This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, ...Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed-thedocta puella,or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers-as plaint and confession-but rather from the viewpoint of the women-thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation-James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.
From romantic novelist Elinor Glyn in the 1920s to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today, this collection examines some of the history, contemporary manifestations and enduring appeal of US-UK romance ...across popular culture.
A handful of celebrated photographs show armed female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in ...the struggle's success has only now received comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution," Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process.Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.
In Buried in the Heart, Erin Baines explores the political agency of women abducted as children by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, forced to marry its commanders, and to bear their ...children. Introducing the concept of complex victimhood, she argues that abducted women were not passive victims, but navigated complex social and political worlds that were life inside the violent armed group. Exploring the life stories of thirty women, Baines considers the possibilities of storytelling to reclaim one's sense of self and relations to others, and to generate political judgement after mass violence. Buried in the Heart moves beyond victim and perpetrator frameworks prevalent in the field of transitional justice, shifting the attention to stories of living through mass violence and the possibilities of remaking communities after it. The book contributes to an overlooked aspect of international justice: women's political agency during wartime.
Combining historical, historiographical, museological, and touristic analysis, this study investigates how late medieval and early modern women of the Low Countries expressed themselves through ...texts, art, architecture and material objects, how they were represented by contemporaries, and how they have been interpreted in modern academic and popular contexts.
Broomhall and Spinks analyse late medieval and early modern women's opportunities to narrate their experiences and ideas, as well as the processes that have shaped their representation in the heritage and cultural tourism of the Netherlands and Belgium today. The authors study female-authored objects such as familial and political letters, dolls' houses, account books; visual sources, funeral monuments, and buildings commissioned by female patrons; and further artworks as well as heritage sites, streetscapes, souvenirs and clothing with gendered historical resonances.
Employing an innovative range of materials from written sources to artworks, material objects, heritage sites and urban precincts, the authors argue that interpretations of late medieval and early modern women's experiences by historians and art scholars interact with presentations by cultural and heritage tourism providers in significant ways that deserve closer interrogation by feminist researchers.
Man and Bird in the Palaeolithic of Western Europe
considers the nature of the interaction between birds and
hunter-gatherers. It examines aspects of avian behaviour and the
qualities that could be ...(and were) targeted at different periods by
hunter-gatherers, who recognised the utility of the diversity of
avian groups in various applications of daily life and thought. It
is clear from the records of excavated sites in western Europe that
during the evolution of both the Neanderthal period and the
subsequent occupations of Homo sapiens, avian demographics
fluctuated with the climate along with other aspects of both flora
and fauna. Each was required to adapt to these changes. The present
study considers these changes through the interactions of man and
bird as evidenced in the remains attached to Middle and Upper
Palaeolithic occupation sites in western Europe and touches on a
variety of prey/predator relationships across other groups of plant
and animal species. The book describes a range of procurement
strategies that are known from the literature and artistic record
of later cultures to have been used in the trapping, enticement and
hunting of birds for consumption and the manufacture of weapons,
domestic items, clothing, ceremony and cultural activities. It also
explores how bird images and depictions engraved or painted on the
walls of caves or on the objects of daily use during the Upper
Palaeolithic may be perceived as communications of a more profound
significance for the temporal, seasonal or social life of the
members of the group than the simple concept of animal. Certain
bird species have at different times held a special significance in
the everyday consciousness of particular peoples and a group of
Late Glacial, Magdalenian settlements in Aquitaine, France, appear
to be an example of such specialised culling. A case study of the
treatment of snowy owl at Arancou in the Atlantic Pyrenees seems to
illustrate such a specialisation. Discussion of the problems of
reconciling dating and research methods, of the last two hundred
years of Palaeolithic research, and of possible directions for
future research offer an open conclusion to the work.
In June 1975, thousands of people converged on Mexico City for the United Nations (UN) conference celebrating International Women’s Year (IWY), the first of four UN women’s conferences that would ...eventually include those in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995). Scholars and activists regard IWY as a watershed moment in transnational second wave feminism. Billed as the “greatest consciousness-raising event in history,” the IWY events included both an official conference, which offered an unprecedented opportunity to put women at the center of international policymaking, and a parallel nongovernmental organization (NGO) tribune, which launched a new generation of civil society organizations focused on issues related to women and gender. This book’s first part explores the history of the IWY conference. It particularly attends to the ways that geopolitical and institutional rivalries, competing ideologies, and material constraints fostered the idea of IWY, shaped the plan to hold an international conference, and resulted in the Mexico City conference serving as the year’s centerpiece. The second part follows the action in the conference and tribune, including conflicts over representation, sexuality, and human rights. The final part considers IWY’s legacies, which included the creation of enduring transnational NGO networks and far-reaching changes within the United Nations. Although the Mexico City conference is widely remembered for its failure to achieve consensus, this book demonstrates that IWY’s greatest achievements emerged from the moments that invited wide-ranging perspectives and even open conflict.
By 1893, the Supreme Court had officially declared women to be citizens, but most did not have the legal right to vote. In Practicing Citizenship , Kristy Maddux provides a glimpse at an ...unprecedented alternative act of citizenship by women of the time: their deliberative participation in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.
Hailing from the United States and abroad, the more than eight hundred women speakers at the World’s Fair included professionals, philanthropists, socialites, and reformers addressing issues such as suffrage, abolition, temperance, prison reform, and education. Maddux examines the planning of the event, the full program of women speakers, and dozens of speeches given in the fair’s daily congresses. In particular, she analyzes the ways in which these women shaped the discourse at the fair and modeled to the world practices of democratic citizenship, including deliberative democracy, racial uplift, organizing, and economic participation. In doing so, Maddux shows how these pioneering women claimed sociopolitical ground despite remaining disenfranchised.
This carefully researched study makes significant contributions to the studies of rhetoric, American women’s history, political history, and the history of the World’s Fair itself. Most importantly, it sheds new light on women’s activism in the late nineteenth century; even amidst the suffrage movement, women innovated practices of citizenship beyond the ballot box.
1. The topic of this book is important not only because of its resonance in Italian and European political conversation, but also in its application to the understanding of political feminist ...movements globally.
2. Through thorough, ethnography-based work on the recent emergence of femminicidio in Italy it explores gendered violence and representation. Focusing on the figure of the witness, this research explores ways to transcend the dichotomy "victim/survivor" in framing women's reaction to gendered violence.
3. The scholarly audience for this book is broad and cross-disciplinary including those working in the history of Italy, gender studies, performance studies, media studies, feminist studies, visual anthropology, and the study of political activism.
Can the way a word is used give legitimacy to a political movement?Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy traces the use of the word "femminicidio" (or "femicide") as a tool to mobilize Italian feminists, particularly the Union of Women in Italy (UDI). Based on nearly two years of fieldwork among feminist activists, Giovanna Parmigiani takes a broad look at the many ways in which violence inflects the lives of women in Italy. From unchallenged gendered grammar rules to the representation of women as victims, Parmigiani examines the devaluing of women's contribution to their communities through the words and experiences of the women she interviews. She describes the first uses of the word "femminicidio" as a political term used by and within feminist circles and traces its spread to ultimate legitimization and national relevance. The word redefined women as a political subject by building an imagined community of potentially violated women. In doing so, it challenged Italians to consider the status of women in Italian society, and to make this status a matter of public debate. It also problematized the connection between women and tropes of women as objects of suffering and victimhood. Parmigiani considers this exchange within the context of Italian Catholic heritage, a precarious economy, and long-held notions of honor and shame. Parmigiani provides a careful and searing consideration of the ways in which representations of violence and the politics of this representation are shaping the future of women in Italy and beyond.
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