54.858-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJAWulN3AT58S-L3ckN9NlwQ-ZgwgYwEFXX6dy58Jl7k6jcOHY9uu4ZNSjpDWXGfwtjOspF8t3BqNKxyeJcfH5s0v44Qq_n-KlXarokTj7Up_0mCDOmYqCI99p4TJh9sMHJRll8r3Q-PM/s1600/masculine-190.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJAWulN3AT58S-L3ckN9NlwQ-ZgwgYwEFXX6dy58Jl7k6jcOHY9uu4ZNSjpDWXGfwtjOspF8t3BqNKxyeJcfH5s0v44Qq_n-KlXarokTj7Up_0mCDOmYqCI99p4TJh9sMHJRll8r3Q-PM/s320/masculine-190.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East Since 1967</span></b></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b>.</b></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b> </b></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b>By Samira Aghacy.</b></span></span><br />
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</b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, November 2009.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cloth: ISBN </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">978-0815632375, $34.95.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">225 pages.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Review by Andrea Duranti, University of Cagliari, Italy</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">“O</span></span><em><span style="color: black; font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">ne is not born a woman</span></span></span></em><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, but rather becomes one”, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Second Sex</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, a work that changed forever the way of considering that “creature, intermediate between male and</span></span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></span><em><span style="color: black; font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">eunuch</span></span></span></em><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, which is described as feminine” through an accurate and thorough multidisciplinary analysis of the condition of women in the human society.</span></span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">More modestly, yet not less effectively, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> aims at opening a window on a relatively new field of study, namely the analysis of the plural paradigms of masculinities in several countries of</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq), using the literary fiction produced in these nations as a primary source.</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">On one hand, the originality of this appreciable work lies in the inauguration of a new vein of research in the field of gender studies applied to the Middle East, as most of the existing studies in this area are focused on women’s conditions or, in case of male-oriented studies, on homoeroticism and homosexuality in Arabic classic literature or in the contemporary societies. Samira Aghacy’s work on the homosocial but heterosexual Middle Eastern men represents, in this regard, a new and praiseworthy piece of scholarship that fills in an epistemological gap.</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">On the other hand, another outstanding peculiarity of this work lies in the innovative perspective that reconnects the development of specific typologies of masculinities to the troubled history of wars – and defeats – in the Middle Eastern area since 1967, with particular regard to the reaffirmation of a violent, patriarchal model of man, who exerts his power – and abuses of it – within the domestic environment as a kind a “compensation” both to the ban from the public sphere imposed by the dictatorships which rule those countries and to the sense of impotence and defeat in the aftermath of the Arab Waterloo of the Six-Day War, an Epicurean “</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">lathe biosas</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">” that, far from being canalized into the development of a refined culture, revives the Mediterranean myths of patriarchy and of familiar violence described in the novels of Italian writers like Gavino Ledda or Ignazio Silone. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Aghacy writes that “since war is generally considered a quintessential male affair, a history of defeats in successive wars in the area destabilized men’s views of themselves and their central role in society” (6).</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">From a structural point of view, the book is subdivided into four chapters, whose evocative – albeit sometimes deceptive – titles, inspired by Greek tragedies and their psychoanalytical reinterpretation, guide the reader through the discovery of novels which are almost unknown in the West. The first chapter, “Oedipus King: Tortured Masculinity,” examines the literary representation of the most traditional patriarchal paradigm that seems to echo the concept of the male as a “</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">stuprator</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">” (rapist) described by Eva Cantarella in her notable study on masculinity in the classic world (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Bisexuality in the Ancient World</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) with regard to the Ancient Rome, with a major difference. If the young Roman men were grown up as “conquerors” (both in a military and in a sexual sense), then the main characters of the novels here analyzed are frustrated conquerors who fail to exert a substantial control on the surrounding world and on their subjects (women – wives and daughters – and sons), as in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Zilal ‘ala al-nafidha</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (“Shadows on the Window”), by the Iraqi writer Gha’ib To‘mi Faraman. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Gender polarization and an archetypal depiction of a homosocial order, as such as a crude description of male violence, are recurring elements in these works, features of a challenged masculine identity that reacts with anger to the weakening of men’s role in the family and society.</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The next chapter, “The Politics of Masculinity: Goal-(Dis)Oriented Masculinity,” deals with a different paradigm, or, better, with a series of paradigms, related to the role of intellectuals in the Arab societies: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">intellectuels engagées</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> arguing for armed revolution, mouthpieces of a regime, or disenchanted Epicurean-Hellenistic writers committed to the representation of subjective and private dramas, they share the belief in the power of the Word to change the World or to represent a refuge, an “ivory tower” against the World itself. A particular relevance in these novels is given to the character of the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">feda’i</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, the Arab militant soldier, “whose defiant valor and firmness of purpose will liberate the vanquished land” (57), definitely a heroic figure that, countering to “Oedipus King”, becomes the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">homo faber</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> of his own destiny and of the fate of his country, making history with his hands.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This is a phallocentric model in which women have the ancillary role of providing stability, fertility and care to the hero – “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, would say John Berger.</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Then, Aghacy reprises, in a chapter titled “Dictator as Patriarch: The State and the (Dys)Functional Male,” the theme of emasculation already discussed in the first section of the book, focusing on the political “castration” of the dissidents and their imprisonment. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The concept of masculinity as “activity” against female “passivity” returns here with particular regard to the monopolization by the State of the male features and of the femalization (i.e. passivization) of the whole population of subjects. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The depiction of the humiliating torture of political prisoners assumes, on this regard, a strong albeit ambivalent symbolical value, of annihilation of the proactive attitude of the dissident, submitted, even sexually, by a hangman who metonymically represents the “male State” (or “sado/state”); nevertheless, the resistance of the tortured man can also acquire the value of a last heroic resistance (“a badge of courage”) against the emasculation imposed by the dictatorial rule.</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Finally, completing an ideal path, with the fall of the King (“Oedipus Deposed: The Man’s Sex(uality)”), Aghacy focuses on a series of novels that challenge both the patriarchal and the heroic paradigms, evidencing the fragility of masculine identities in a post-war world, made vulnerable by the consequences of the armed conflicts that stained with blood the whole Middle Eastern region. Mutilated and disabled former soldiers, men who envy the fate of women for their being “outside history” (namely far from the political and military struggle), insecure and women dependent men are the typical characters described in the novels analyzed in the final, and, in my opinion, more interesting chapter.</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Altogether, this work doubtlessly deserves words of appreciation both for the innovativeness of its perspectives, as formerly discussed, and for the theoretical effort of its author in offering a thorough and consistent framework to a remarkable number of novels from different countries, while the solid bibliography reported in the references evidences Aghacy’s mastery of the field. Yet this book represents a starting point for a new field of research, one that should be deepened not only by Western scholars but, first and foremost, by Middle Eastern men themselves. Indeed, if in the francophone Morocco a first attempt of breaking the taboos was made by the psychologist Abdelhak Serhane with his essay </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">L’Amour circoncis</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, discussing the masculine sexuality in the Middle East still represents a wall hard to be destroyed.</span></span></span></span></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-35703129087308481352010-07-28T17:50:00.002-07:002010-07-28T17:50:45.461-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP8J1xztQ480HGc12H3p62gjNwUSH2aerZbgXYgFMv_Xm5zoDnkbDWzA-pAf6XJSnWKKm95gWQ6Sg1I64d6cOoZA9phsQguJg9P3L6zyQY45aQDHy6yW3QaajJDqMYpJFOq17S41V3_2Y/s1600/9781845118273.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456818449636896626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP8J1xztQ480HGc12H3p62gjNwUSH2aerZbgXYgFMv_Xm5zoDnkbDWzA-pAf6XJSnWKKm95gWQ6Sg1I64d6cOoZA9phsQguJg9P3L6zyQY45aQDHy6yW3QaajJDqMYpJFOq17S41V3_2Y/s400/9781845118273.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 400px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 252px;" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: ";"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture</span></b></span></i><span style="font-family: ";"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">.</span></b><b> </b><b>By Feona Attwood.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">London, New York: I. B. Tauris, April 2009.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paper: ISBN 978-1-84511-827-3, $29.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>224 pages.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Review by Maheswar Satpathy, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">This book by Feona Attwood has emerged as a reflection of modern critical perspective dissecting the nuances of an intricate culture of incessant sexual consumerism. As is evident from the title “Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture,” the book promises to vividly portray the reaction formations and rationalizations people use regarding sex.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The author in the preface succinctly and precisely assesses recent trends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The breach between the concepts of public and private, the emergence of “public intimacy” reflected in more public displays of affection, and “striptease culture” involving self-revelation and exposure all receive a thorough treatment. The book integrates diverse themes of a sexed approach to the construction of western culture in its multifarious manifestations. Issues such as sex professionals as “architects of our sexual lifestyles,” and sex more as a form of recreation than a mechanism of reproduction or relationship have been elegantly canvassed. </div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The book raises important questions about the role of media, technology, leisure, commerce, education, and popular culture in the production, consumption and reproduction of sexual identities, relationships, ethics, and in a way our very ethos. It presents sex as a constantly changing concept, with its values and configurations being subjected to continuous reinterpretation, resulting in the creation of diverse meanings. Some of the prominent themes addressed are the gendering of sexualization, the epistemological undercurrents required for making sense of the ever-changing concept of sex, the question of sexual ethics, sexual citizenship, and the politics of intimacy.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Attwood systematically develops three themes: Pornographication, Sexualization, and mainstream Media and Striptease Culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the first chapter, she examines pornography and the mainstreaming of sex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She provides penetrating discussion of issues such as Gonzo Culture and its role in blurring boundaries between reel and real; amateur sex; the role of technology in structuring our expectations, experiences and desires; purchased intimacy; realcore and hardcore; and the incitement of desires for selfhood through sex. Reflections on preferred masochism and pornographic short fiction and several stories published in Forum Magazine with vivid descriptions prove stimulating for a reader. Pornography is examined in a “postfeminist” framework. The author argues that Hyper-Sexualization of culture has desensitized us. She presents compelling arguments on the objectification, and commodification of the female, and a new feminist advocating the sexual confidence and autonomy in the sexual politics reigning over the scene.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The second part of the book deals with the role of media in sexual representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It contains three fascinating chapters dissecting diverse issues. The exploration of private lives and fantasies is something readers can identify with. The chapter on themes of media representations of the choices and desires of women presents how the media has become an instrument of Foucauldian (sexual) subjectification, and in turn an empowering device. Treatment of intricate issues like sex advice and the changing roles of “agony aunts,” the concerns and dilemmas of today’s youth regarding sex and sexual identity, and the politics of advice-giving in the twenty-first century are dealt with extremely well. </div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The third section, i.e. striptease culture, deals with four diverse themes, namely media and impact on sexual learning, erotica, liberating women, and a new revolution in sexual history. Chapter eight is very self-consciously balanced, and refreshing for its emphasis on analysis based on research, advocating honesty, happiness, and personal freedom, rather than following externally imposed eternal ethical constraints in sexual knowledge and identity search. Another theme glorifies erotica over pornography and examines differential preferences of males and females and the pivotal role of consumption of various sexual resources in the construction and organization of sexual selves and lives in contemporary society. Attwood discusses the intricate pleasures derived by women through pole dancing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some women find that activity liberating, stimulating, and sublimating, and find that it equips women with agency, freedom, and liberty for a freer expression of self in an ultra-modern society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The addition of a Film and TV guide is definitely useful to arouse curiosity in the minds of readers to dig further. </div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The book is unique because of its rich blend of academic spirit with interesting issues which it touches, and promises to take them forward, by creating curiosity, making readers to stay with it, reflect, ponder, and ask questions every moment. The book definitely challenges many prevalent social representation of sex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though the book is a candid reflection of the mainstreaming of sex in western culture, still, the scanty discussions of alternative sexualities (e.g., LGBT culture), it suggests that these have not made their way to mainstream culture, remaining a kind of add-on practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A chapter on the themes of LGBT sexuality would have certainly enriched the value of the work. To an onlooker, the book may appear to be a new feminist manifesto, but it has an interesting discussion of the end of the war between the sexes and a reconciliation of the binaries in the society. I recommend this work to all.</div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-49603740599151129132010-07-28T17:50:00.001-07:002010-07-28T18:37:25.883-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigL6jvptoyQf9kvmdRH49JztoPBIha7iM5t0WvF8l5rDGmJGr3QVs36aZ8jxcIB8ljTgo1owkO7lO0077YpAGl1rxaRkKyQzNu_bajknL9qpUEjUCC-7ADho4yhrltuZCh7s30bZgypWY/s1600/He+Was+Some+Kind+of+Man.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456815696436046482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigL6jvptoyQf9kvmdRH49JztoPBIha7iM5t0WvF8l5rDGmJGr3QVs36aZ8jxcIB8ljTgo1owkO7lO0077YpAGl1rxaRkKyQzNu_bajknL9qpUEjUCC-7ADho4yhrltuZCh7s30bZgypWY/s400/He+Was+Some+Kind+of+Man.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 300px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 300px;" /></a><i></i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="TR"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b>He Was Some Kind of Man: Masculinities in the B Western</b></span></span><span lang="TR"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b>.</b></span> <b>By Roderick McGillis.</b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="TR"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><b></b>Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, May 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-1-55458-059-0, $29.95. 222 pages.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Ken Maynard, Bob Steele, Larry "Buster" Crabbe – all were stars of the B western, that highly popular genre that dominated American screens from the earliest days of the talkies to the mid-1950s, when television took over. He Was Some Kind of Man is an affectionate tribute to these heroes, written by someone who spent his formative years taking them as role models. The book is sprinkled with autobiographical reminiscences – for example, an occasion in 1954 when the author was photographed as a nine-year-old in a family group with two toy pistols at his side: “What is clear [from the photograph] is how pleased I was with the gun, how proudly I wore the holster; and how engaged I was in performing the quick draw. I was, of course, emulating the cowboy heroes I saw in the movies” (61).</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">At the same time McGillis tries to account for this popularity by showing how the B western hero communicated a view of masculinity that seemed particularly appropriate for the time. He argues, for instance, that the cowboy code was very similar to that of the Boy Scouts: both stress the importance of duty to God and country, helping other people at all times, and individuals’ keeping themselves strong and healthy at all times. The western hero had to be strong and powerful and exhibit “no sissy stuff” (such as bursting into tears), yet at the same time understand the importance of collective action to stop the kind of male posturing that leads to mindless violence (43).</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On the other hand, the western hero offered a vision of freedom – especially for young boys brought up in the confines of the urban environment. Many of the films were set in a consciously fictional, almost nostalgic world of the American West, a world where good invariably triumphed over evil and the hero lived to fight another day. Young boys recreated these fantasy worlds for themselves. For McGillis “the identification with the cowboy provided a complex cover and compensation for a troubled home life. To enter the world of the cowboy was to escape the anxiety of home” (58). His comparison between the world of the B Western and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is very apt here. The fact that B Westerns are basically fantasies is also important in looking at the way they deal with guns: “What the cowboy heroes […] offer is a clear-cut fantasy. Their guns, like their clothes […] remind us that they are the imaginary, impossible ideals that have life only in the world of play and pretend” (81).</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Yet the screen representation of the western hero incorporated some ambiguous elements – especially in the way they dressed. McGillis shows how stars such as Rogers and Autry wore the kind of jeweled clothing never actually seen in the real West; rather, they made a kind of fashion statement, emphasizing their feminine as well as their masculine sides: “These are camp cowboys. The self-conscious assumption of a costume, the flaunting of the masquerade, signal immaturity. Camp is a guilty pleasure because it subverts the norms of straight living, and also because it keeps us loving childhood” (101). This is an important point: B Western heroes could never be accused of homosexuality. Rather they inhabited a childlike world in which adult distinctions between masculinity and femininity did not prevail. It was a world where women took little or no part, and where the hero cared more for his horse than anyone else: “the attractions of the cowboy and his horse appeal to our spectacular imagination, they are the imaginary” (128).</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But McGillis also suggests that this image was a product of its time when white America reigned supreme and members of other cultures were either marginalized or othered. Mexicans or French Canadians were portrayed as sexually rapacious, while African-Americans were excluded altogether. It was only in films such as Harlem Rides the Range (1930), or Harlem on the Prairie (1937), intended specifically for African-American audiences, that more positive images could appear. However they seldom attracted mass attention, as they revealed the seamy truth lurking behind the façade of the white westerns: that the heroes were not always perfect in their treatment of other people (139).</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The dominance of the white male in B Westerns also made sound commercial sense, as the studios marketed a range of products designed to help children relive their screen experiences. They included Hopalong Cassidy bicycles, crayon and stencil sets, tablecloths, wrapping paper, pocket knives, pins, comics, and of course guns and holsters (168). Many stars became successful business people in their own right, trading on their image to attract customers. Most of them have now passed on, but their lives and work are commemorated in museums: for example, the Roy Rogers/ Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri, or the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles. The image of the Western B hero lives on.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And what of the hero today? He has been consciously appropriated by military leaders such as Norman Schwarzkopf and politicians such as George W. Bush as a way of justifying foreign interventions. However, McGillis argues that this is a “one-dimensional” version of the image, designed to validate the cowboy virtues of aggression, enterprise, and expansion. It neglects the more human side, which had its parallels with the Boy Scout movement. And perhaps it is these qualities, rather than the aggressive aside, that renders the B Western hero enduringly attractive even in a pluricultural world. Skillfully combining cultural history, critical theory, and reminiscence, He Was Some Kind of a Man reminds us of just how powerful an influence the Poverty Row products of the mid-twentieth century had on American popular culture. I thoroughly recommend the book to all readers.</span></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-38219232009118178202010-07-28T17:50:00.000-07:002010-07-28T17:50:04.568-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdp7tsN1Swo0Mbv4lAPwWDtWLxeEYGf6Nyn6NTSRahmKWcZrtfj2L2k7EPASZ8-PJn0szSZU074AMOrv5z1wpxszSWiLLt3Q4KTtSmjJc9AVksHmFhCNSEBrZfblTSgHu7e9dlHJAC3Dg/s1600/frpic.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456821803849997234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdp7tsN1Swo0Mbv4lAPwWDtWLxeEYGf6Nyn6NTSRahmKWcZrtfj2L2k7EPASZ8-PJn0szSZU074AMOrv5z1wpxszSWiLLt3Q4KTtSmjJc9AVksHmFhCNSEBrZfblTSgHu7e9dlHJAC3Dg/s400/frpic.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 320px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 212px;" /></a><i></i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South</span></b></i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">.</span> By Hannah Rosen.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8078-3202-8, $65; paper: ISBN 978-0807858820, $24.95. 424 pages.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Review by Robin Dasher-Alston, American Historical Association</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Reconstruction was a period when former slaves attempted to create new lives for themselves following the Civil War, and when the whites who occupied the cities, towns, and hamlets where these newly freed men and women settled were faced with the challenge of attempting to reconceptualize their perceptions of race and the racial hierarchy that had heretofore dictated their interactions. In 1865, Memphis, Tennessee was one of the many cities and towns that experienced an influx of former slaves from the surrounding countryside and other parts of the south. Recently freed blacks were drawn to Memphis, located in former Confederate territory, in part because of the strong presence of the Union Army and access to a local Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance was the presence of black Union soldiers, who aided the federal government’s efforts to protect and provide for these newly freed slaves. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The former slaves embraced their newfound freedom, establishing schools, churches, and benevolent societies with such speed and vigor that local white communities were shocked by the sense of urgency associated with those efforts. Freed slaves did not hesitate to seek ways to exercise their rights as citizens, and quickly began to explore the opportunities associated with their new status as free men and women. Black women in particular sought the protection of law as administered by the local Freedman’s Bureaus. One former slave sued her employer for unpaid wages, and another filed a complaint against a former slave owner who refused to release her children. By virtue of such actions, these former slaves were redefining racial boundaries and their status in the public sphere—efforts to integrate and fully participate in every aspect of society as emancipated citizens—that had previously been denied them. Prior to this period, the very definition of citizenship was associated with being male and white.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">What occurred in Memphis was, in many ways, illustrative of the struggles and conflicts that escalated as previously enslaved men and women sought political and social equality in realms that had been the preserve of whites. The Memphis Riot of 1866 and the brutal violence that followed was an example of how violence was tactically used to preserve black subjugation. For black women, rape and the threat of rape was used to intimidate, and to force them into submission. The presence of armed black Union soldiers, along with the accelerating tensions between those soldiers and the white city police provided the impetus by the white citizenry to correct perceived wrongs by Union troops. The events that led to the Memphis Riot were in were in many respects a violent collision between the established political order, with its historic racial hierarchies, and the demand for the rights and opportunities associated with citizenship by the previously enslaved.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Hannah Rosen reveals, through careful research and insightful analysis, that the violent response by white southerners against the push by former slaves to gain status in the political, social, and economic spheres served to unite whites across social and economic boundaries that had previously divided them. While wealthy white males may have initially resisted the economic implications associated with freed men and women seeking fair wages for their labor, immigrant whites understood the implications in terms of the potential loss their growing political power and a threat against the promise of enhanced economic status. The white citizens of Memphis were now united across class lines with a common goal and against a common target. While the goal was to suppress any actions by black men and women that would enable them to assert political, economic, or social independence or power in the public sphere, or to claim any notion of equality in the social sphere, black women were often targeted. The author reveals that the Memphis Riot was an attempt by the local white citizenry and the police to regain the control that they saw slipping away.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Rosen establishes that sexual violence against African American women enabled the rioters to reestablish the dominance of white over black, to reinforce racial differences and to assert racial and gender inferiority. The actions of the Memphis rioters were supported and, in some cases, even encouraged by local politicians and the press as an assertion of white manhood—protectors of not only the public spheres but also the private spheres of the home, hearth, and family. Not surprisingly, the riot erupted with a violent confrontation between black Union soldiers and white city policeman, followed by rumors of a planned attack by the black soldiers against the white community in general. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">As Rosen asserts, the press often characterized blacks as disorderly and criminal, perceptions that black women, regardless of their status, were prone to sexual promiscuity and lewdness. These blatant mischaracterizations only served to heightened fear and anxiety amongst the white citizens who increasingly viewed the black community in Memphis as dangerous and out of control. During the riot, at least 48 blacks were killed, many were wounded, and at least five black women reported that they had been raped. Of the two white men who died, one succumbed to a self-inflicted gunshot.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Rosen presents the documented testimony of individuals—both black and white—both the perpetuators and victims of the violence of the Memphis Riot. Yet, most compelling is the testimony of the black women who were raped. The testimony of these women in itself was extraordinary because it revealed that they believed that the congressional committee that received their testimony would accept their statements as truthful, and that the law would recognize their rights as victims. To wit, their testimony challenged the perceptions of black women as immoral, incapable of being virtuous and honorable. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Among the many strengths of Rosen’s deeply engaging and penetrating book is that she uses the emergence of these formerly enslaved men and women into the social, political, and economic arena, as well as the Memphis Riot and its aftermath, as a way to examine and assess the radical shifts and disruptions that began to appear after emancipation. Rosen reveals, how, in an all-too-brief moment in history following emancipation, blacks sought to exercise their rights as citizens, and black women defied both racial and gender hierarchies as they sought to redefine those socially defined constructs.</span></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-51348144946617333932010-03-01T11:21:00.000-08:002010-03-01T11:25:31.703-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIfnL-p-jPV7q413WDr8c9H3zdiEglfA75ZPAgfmEO5NOd7KDvGOiX0IBQC_nEyM9-xQA2pz7UTS6NPRU4WSokHJWB4VLzMdqzLrdDZAn9TqAd74_50W2ivJe_E4fEoA6z2cZEzkWkGSE/s1600-h/9780521519090.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 180px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 272px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443748532256421282" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIfnL-p-jPV7q413WDr8c9H3zdiEglfA75ZPAgfmEO5NOd7KDvGOiX0IBQC_nEyM9-xQA2pz7UTS6NPRU4WSokHJWB4VLzMdqzLrdDZAn9TqAd74_50W2ivJe_E4fEoA6z2cZEzkWkGSE/s400/9780521519090.jpg" /></a><br /><div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" ><b><span style="font-size:x-large;">Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman</span></b></span></i><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12;" ><b><span style="font-size:x-large;">.</span></b><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12;" ><b><span style="font-size:100%;">By Cheryl A. Wilson.</span></b></span><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 18px"><br /></span></span><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, April 2009. ISBN-978-0-521-51909-0, $90.00. 220 pages.<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O /><o:p></o:p></span><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >Review by Luca Caddia, Independent Scholar<o:p></o:p></span><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /> </div><br /><div style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >According to Alexander Pope, who has deserved the epigraph of this book, “those move easiest who have learned to dance” (1). Whatever mobility Pope refers to, Cheryl A. Wilson soon clarifies in her introduction that her study privileges certain aspects of the culture of dance, such as upper-class and urban entertainments. This leads her book to focus on the discipline of social dance, which turns the individual body into public discourse and imbues literary works with a range of social, political, and national concerns. In particular, the subjects she privileges are those by which feminist cultural studies are usually informed, including gender construction and social mobility, so that this book could also be defined as a study of the body politics of nineteenth-century ballrooms.<o:p></o:p></span><br /></div><br /><div style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >Wilson has devoted the first two chapters to a comprehension of the culture of nineteenth-century dance through the analysis of dance masters and Almack’s Lady Patronesses, two complementary categories of gender construction and destabilization. In the first chapter, for example, she highlights the idiosyncratic position of dance masters within upper-class life: often depicted as effeminate figures who eschew traditional manly employment (i.e. Dickens’s Mr. Turveydrop in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Bleak House</i>, 1853), they also figure as social arbiters through their dance manuals, which include instructions to ensure that participants in a ball behave appropriately. However, especially in the emergence of scandalous dances such as the waltz, “the dance manual emerges as a text that simultaneously affirms the need to police physical bodies and promotes transgressive behaviors” (29). Indeed, whereas social dance contributes to gender socialization and construction, it also has the potential to destabilize gender norms: while German cotillion “gives [women] the rare chance of showing their preferences” (33), figures like ‘Blind-man’s Bluff’ do incorporate descriptions of same-sex couplings” (34).<o:p></o:p></span><br /></div><br /><div style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >The second chapter is dedicated to Almack’s, the most fashionable club in Regency London. Wilson explains how institutions such as Almack’s react against changes in class boundaries by reveling around the fashionable aristocracy. Yet the Lady Patronesses, the aristocratic ladies who assumed an authorial role in its organization, complicate the “separate spheres” ideology by exercising political influence and arranging marriages. The chapter discusses the satirized authorial role of the Lady Patronesses through fashionable novels such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Exclusives</i> (1830), by Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Almack’s: A Novel </i>(1826), by Marianne Spencer Stanhope. This is perhaps the part of the book where Wilson’s own authoriality proves more reliable, especially when compared to her analysis of Jane Austen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Emma</i> (1816). Perhaps this happens not because Wilson has not understood <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Emma</i>, but because the purposes of her chapter (a comparison between the social codes of Almack’s and those of Highbury) lead her to focus too much on a constrained comparison between Emma and Mrs Eldon that favors the former instead of treating Emma’s own unfulfilled matchmaking pretentions as the major topic it is in the economy of the novel. Indeed, if it is debatable that “Emma employs a system of admission designed to promote her own desires and in doing so positions herself in an authorial role” (65), this does not mean that “Emma displays a critical self-consciousness” (66). On the contrary, by eventually giving up to Mr Knightley’s moral authority, Emma abandons her patronizing pretentions and learns not to impose her views on others. Wilson has clearly realized this, but since her conclusion contradicts most of her previous discourse, this part of the chapter is not as strong as that devoted to silver-fork novels.<o:p></o:p></span><br /></div><br /><div style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in" class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a single social dance as described in a significant selection of nineteenth-century fiction, which shows that, instead of compiling a catalogue raisonné of all the nineteenth-century novels where social dance has a prominent part, Wilson has chosen texts in which the relationship between literature and dance can be analyzed in narrative terms. The social dances selected in the book are the English country dance, the quadrille, and the waltz. Despite its name, the term country dance derives from the French “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">contredanse</i>, which referred to the two lines of dancers standing across one another” (71). This highlights the divisions inherent in such a dance, which authors like Austen, Thackeray,and Eliot employ to consider social ideas concerning class, gender, and nation. In particular, the subchapter dedicated to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Vanity Fair</i> (1848) is particularly convincing in its attention to the French-English conflict, especially if one considers, as Wilson does, that Becky Sharp may prove unable to complete her turn through the country dance because it is a symbol of English national identity. Also striking is the way Wilson’s reading of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Northanger Abbey</i> (1798-9) manages to match that of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Adam Bede</i> (1859): indeed, the social and sexual dangers carefully avoided by Austen are sympathetically explored by Eliot by means of an intertwining of the social and the marriage plot through country dance.<o:p></o:p></span><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 115%;font-family:'Times New Roman';" >The book proves even more convincing in the following chapter, which shows how, compared to the English country dance, “the quadrille embodies changing cultural perceptions concerning nation […] and enables authors to employ time, space, and physicality to advance a consideration of social mobility” (105). This is certainly true of Anthony Trollope’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Way We Live Now</i> (1875) and was also magnificently realized by Andrew Davies when, in his 2001 adaptation of the novel, he had a self-confident Prince George dance with the awkward Mrs Melmotte. As regards Trollope, it might have been useful for Wilson to mention <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Rachel Ray</i> (1863), a pretty novel on provincial life where the waltz is employed to express the same concerns about sexuality and social mobility advocated by Wilson’s last chapter, which prefers to rely on dance-less works like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Aurora Leigh</i> (1856) instead. But who writes is far from complaining: this book is properly orchestrated and remarkable for its insightful reading, and considering Wilson’s desire to be acknowledged as a Lady Patroness herself, she can be more than satisfied with the result.<o:p></o:p></span> </div></div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-90906064509903035092009-11-29T15:21:00.000-08:002009-11-29T15:21:46.472-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAH89ikCjgXl7fM5xSbfqQi8ZV_F_1U-0Atlc2H954PSyIEIJ5S9c7R2CDqWJxzzxQnXHOSqKlJQPR3vxuqDMTs9iR_KwXGhJdaC9hy-_Arbu6FcjntCBllr7T9Z79YphthDNz2HH_-VU/s1600/materson_freedom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAH89ikCjgXl7fM5xSbfqQi8ZV_F_1U-0Atlc2H954PSyIEIJ5S9c7R2CDqWJxzzxQnXHOSqKlJQPR3vxuqDMTs9iR_KwXGhJdaC9hy-_Arbu6FcjntCBllr7T9Z79YphthDNz2HH_-VU/s320/materson_freedom.jpg" yr="true" /></a><br />
</div><em><span style="font-size: large;">For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932.</span></em><br />
<br />
By Lisa Materson.<br />
<br />
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, February 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8078-3271-4, $42. 352 pages.<br />
<br />
Review by Jason Hostutler, Mount Mary College, Wisconsin<br />
<br />
In For the Freedom of Her Race, Lisa Materson makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of African-American women within Jim Crow era politics. Materson tells the story of black women activists in the context of the Illinois political system, working in favor of the Republican Party agenda that supported the use of federal authority to protect the constitutional rights of black citizens. Separated from the influence of Southern white supremacists, these women strove to make a positive political impact for those black Americans facing disenfranchisement and terror in the American South. Individually, these women-activists were of diverse social, economic, and educational backgrounds. However, each had migrated to Illinois from the recently “redeemed” and increasingly racist South, and each possessed a zealous drive to assist the embattled Southern black community in any political way possible. Initially these political opportunities were very limited for Illinois women, but gradually increased alongside expanding suffrage. Women in Illinois won the right to vote in school elections in 1891, and for municipal and federal offices in 1913; they were finally granted full franchise in 1920. Materson convincingly makes the case that even when the outlets for political expression were limited, these African-American activists represented those in the South who had lost their political voice “by proxy,” and encouraged African American men in their communities to do the same. Over time these activists began to lose faith in the Republican Party, as Republican politicians failed to make good on promises to assist their black constituents with anti-lynching legislation. In this manner, the origins of the African-American embrace of the Democratic Party are visible years before the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt. <br />
<br />
Materson provides numerous case studies to convincingly demonstrate the high level of engagement of Illinois black Republican women in the years 1877-1932. The author describes these decades as the “nadir” and “crucible” of black life in America. Activists such as Ella Elm, Jennie Lawrence, and Alice Thompson Waytes rose to the challenge and actively engaged local, state, and eventually national politics with a zeal fueled in part by the racial injustices occurring in the southern states. Materson’s examination of these women provides much-needed detail to a political drama that in previous historiography has been overshadowed by the story of the black reformer Ida B. Wells. Wells is mentioned only as a side note to allow lesser-known actors to take center stage. The stories of these women make Materson’s study a colorful and fascinating read. Still, the author’s treatment of the specific activities of these women can be at times too superficial. When lacking specific evidence to detail the exact words and activities of her subjects, Materson relies on generalizations based on the overall social climate of the era to imply what the women should have been thinking or doing at the time. Furthermore, the author is also vague about the specific accomplishments of the black activists, especially with regard to their impact on the lives of the Southern black community they are supposedly representing. While these issues are troubling, they do not detract from the quality of this study overall. For the Freedom of Her Race sheds new light on a previously under-examined topic in the political history of the Jim Crow era. The accessibility of this study is due in no small part to Materson’s clean and precise writing style and vibrant storytelling. Her research, most notably in Chicago-area archives, is meticulous.Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-40985029205059950232009-10-30T12:58:00.000-07:002009-10-30T12:58:50.034-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4Kk2_OKo65su4e_JpnhifGnQdUo-5bk09M-LQPVwqLFLa3hPsyLSxns2ws_HwcGPLbYXyJEnMXzK-XBNaHHnmCgR3qgEtyIVsDHTruG4ezT_sNuThLoDLmxhodx_YN-m-qz8qF5qkui0/s1600-h/Gender.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4Kk2_OKo65su4e_JpnhifGnQdUo-5bk09M-LQPVwqLFLa3hPsyLSxns2ws_HwcGPLbYXyJEnMXzK-XBNaHHnmCgR3qgEtyIVsDHTruG4ezT_sNuThLoDLmxhodx_YN-m-qz8qF5qkui0/s320/Gender.jpg" vr="true" /></a><br />
</div><em><span style="font-size: large;">Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Autobiography.</span></em><br />
<br />
By Christine Etherington-Wright.<br />
<br />
London: Palgrave Macmillan, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-230-21992-2, $80.00. 248 pages.<br />
<br />
Review by Suanna H. Davis, Lone Star College, Texas<br />
<br />
Christine Etherington-Wright examines autobiographies of British women from the 1900s to the 1920s. The author also writes of her search for meaning within the texts she studied, and her exploration of the autobiographies becomes a narrative of her own evolving theories on cultural history. It is a relational articulation of knowledge, which helps make the book more approachable. The vacillation between the scholarly objectivity and personal impulses fits well with her discussion of different styles of writing appearing within the autobiographies, with the changes apparently based on the subject matter.<br />
<br />
Gender, Professions and Discourse discusses the autobiographies in two ways, by profession and theme. The professions are headmistresses, doctors, nurses, artists and performers (dancers, actors), and writers. The book details significant aspects of the autobiographies for each group. For example, Etherington-Wright found that the autobiographies of headmistresses used religious metaphors, while those of the doctors used metaphors from fairytales. Each chapter weaves together various threads of theories, uniting disparate fields and approaches. Within the chapter on doctors, for example, she calls upon numerous disciplines for explication, from Zipes on fairytales to Dworkin on woman-hating, from the history of children’s literature to discussions of social semiotics.<br />
<br />
In the theme section, Gender, Professions and Discourse develops theories on frontpiece images, beginning materials, silences, and questions of identity and memory. In the beginning discussion within theme, the author describes the photographs used by different autobiographers as frontpieces; these ranged from studio portraits in the “girl child as angel” genre to an amateur snapshot of the author with a tennis racket and a mantling pigeon. The discussion of silences integrates theories of autobiography, representation, language, reader response, and sexuality to argue persuasively that the textual gaps within the autobiographies offer additional insight into the women who wrote them and the contexts in which they were written.<br />
<br />
Etherington-White suggests that the autobiographies of representative women who were resistant to the dominant patriarchal culture, but who were not extreme, offer a unique insight into the era. She presents the idea that the individual voices in the autobiographies can be united in styles of writing, approaches to various subjects, and how they deal with or ignore various topics. They can amplify the female voice and mentality of the era so that modern readers can hear and understand it.<br />
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The book is partially an attempt to fill in the gaps left by historians who examine cultural artifacts, such as newspaper articles, and focus on the exceptional rather than the more normal. The author says that autobiographies contribute to the histoire de mentalités. She also says that autobiographies, being a masculine mode created and dominated by men, created expectations that women both acceded to and rejected; clearly a study of the ways in which they did both would help scholars to understand the viewpoint being expressed from these choices. In this attempt she joins many others, more and less successful, who have sought to identify and isolate the feminine for intellectual inquiry.<br />
<br />
A variety of theories and theorists are quilted together to inform an understanding of the texts Etherington-Wright examines. Previous exposure to the theories is useful, but not necessary. The unique application of pieces of theories may be problematic. How can a particular part of a theory be relevant while the rest is not? However, if she is putting together a new theory, based on working models, then this is a legitimate exercise.<br />
<br />
Within the book, Etherington-Wright says that the autobiographies she has chosen are representative rather than extreme. However, the methodology and criteria for determining this are not included. A chapter detailing parts of the decision-making process would have been useful on two levels. First, it would have allowed the reader to determine whether or not those decisions were reasonable. The representativeness is part of the issue in identifying the works as the voice of a generation of forward-thinking women. Decisions were made in silence, leaving textual gaps in the work that force the reader to accept or reject the arguments in the book without understanding their genesis. Second, a heuristic of her process would allow her work to be more effectively followed up or expanded.<br />
<br />
Two other significantly lesser problems are distractions within the work. First, the author uses [sic] frequently, even when there is nothing wrong with the quotation. This could be a result of modern editing which cleared up the errors through a word processing program without recognizing the quotations or it might be a result of different word choices in British English. Second, while Etherington-Wright limits her discussions, she sometimes limits them only partially. The first instance of this is in the chapter on women writers where she prepares to discuss four authors, organizing them through the type of publications they produced. However, within the discussion she actually examines five, without placing her work contextually. The second instance is in the explication of the frontpiece images. The book includes six photographs for discussion, but Etherington-Wright actually discusses seven. This seventh is an actress who is included within the index, but she is not, in fact, mentioned anywhere else in the book.<br />
<br />
Etherington-Wright officially covers 24 autobiographies in 248 pages. The presentations are insightful and fascinating, leading readers to ponder questions outside the scope of the book. An example of this is that the actresses presented were all encouraged to the stage by their fathers, despite the fact that stage work was considered synonymous with loose morality. Were the non-representative actresses also supported by their families? What caused this? How might it be explained?<br />
<br />
Scholars working in gender, autobiography, and history, particularly of World War I, will find this book helpful and engaging. Readers in other disciplines will be enchanted with the glimpse into the private worlds of unconventional women of the early twentieth century.Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-28623552129317825742009-08-11T12:40:00.001-07:002009-08-11T12:44:49.318-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYR1lx_hMRrjEq8lQxyLKdOCX1ZkkgnXzBc2rrcnK7bOrPiXUjvGXEMGquLEIMs8ClUZA2Fu8zpsSkECKFP-e4fysO4WpWKcgzwo_OUqXF0yX2-zoOMQ1Xj9UwMxUiWD3rZs77PeXwNm8/s1600-h/Mysterious+Skin.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5368793527582472210" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYR1lx_hMRrjEq8lQxyLKdOCX1ZkkgnXzBc2rrcnK7bOrPiXUjvGXEMGquLEIMs8ClUZA2Fu8zpsSkECKFP-e4fysO4WpWKcgzwo_OUqXF0yX2-zoOMQ1Xj9UwMxUiWD3rZs77PeXwNm8/s320/Mysterious+Skin.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em><span style="font-size:130%;">Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema</span></em></div><div> </div><div>Edited by Santiago Fouz-Hernández. New York: I.B. Tauris, May 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-1845118310, $32.50. 272 pages.</div><div> </div><div>Review by Nathan G. Tipton, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis</div><div> </div><div>Ever since Laura Mulvey famously declared, in her groundbreaking 1975 <em>Screen</em> article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that in narrative film the woman is consistently represented as the passive object of the active male gaze, various critics have been quick to challenge the fixed male-female binarism inherent in Mulvey’s argument. Film theorists Richard Dyer, Corey Creekmur, Steve Neale, and Peter Lehman, for example, have demonstrated that masculinity cannot be equated uniformly with activity or dominance precisely because, in terms of cinema spectatorship, there are always multiple gazes in play including, importantly, males gazing at males and male bodies. However, the potential for the male body to become a “spectacle” for other men, even within the safe confines of simple curiosity ostensibly extant in the viewing mechanisms of heterosexual men, almost immediately provokes profound anxiety, repression and, oftentimes, outright homophobia. After all, the very act of males gazing at other males presents a constant threat to the secure, comfortable “norm” of masculinity.</div><div> </div><div>In his edited collection <em>Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema</em>, Santiago Fouz-Hernández has gathered together a multinational array of contemporary film theorists who explore not only the complex mechanics of the male gaze, but also show how cinematic representations of the gazed-at male body communicate and engage with inbuilt national identity anxieties surrounding race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Although Fouz-Hernández notes that the collection makes “no claims to global coverage” (4), <em>Mysterious Skin</em> nonetheless has an impressive reach, with contributors presenting interpretations of male bodies that are variously (and literally) “put on display” in non-Westernized cinemas of Francophone Africa, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and India, as well as in films from Western countries such as Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, and Spain. This emphasis on the male body, along with Fouz-Hernández’s global disavowal, serves the collection well, as it effectively backgrounds the myriad cultural differences existing among these disparate countries in favor of emphasizing the more universalized “crisis of masculinity” and its attendant anxiety over the “looked at” male body.</div><div> </div><div><em>Mysterious Skin</em> is divided into three thematic sections: the body and ethnic/national identities; dissections/textures/close-ups (or what Fouz-Hernández eloquently calls “the body as cinematic canvas”); and sex/sexuality, which explores the vulnerability and versatility of gendered identities typically associated with masculinity. At first glance these groupings seem logical in terms of compartmentalizing the articles, but there is also considerable overlap that is perhaps unavoidable given the collection’s overarching (inter)national focus. For instance, Heidi Schlipphacke’s “Fragmented Bodies: Masculinity and Nation in Contemporary German Cinema,” which appears in the collection’s first section on national bodies/national identities, is concerned mainly with exploring contemporary German cinema’s linkage of masculinity to the formulation of a more average qua “normal” national identity. Schlipphacke explains that this “new normal” nationality was formulated as part of an overarching governmental mandate that sought to mitigate Germany’s tortured history, and especially its psychic connection to the fervent neoclassical nationalism and patriotism appropriated and perversely applied by the Nazis.</div><div> </div><div>The author, however, dovetails from her discussion of this fundamentally redefined German normality (what Schlipphacke refers to as “Neue Unbefangenheit”/new unselfconsciousness) into a fascinating exploration of the almost schizophrenic fragmentation this normalization provoked among German males. As Schlipphacke notes, not only does this schizophrenic identity signify a psychic split between past and present conceptions of what it means to be German, but it also becomes the locus for a body undergoing literal fragmentation by way of dissection. This occurs particularly in the film <em>Der freie Wille/The Free Will</em> (2006) where Theo, the movie’s ostensible protagonist (ostensible because although he is a rapist, his overarching desire is simply to be normal), recognizes the futility of trying to reconcile his split selves and, ultimately, slits his wrists with a razor blade.</div><div> </div><div>Indeed, the motif of fragmentation appears in various physical and/or psychical permutations throughout <em>Mysterious Skin</em>, thus providing a further commonality binding together the collection’s chapters. An outstanding example of this fragmentation occurring on both mental and bodily levels is highlighted in Aparna Sharma’s “The Square Circle: Problematising the National Masculine Body in Indian Cinema.” Sharma discusses the Indian film <em>Daayara/The Square Circle</em> (1996) by focusing on unpacking the shifting identities undergone by the film’s unnamed transvestite protagonist. What makes this chapter so successful is Sharma’s application of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as it relates to what Sharma calls the transvestite’s “prerogative for migration” (94). This migration is multi-faceted, as the transvestite—who is portrayed as a rural, nomadic figure wandering from village to village—not only crosses and re-crosses gender lines but also traverses class, religious, socio-historic, and regional boundaries. Sharma ultimately views the transvestite figure as a representative critique of India’s carefully constructed, if entirely imagined, traditional value system that overtly emphasizes heterosexuality (which is, by definition, indicative of modernity, technological/industrial mobility, and national superiority). Thus the transvestite, through “his” muddying of socio-sexual conventions and national norms, effectively confronts and de-legitimates the hegemonic frameworks set up to police and regulate any and all boundary crossings.</div><div> </div><div>These affective, transgressive border crossings, both physical and psychical, are foregrounded in varying degrees in all the entries in <em>Mysterious Skin</em>, but some chapters succeed better than others at conveying how these crossings are deployed cinematically. D. Cuong O’Neill’s exploration of homosexual cruising in Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s film <em>Bu san/Goodbye, Dragon Inn</em>, for example, is strangely complex and disjointed. This is perhaps partly due to the disconnectedness inherent in the film <em>Bu san</em>, which utilizes a film-within-a-film approach in order to combine a cinematic homage to the martial arts genre (in this case, the martial arts classic <em>Long men ke zhan/Dragon Gate Inn</em>) with the concept of the “moving body” exemplified by the homosexual men who cruise the dilapidated theatre in which the film is being screened. Yet throughout his chapter, O’Neill never seems to be sure how or where to focus his discussion until he arrives, late in the entry, at what appears to be the argumentative crux. O’Neill notes that the moving bodies displayed both on-screen (in <em>Dragon Gate Inn</em>) and “on screen” (the men cruising the theatre) represent “a contested terrain of competing identities” and “a world shaped by another form of mobility… where sexuality becomes not a type of identity but a type of loss of identity” (203-204).</div><div> </div><div>While O’Neill’s cogent observation occurs within the context of an otherwise cumbersome chapter, it nevertheless neatly encapsulates the larger theoretical ethos that informs the collection and makes <em>Mysterious Skin</em> a continual delight. Fouz-Hernández and his coterie of international film theorists have provided an important, fascinating, and welcome addition to studies of masculinity, gender, and extra-Hollywood cinema. Despite its limitations—including some overly complicated and heavily theoretical entries—<em>Mysterious Skin</em> ultimately proves successful at not only showcasing the various permutations of gazed-at male bodies deployed in contemporary films, but also exploring how these incarnations provoke and promote negotiations over how these bodies define or defy international conceptions of masculinity. </div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-14801566512653721902009-07-16T14:10:00.000-07:002009-07-16T14:42:10.991-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOPGJ3_AJVjVvhx7wpoRai8lJHAfOjr9eTTcw9bI01kF78n8OW04sxYi8PiQMeE4-qbtR4RmU2YzNwobj5MbHRMJiKLYID1IMcT3A4MA-CUxDMwz31yuwOx67DWqQuHDNL5syhVV-k1aE/s1600-h/Ute_Women.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359168598295998738" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 99px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 150px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOPGJ3_AJVjVvhx7wpoRai8lJHAfOjr9eTTcw9bI01kF78n8OW04sxYi8PiQMeE4-qbtR4RmU2YzNwobj5MbHRMJiKLYID1IMcT3A4MA-CUxDMwz31yuwOx67DWqQuHDNL5syhVV-k1aE/s320/Ute_Women.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em><span style="font-size:130%;">Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation, 1887-1934</span></em></div><div></div><div>By Katherine Osburn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, January 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0803220386, $18.95. 184 pages.</div><div></div><div>Review by Brad Montgomery-Anderson, Northeastern State University</div><div></div><div>Between the years 1887 and 1934, the U.S. government made a concentrated effort to assimilate American Indians into the dominant society. This assimilative agenda began with the 1887 Dawes Act and centered on breaking up communally-held land and redistributing it as private property. Some of the “civilizing” programs were aimed specifically at Native women, and Indian agents saw their transformation into middle-class homemakers as a crucial component of the process to remake the Native American family. Katherine Osburn’s book is a groundbreaking study of the reaction of the women of one tribe to this assimilative effort. <em>Southern Ute Women</em> is a republication of a title that originally appeared in 1998 through the University of New Mexico Press. The current publication from the University of Nebraska Press includes a new introduction that places this work in the context of recent scholarship on Native American women. An especially interesting portion of this introduction is Osburn’s description of three general categories of studies regarding women’s reactions to colonialism. One category of scholars see colonialism as having little impact on the power of women, while another group of scholars, following the “declension model,” see colonialism as producing a marked decline in the power and status of indigenous women. Osburn’s work falls into the category of scholars who “argue some decline but also document creative adaptation” (vii). The book’s original introduction is also included and provides a good theoretical context for the main thesis of the book: namely, that during the assimilative years of the Dawes Act, Ute women used strategies of adaptation and selective assimilation to deal with the changes that outside forces attempted to impose on them. In the first chapter, Osburn provides the historic events that led to the confinement of the Utes on their reservation in southwestern Colorado and initial attempts at assimilation. Osburn groups these areas of attempted assimilation into the following four chapters. In chapter 2, “Women and Public Leadership,” Osburn discusses how the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) ignored women when discussing policy matters with the tribe. Ute women, however, did not accept the passive role assigned them and refused to send their children to schools they deemed unsafe. While OIA policy continually relegated women to the private sphere by only dealing with the “head of the household,” women found ways to recover their traditional participation in the public realm. In the next chapter, “Women and Economics,” Osburn shows how women resisted being relegated to dependency on their husbands’ wages and engaged in economic activities that were crucial to the tribe’s survival. The OIA expected women to be homemakers and to create nuclear households that fit a Euro-American model of “civilized” domestic life. To achieve this goal, the OIA hired three matrons to train Ute women in a variety of domestic arts. Osburn outlines the successes and failures of this program in the fifth chapter. The response to the matron program was complex. Ute women eagerly adapted many innovations concerning sanitation and health care as well as homemaking technology. As a result of this program, infant deaths on the reservation declined significantly. At the same time, this program failed in its basic goal of replacing the extended family with a single nuclear family living in its own home. Part of the OIA’s initiatives included bringing Ute attitudes towards sex and marriage in line with Euro-American attitudes. These attempts are the focus of chapter five. Osburn speculates that the increase in marriage licenses probably indicates an outward conformity to assimilationist pressure; on the other hand, the persistence of “serial monogamy” showed that OIA attempts to increase the number of lifelong marriages were not successful. This strategy of “selective assimilation” is characteristic of the attitude of Ute women in general as they struggled to retain their autonomy. Despite being treated as second-class citizens by the OIA, Ute women found creative ways to continue to make important contributions to their family and tribe. In her conclusion, Osburn argues convincingly that “while the framework of women’s lives was radically altered on the reservation, Ute women did not suffer a serious decline in status and power among their people” (117). Osburn makes a strong case for this conclusion using the existing documentation from that time period. She could strengthen this argument, however, by more thoroughly explaining the role of women in traditional pre-reservation culture. Osburn has a few pages of such discussion at the beginning of chapter 2, which she summarizes by stating that “women were equal members of families and bands” and that “they participated in councils” (23). Traditional gender roles deserve greater explanation and exemplification; moreover, Osburn should address what appear to be situations of traditional gender inequality that are depicted in the literature. For example, in the recently re-released classic history <em>The Last War Trail </em>(University Press of Colorado, 2000), Chief Ouray declares that the Utes do not accept the testimony of women (269). Although Osburn’s book does focus on Southern Ute women, it does nevertheless feel that something is missing without a discussion of Chipeta, wife of Chief Ouray and perhaps the most famous Ute woman. Chipeta did not live on the Southern Ute reservation, but it seems that the available documentation on her life and the part she played in the transition to the reservation (<em>Chipeta: Queen of the Utes</em> by Becker and Smith appeared in 2003) could provide another perspective on the role of women in Ute culture. An expanded discussion of Ute women in general would allow the reader to better understand the contexts of the strategies of resistance and adaptation. These are minor absences, however, in a work that is well-researched and thought-provoking. Osburn’s book has been and remains an important contribution to the growing literature on women’s responses to colonialism, and this book will be of interest to readers interested in Native American history and women’s history. </div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-77410442057974587182009-05-28T11:09:00.000-07:002009-05-28T11:11:20.908-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQF3Vh2uIbQ1eBP9jANEM1CGkloT83NX1TCAlnJE1OS4Q_8_4nuzqQIonjz4-GSdIjN7iCLigtjB05ODB5aCk4XkKcs-krrZfeoDdgiMjcE0mOLSF3b1VWDPALlJB8CTwgJUTXMwlILG8/s1600-h/SacredFeminine.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340938762211948290" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 130px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQF3Vh2uIbQ1eBP9jANEM1CGkloT83NX1TCAlnJE1OS4Q_8_4nuzqQIonjz4-GSdIjN7iCLigtjB05ODB5aCk4XkKcs-krrZfeoDdgiMjcE0mOLSF3b1VWDPALlJB8CTwgJUTXMwlILG8/s400/SacredFeminine.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em><span style="font-size:130%;">The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference</span></em></div><div> </div><div>Edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron</div><div> </div><div>London and New York: I. B. Tauris, June 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1845115203, $85; paper: ISBN 978-1845115210, $29.95. 320 pages.</div><div> </div><div>Review by Gypsey Teague, Clemson University</div><div> </div><div>The longer I teach Gender and Women’s Studies, the more I am made aware that there are two distinct types of books in the field. The first type is the fluffy book. This type of book says very little but has a glitzy cover, and blurb on the back promising the latest information, and usually a forward by someone you have never heard of but who has been changed forever because of the content of the material. The second type of book is the scholarly tome. This book has little more than a title and an author on the cover, is usually a single color, often very thick with small print and too many references and citations; as though the author had little original to say and backed up what he could think of with someone else’s ideas.</div><div> </div><div><em>The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference</em>, fortunately, is somewhere between these two polar extremes. Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron have edited a delightful book that takes into account both the heavily scholared essay and interspersed a few lighter, more easily read articles. True, this book is tightly packed with information, there are very few illustrations [Editor’s note: the cloth edition is more fully illustrated], and the citations are lengthy; however, the information is pertinent to the subject area, the illustrations are specific to the essay and are there as augmentation, not as filler, and the citations are essential as a jumping-off point to more research.</div><div> </div><div>Turvey-Sauron is an art historian, and her work reflects that background. Pollock is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History at the University of Leeds. She brings to the table a “social criticism” that is found in few works currently published. Between them they have chosen 13 essays, each adding one to this Baker’s Dozen, and have emerged with 15 critical pieces on the world of feminism and how that feminism coexists, at times, with current thought and dogma. The authors do not take themselves or their subjects either lightly or frivolously, but rather, apply themselves to answering specific questions that they have found important to the feminist movement.</div><div> </div><div>I recommend this book to professors and instructors of feminist theory, or to gender constructionists. This is not a book to pick up lightly. It demands and expects attention to detail and a background in at least a couple of the waves of feminism to fully grasp what is being presented; however, once those foundations are attained, this book will become essential to all feminists’ and genderists’ libraries. </div>Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-73185317316980622562009-02-11T14:25:00.000-08:002009-02-12T18:49:41.192-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic8pZrBGEtgDK8mS6XMXcg1_5DC2JMDXv-a_cETYFqFbYIqNpBHR_lZQ3erNZcHMEWKGb7lRucad_PK5aEt_XWyRs6pSRCKv0WKg0_OXw2YZ2T5ok6mzmdrMfRH8c2cR-ZcqNzTz6Gs199/s1600-h/perfection_salad.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5302108675597367490" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 160px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic8pZrBGEtgDK8mS6XMXcg1_5DC2JMDXv-a_cETYFqFbYIqNpBHR_lZQ3erNZcHMEWKGb7lRucad_PK5aEt_XWyRs6pSRCKv0WKg0_OXw2YZ2T5ok6mzmdrMfRH8c2cR-ZcqNzTz6Gs199/s320/perfection_salad.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century</span></strong></em><br /><br />By Laura Schapiro. Berkeley: University of California Press, rpt. October 2008 (originally published 1986). Paper: ISBN 978-0-520-25738-2, $16.95. 296 pages.<br /><br />Review by Michelle Moravec, Rosemont College, Pennsylvania<br /><br />Add one part food history to another part women’s history. Stir in a dash of feminism. The result is an intriguing concoction that uses middle-class women’s attitudes towards food as an entree (pun intended) into their changing status at the turn of the century. Journalist Laura Schapiro, the author of two previous works about women and cooking, brings a deft hand to what could easily have become a trivial subject in Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.<br /><br />While Schapiro’s focus on “scientific cookery” may seem insufficiently broad, she uses culinary oddities such as “marshmallows stuffed with raisins” as a jumping-off point to explore how middle-class women’s shifting status at the turn of the century led to both class and gender anxieties. This angst made a certain population of women particularly receptive to this new approach to housekeeping, although it ultimately proved to their detriment. As women’s historians have illustrated, domestic science may have been the thin edge of the wedge that got scientific studies into female curricula, but not without exacting a huge toll. Ultimately, cloaking science in the respectable mantle of domesticity served only to reinforce, rather than repudiate, a gendered division of labor and study.<br /><br />As with cooking a fine meal, timing is everything, and women’s transformation of housewifery into domestic science unfortunately coincided with the risk of consumer food production in the United States. While these pre-packaged foods initially seemed to promise libration for women, Schapiro argues that they contributed to the degradation of women’s productive creative labor as cooks and reduced them to mere assemblers of prepared products. Furthermore, through the near dictatorial influence of the Boston Cooking School, the efforts to increase the scientific nature of cookery reflected a darker backlash by native-born women to the changing demographics of the United States. Literally, you were, or could be, what you ate. The bland blanket of “white sauce,” the virtues of which domestic scientists extolled, and for which Schapiro provides a brilliant genealogy, could coat even the most recalcitrant of foods. By implication, it blanched immigrants, labor radicals, and any other unruly force that threatened middle-class stability during those tumultuous days.<br /><br />In eight chapters, Schapiro charts the rise and eventual demise of the promise of domestic cookery. Domestic science was a well-documented subject even two decades ago when Schapiro first penned Perfection Salad, and she draws on this literature extensively. The first chapter explores the “domestic drudgery” that dominated women’s lives in the United States until the Civil War. The second chapter focuses on the wealth of prescriptive women’s literature that emerged due to cheap printing processes in the post-bellum period. Chapter three analyzes the various institutions of the scientific cookery movement, most notably the famed Boston Cooking School. Chapter four traces the proliferation the ideals of scientific cookery through various cookbooks, magazines, and newspaper columns. The brief fifth chapter provides a biography of the highly influential Fannie Farmer, who brought a sophisticated zest to the highly scientific standards of the Boston Cooking School, and to women across America who attempted her elaborate recipes at home. Chapter six traces the efforts of domestic scientists to bring their ideas about cooking and nutrition into social reform movements. By chapter seven, some of the pioneers of the scientific cookery movement begin to express doubts about the wisdom of their strategies. These doubts are confirmed in the final chapter, which documents the conservative impact that the scientific cooking movement ultimately had for women once it was co-opted by food manufacturers. A brief conclusion discusses modern food mania, which is largely dominated by male chefs, with the exception of Julia Child, about whom the author has previously written. First published in 1986, then reprinted for famed Gourmet food editor Ruth Reichel’s Food series (1991), this current edition comes complete with a new afterword by the author. In a brief seven pages, Schapiro considers gender roles in the new millennium, the local food craze, as well as the fate of the ideals of domestic science in the 21st century.<br /><br />Although Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century is now over twenty years old, it was extraordinarily well received at its initial publication and it has held up remarkably well. Despite further investigations into the fields of gender and food history, Schapiro’s work remains an intriguing and highly readable analysis and is still an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the field. As with all books that focus on the prescriptive, the reader is left wondering what actual women thought of these transformations. While their responses may be imputed or inferred, Schapiro makes little use of diaries or letters that might have revealed more nuanced aspects of women’s responses, but this quibble is minor compared to the wealth of detail Schapiro does offer.</div>Alana Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07006211600219601627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-35760664164005883332008-12-14T16:47:00.001-08:002008-12-14T16:47:34.845-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYMFePwho7fZ9JdQ7t5aC6iqTmZGxDBYRPNvcQ7LWCXJ7WYU8hraCRSU7mKXgvbi5jP3Kncv1H59RT8Jy9Znk32Yb2pIaCPwKDTksvrEV1c2n4JlLpLC0K_d5BEQVpqC1E5UMpi6AdR9E/s1600-h/enchanted+lives+enchanted+objects.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5269413522373840306" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 200px; height: 200px;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYMFePwho7fZ9JdQ7t5aC6iqTmZGxDBYRPNvcQ7LWCXJ7WYU8hraCRSU7mKXgvbi5jP3Kncv1H59RT8Jy9Znk32Yb2pIaCPwKDTksvrEV1c2n4JlLpLC0K_d5BEQVpqC1E5UMpi6AdR9E/s200/enchanted+lives+enchanted+objects.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong><em><span style="font-size:130%;">Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of American Culture, 1800-1940</span></em></strong>. By Dianne Sachko Macleod. Berkeley: University of California Press, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-520-23729-2, $45.00. 328 pages.<br /><br />Review by Stephanie Jacobe, American University<br /><br />In her newest book, Dianne Sachko Macleod, Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of California, Davis, investigates the lives of American women art collectors from roughly 1800 through 1940. She argues that collecting art liberated women of the nineteenth century from the gilded cage of the home created by the cult of true womanhood. Macleod employs case studies of women collectors to support her arguments. She focuses her arguments not on the content of collections but more on how the acquisition of those objects and the need to share them with others brought women outside the home. She also demonstrates that within the language of collecting, gender became more fluid.<br />Macleod is very honest in her introduction, admitting that she specifically chose her examples because they best fit with her thesis. She discusses the lives and collecting habits of thirty-seven women through five chapters and an epilogue. Although each chapter includes anywhere from three to eleven women in its analysis, each chapter focuses on one women as the primary example, with the others holding secondary roles in the discourse.<br />The first chapter is the only one in which Antebellum America is discussed, and it is by far the weakest of the five. Macleod examines Eliza Bowen Jumel as her primary example. Eliza Bowen was born in Rhode Island. Her early life was characterized by turmoil and financial hardship. She worked as a prostitute and actress before her marriage to shipping magnet Stephen Jumel in 1804. Macleod argues that Jumel flaunted gender conventions through her involvement in her husband’s business as well as her art collecting. However, Macleod does not discuss the political ramifications of the Early National Period that pitted Francophiles like Eliza and Stephen Jumel against those who favored a more British influence. Macleod also did not deal with the correlation between Jumel’s lower-class upbringing and early life with her seeming rejection of upper-class feminine ideals. The relationship between class and the cult of true womanhood is not discussed. Considering Jumel’s early life, the independence of her later years is not as surprising as it otherwise might be.<br />The later four chapters and the epilogue showcase the women collectors of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Macleod begins her look at the later nineteenth century by focusing on well-known women collectors, such as those described by Earl Shinn, who produced the first history of collecting in America. Macleod argues that Shinn did not have any respect for the women whose collections he documented, but instead saw them as extensions of their husbands. Macleod also introduces the concept of collecting-as-play. Macleod shows that women used their collections as a basis for psychological escape from not only the domestic sphere but also the rapidity of the modern world. As described in this book, collecting-as-play is almost an extension of the type of play children engage in with toys. Macleod also makes a case for the blurring of gender lines: men sometimes had these same playful tendencies.<br />Macleod next turns her attention to women collectors who also became activists in the fields of education, art, and suffrage. She focuses her story on Phoebe Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst, who spearheaded the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Macleod goes to great pains to show how women’s involvement with the World’s Fairs, beginning in 1876 and culminating in 1915, provided an avenue to the world outside their traditional place in the home. Surprisingly, not all the women Macleod discusses were fully in favor of women’s suffrage. Instead they displayed a range of opinions, from being against the idea completely to women’s limited participation in local politics to full national suffrage.<br />In the fourth chapter Macleod turns her attention to the creation of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt, by women collectors. She demonstrates that women such as Abby Rockefeller and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had emerged from their domestic spaces but that the male-dominated world did not accept that change. In fact, by the beginning decades of the twentieth century, men were beginning to extend their sway over the arts and saw women’s influence as unhealthy.<br />Finally, Macleod focuses on Gertrude and Leo Stein and their circle in Paris and the United States. It is in this final chapter that Macleod’s arguments concerning the gender of collecting come to fruition. Gertrude and her brother lived a reversal of gender roles within their personal as well as their collecting lives. Though Macleod employs gendered language in discussing aspects of art collecting throughout the book, it is not until these later examples that those arguments become convincing.<br />In <em>Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects</em>, Dianne Sachko Macleod has opened the discussion about the influence of art on women’s independence from the domestic sphere. Her work is by no means the final word; instead, it can be hoped, it will spur new studies that explore women’s art collecting in greater detail.Julie Cannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13595689506976367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-3704098273797651012008-12-14T16:42:00.000-08:002008-12-14T16:43:02.778-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv_GwaJ3vM35TrVQGA4a8fqyQ_mUNR3rSAl15qBtcNa7ISeGKzSXupJ-CFn-KMvaC5N0inq_rgkAIJBJOiTf2P_xKOqRAjL4VQ7FE3utEzWfqdXaRWkVGRACyc4vLcfaAeU_9eaa7u2bQ/s1600-h/sex_goes_to_school.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5269362236190333378" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 133px; height: 200px;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv_GwaJ3vM35TrVQGA4a8fqyQ_mUNR3rSAl15qBtcNa7ISeGKzSXupJ-CFn-KMvaC5N0inq_rgkAIJBJOiTf2P_xKOqRAjL4VQ7FE3utEzWfqdXaRWkVGRACyc4vLcfaAeU_9eaa7u2bQ/s200/sex_goes_to_school.jpg" border="0" /></a><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s</span></strong></em>. By Susan K. Freeman. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, June 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0-252-07531-5, $25.00. 220 pages.<br /><br />Review by Jennifer Aerts Terry, California State University, Sacramento<br /><br />In <em>Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s</em>, Susan K. Freeman explores the nature of sex education in post-World War II America. Freeman posits that the democratic impulse of American society in the 1940s and 1950s influenced the development of sex education curriculum by encouraging dialog-based courses. These courses solicited students’ input, which in turn contributed to the shaping of more liberal courses than what was offered either previously or in later decades. Further, she explains the pedagogical shift away from a purely biological approach to a psychological focus which encouraged introspective analysis. Though, she asserts, formal sex education during this era continued to reinforce heterosexual gender roles and relationships as normal social practices, these classes gave female adolescents the vocabulary and cognizance to challenge contradictory societal messages and confront male dominance, subsequently influencing women’s liberation in the 1960s.<br />Sex education programs were not new developments in the post-World War II era. They originated in the turn of the twentieth-century social hygiene and purity movements that sought to clean up cities, assimilate immigrants, and regulate Americans’ sexual behavior. The curriculum, medically grounded and morally rigid, took a clinical approach aimed mainly at combating venereal disease and premarital pregnancy. Freeman likens this approach to modern-day conservative curriculum that places topics regarding sexuality in essentially positive or negative categories. Yet, Freeman explains, in the years following the war and preceding the moral backlash against the sexual revolution, American attitudes and behaviors took a more liberal slant in that sex education programs promoted physical relationships between young men and women as normal and desirable. In fact, students were given the impression that a desire to do otherwise was unnatural and immature. In this regard, Freeman adds her voice to those of Stephanie Coontz and Joanne Meyerowitz in further complicating our understanding of post-World War II sexual behavior, challenging the notion that Americans were more conservative in their attitudes and behaviors than in later eras. This liberal attitude toward physical relationships led to frank and open classroom discussions that placed an emphasis on “emotional satisfaction” rather than physical pleasure (145). Though widely supported and welcomed in a number of communities, she also points to continued opposition from the Catholic Church.<br />It was within this liberal atmosphere that students (with the focus of this study primarily on teenage girls) participated in a variety of activities, discussions, and question and answer sessions. Freeman does not view students as “a submissive captive audience” controlled and indoctrinated by educators as in earlier decades (xi). Rather, the democratic, frank atmosphere of the classes welcomed adolescents’ questions, comments, and perspectives, thus shaping the curriculum as it went. On this point, Freeman emphasizes the importance of dissenting opinions, questions, and arguments made by students, since that is where one might truly see a deviation from the curriculum. Based on examples drawn from preserved student journals, assignments, and educators’ recollections, it does indeed appear that discussions were student-centered, and at times, diverged from planned curriculum, but Freeman provides little evidence of dissent or what would have been termed deviant inquiry. Unfortunately, without concrete evidence, comments such as, “Other questions were no doubt voiced, although teachers ignored or minimized them in promoting sex education,” and, “Inquiring students nevertheless posed questions that educators might have wished to avoid” (98), leave the reader wondering about the nature of those questions. Further, the bulk of examples support the notion that adolescent girls were indeed inquisitive but mostly compliant with educators’ principles.<br />Though a great deal of significance was placed on one’s conduct in dating situations and potential encounters with the opposite sex, sex education in the 1940s and 1950s was much broader than simple dos and don’ts of sexual relationships. The courses Freeman studied were relationship-centered and carried names such as Family Life Education, Human Science, and Human Relations. In addition to potential romantic relationships, these courses encouraged boys and girls to consider platonic interactions and personal decorum in a variety of social settings. The promotion of gender roles arises as a common theme among these courses. Here, Freeman connects sex education classes with the social construction of femininity versus masculinity. Boys and girls were conditioned, albeit in what was considered a progressive and enlightened manner, to accept and adopt gender roles and hierarchies as a means of conforming to proper society. As further evidence, Freeman highlights extracurricular activities such as dances, dating, and outlets of student expression such as high school yearbooks as places where societal constructs were reinforced by the students themselves. This, she suggests, was an extension of sex education. Yet it was also in these extracurricular activities that a degree of rebellion and dissent was evidenced through non-conformist behavior, as a variety of examples attest.<br />Freeman’s work differs from other scholarship on sex education in her bottom-up approach; she focuses on and draws attention to the students, rather than on the educators’ intent and curriculum development. <em>Sex Goes to School</em> is a valuable addition to scholarship on girls’ studies in that it highlights the role schools, and teenagers themselves, played in the enforcement of rigid social messages regarding gender roles and responsibilities that permeated post-World War II America. While Freeman’s assertion that this education somehow empowered girls and influenced them in the later women’s movement is intriguing, this is not made completely clear and could bear further investigation. Nonetheless, this is an interesting book that could prove useful in history and women’s studies courses.Julie Cannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13595689506976367006noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-57177425345445571212008-11-16T15:25:00.001-08:002008-11-16T16:36:32.424-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsWCtOzn7-2Nhn37IUMJsko7juqb5NiDUCGZMuHTIK4Y0v0HmYYHTkTQQp_42LzeB_05imWMZAoS-C2nWU_fHaC9ly3wG2T0cO_GjhMen_-R7J97PwbBhND1wi7qxSKtNaD-2yK8taq3E/s1600-h/meterosexual.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5269401397643706914" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 123px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 187px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsWCtOzn7-2Nhn37IUMJsko7juqb5NiDUCGZMuHTIK4Y0v0HmYYHTkTQQp_42LzeB_05imWMZAoS-C2nWU_fHaC9ly3wG2T0cO_GjhMen_-R7J97PwbBhND1wi7qxSKtNaD-2yK8taq3E/s200/meterosexual.jpg" border="0" /></a><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport</span></strong></em>. By David Coad. Albany: State University of New York Press, July 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0791474105, $16.95. 214 pages.<br />Review by Gypsey Teague, Clemson University<br /><span style="color:#000099;">from SJC post 2 (10/13/08)</span><br /><br />There are not many books on gender that do not cover women’s issues or Women’s Studies. Therefore, when I was asked to review this book I agreed quickly, and I am very glad I did. This is not the book I anticipated. What I expected—a book on how the metrosexual became part of the general vocabulary of television and print—although close to the heart of this book, was replaced by a book rife with examples of how the boundary between the homoerotic and the heterosexist is being blurred in advertising.<br />Coad gives the reader many examples of how the clothing industry, specifically the underwear and sportswear manufacturers, wove a mythos of sports stars and their irrefutable heterosexuality. However, Coad also uses the same examples to show how this mythos of heterosexuality was used by publishers to lure and capture the gay reader into dreaming that these models at the height of their masculinity could be theirs. It has been a fine line trodden since the 1970s, one still in evidence today with actors and sports figures such as Michael Jordan and Charlie Sheen.<br />As a professor of Women’s Studies I have taught for some time that not all advertising is exploitive of women merely because it shows women in their underwear. This book gives the male side of this same issue. Yes, the male models are showing much more than they would have in print and television ads of yesteryear; however, they are doing nothing more nor less than what the women have been doing for years, and they are enjoying the fame that goes with it.I am saddened, though, by the fact that in order for these ads to work in the minds of the straight general viewing public, the models must be hyper-hetero. They must portray a degree of homophobia in some cases that borders on damaging to humanity. Examples of trophy wives for featured sports stars are mixed with their highly evolved sense of style and fashion. Their knowledge of which material goes with which style is no longer the exception to the rule but is the rule itself.I have ordered a copy of this book for Clemson University’s Gunnin Architecture Library and have included it in my syllabus for the Gender class that I teach in Women’s Studies. As the saying goes; “the mirror has two faces,” and in this case one of them is not what you expect to see. I recommend this book for anyone who has a Gender, Women’s Studies, or Men’s Studies program, or anyone who is a marketing or management major. There is something for all of them, as well as the general public, to see how we are being manipulated in our view of sex, sexuality, and image in advertising.Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-57834828804901298532008-10-13T20:02:00.001-07:002008-10-13T20:03:01.596-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtISYCB_SoqES9wTnFPZLQqdCnzKyYTk6_F40zd4p3fNmlmDjg4DO9Cf-ZK8pIiecABwJLfsu5gDvy2yBN6RoxSohUDOsxqtWgTvybmhdKtYVPPIAUHsxKtD0SmczqWWB7CRQ0tNlV1nc/s1600-h/a.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256839617259348978" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtISYCB_SoqES9wTnFPZLQqdCnzKyYTk6_F40zd4p3fNmlmDjg4DO9Cf-ZK8pIiecABwJLfsu5gDvy2yBN6RoxSohUDOsxqtWgTvybmhdKtYVPPIAUHsxKtD0SmczqWWB7CRQ0tNlV1nc/s400/a.jpg" border="0" /></a><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theatre, and Film in the McCarthy Era</span></strong></em>. By Milly S. Barranger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, June 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0809328765, $37.50. 224 pages.<br />Review by Robert Weiner, Texas Tech University<br /><br />The Hollywood Blacklist, which was in effect from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, has been well documented in books like Time of the Toad, The Inquisition in Hollywood, and Fear on Trial. It has been the subject of documentaries like Scandalize My Name: Stories from the Blacklist (1998) and Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist (1987). Also the stories of the Hollywood Ten, actors, playwrights, and directors like Lee J. Cobb, James Garfield, Edward G. Robinson, Eli Kazan, Arthur Miller, and Clifford Odets and their experiences with HUAC have been well documented. What has not been well documented is how the Blacklist affected some women who had a connection to movies, television, and the theatre. With Unfriendly Witnesses, Milly S. Barranger has attempted to rectify this oversight. In this book, which is part of the Southern Illinois University Press Series Theatre in the Americas, Barranger, a professor of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, presents case studies of seven prominent women, and places them within the larger context of the “Red Scare.” These women are Judy Holliday, Anne Revere, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Margaret Webster, Mady Christians, and Kim Hunter.The movie and television industry used publications like Red Channels, Counterattack, and Aware to gauge who was un-American or a Communist and therefore unemployable. The names of the above seven women appeared in these publications as possible Communists. Judy Holiday, who starred on Broadway and went on to star in such noteworthy films as Adam’s Rib (1949), had “nine offenses” in Red Channels. She was called before HUAC to testify, and was subsequently dropped by CBS and ABC, even though she was not a Communist and had no real party ties. She played her role before the committee as she would any acting job, and showed that a strong woman could get through it. Her career was not appreciably affected; she continued to act on television, and became one the performers to prevail over the Blacklist. However, Mady Christians (I Remember Mama, 1948) was not so lucky. There is speculation that the stress caused just by being investigated as a Communist contributed to her cerebral hemorrhage before she even had a chance to testify before the committee.Anne Revere (A Place in the Sun, 1951) was being watched as early as 1943, and her performance as an “unfriendly witness” before HUAC makes her story one of the more colorful ones. She continued to work in theatre, acting in Arthur Miller’s parable of the times, The Crucible. Interestingly, by the time it ended its investigation, the FBI almost seemed to be afraid of her. When Revere won a Tony for her performance in the play Toys in the Attic, the FBI stopped its surveillance.The most interesting chapter covers the writers Lillian Hellman (Children’s Hour) and Dorothy Parker (A Star is Born/Nothing’s Sacred). Parker was a diehard activist who worked to help the poor and disenfranchised. Hellman, on the other hand, was involved with the noted Marxist writer Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon). She even admitted that at one time she had flirted with Communism. Parker ended up an alcoholic, and never really recovered from the shock of being investigated. However, Hellman continued to fight for the causes in which she believed, wrote her memoires (An Unfinished Woman), and was an iconoclast till her death in 1984.Margaret Webster was a stage director and daughter of actress Dame May Whittey. She is noteworthy for being the first to employ an African-American actor in the title role of Othello, on Broadway (1944). She was deemed guilty by being associated with folks like Paul Robeson, Jose Ferrer, and Uta Hagan. Her innocent choices during and before the war years came back to haunt her. Kim Hunter (The Seventh Victim, 1943) was known for her film and Broadway role of Stella Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. At the hearings, she claimed that she had nothing but disdain for Communism. However, during her early career she had associated with groups like Americans for Democratic Action, and had signed petitions for the World Peace Conference. Of all those profiled by Barranger, Kim Hunter seems to be the one who came out most unscathed. Although she did not have any offers for work in 1954, in 1955 and 1956 she was back appearing on network television, and her career lasted for 43 years.It is well known that those who worked solely in theater/Broadway were not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that hindered employment in movies and television. However, Barranger points out that there was a kind of “Graylist” which seemed to make it difficult, but not impossible, for some to get good paying jobs in New York theater and other places.The author presents these women, with the exception of Mady Christians, as “survivors.” They were up against terrible odds and lived through their trials. The author ends this study with a warning that similar situations could happen in our post 9/11 society. She cites the Patriot Act and possible government surveillance of those deemed unpatriotic as potential dangers. She equates the condemnation of the Dixie Chicks’ “anti-American” remarks by some radio stations to blacklisting, and compares the few CD burnings by conservative organizations to a modern-day book-burning.Unfriendly Witnesses documents a formerly untold story that needs to be told and read. It is well written and well documented, and it could be used in American History, Women’s Studies, Theater History, or Film History courses. This book is written in a way that allows students, academics, and the general public to find something of interest. By quoting from actual testimonies, it also provides a unique insight into these brave women. In the appendices Barranger has a timeline for women on the left, 1919-1976, which helps the historical context. Excerpts from Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television 1950 is also provided for context. Barranger’s bibliography is extensive. This book is recommended for both public and academic libraries.Bridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7858054571623513018.post-76924068462952826532008-08-19T18:25:00.001-07:002008-08-19T18:26:40.792-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhakY8_MtoOHUabT88-wq0bZbx9GLnWrPnmAFzEhwo49dDAWwwyml1DhGqAx-oq3QN5Wo7JsoUZLgnPCH8nF0vyxf3HZ_vxyQ9W4JB9dDMnF0_00wcEOLCueztPBqmLVeX0rLRx4ouF9AI/s1600-h/sacred+and+the+feminine.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5236405098471757698" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhakY8_MtoOHUabT88-wq0bZbx9GLnWrPnmAFzEhwo49dDAWwwyml1DhGqAx-oq3QN5Wo7JsoUZLgnPCH8nF0vyxf3HZ_vxyQ9W4JB9dDMnF0_00wcEOLCueztPBqmLVeX0rLRx4ouF9AI/s400/sacred+and+the+feminine.jpg" border="0" /></a>from I.B. Tauris<br /><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference</span></strong></em><br />edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron<br />under review by Gypsey Teague, Clemson University, South CarolinaBridget Cowlishaw, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13990580353645654390noreply@blogger.com0