Gender and the Southern Body Politic

Gender and the Southern Body Politic
Author: Nancy Bercaw
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2007-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781934110386

A re-examination of history through the unique lens of gender Download Plain Text version In recent years an exciting new branch of scholarship has contributed to revising our understanding of politics and history. Expanding our definition of southern politics, a new generation of historians is challenging us to reconsider the most hallowed subjects in southern history -- the origins of slavery, Bacon's Rebellion, the Nullification crisis, the origins of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Lost Cause, Populism, and Jim Crow. Taking gender as a lens of analysis, these subjects are envisioned in a new light. As Gender and the Southern Body Politic examines literature and art, labor and law, manhood and womanhood, the historians contributing to this volume argue that politics is not limited to the machinations of parties, candidates, and voters. Instead, they suggest that private matters -- family, home, and sexuality -- are integral to the construction of public power. Focusing on gender and ranging from the colonial period to the present, these essays explore the politics of memory, masculinity, domestic violence, political obligation, the male body, and affirmative action. In revising southern political history, each author challenges our conceptualization of history itself. Jacquelyn Hall calls for a new form of writing that questions the tired boundaries of public and private and that "emphasizes not our expertise but our common condition, writing that troubles the boundaries between poetics and politics, memory and history, witnessing and writing, acting and research." In questioning politics, these and other new-thinking historians have opened our eyes to fresh ways of seeing and practicing the art of history. These papers were presented in 1997 at the at the University of Mississippi. Nancy Bercaw is an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi.

Body and Nation

Body and Nation
Author: Emily S. Rosenberg
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2014-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822376717

Body and Nation interrogates the connections among the body, the nation, and the world in twentieth-century U.S. history. The idea that bodies and bodily characteristics are heavily freighted with values that are often linked to political and social spheres remains underdeveloped in the histories of America's relations with the rest of the world. Attentive to diverse state and nonstate actors, the contributors provide historically grounded insights into the transnational dimensions of biopolitics. Their subjects range from the regulation of prostitution in the Philippines by the U.S. Army to Cold War ideals of American feminine beauty, and from "body counts" as metrics of military success to cultural representations of Mexican migrants in the United States as public health threats. By considering bodies as complex, fluctuating, and interrelated sites of meaning, the contributors to this collection offer new insights into the workings of both soft and hard power. Contributors. Frank Costigliola, Janet M. Davis, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Paul A. Kramer, Shirley Jennifer Lim, Mary Ting Yi Lui, Natalia Molina, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Emily S. Rosenberg, Kristina Shull, Annessa C. Stagner, Marilyn B. Young

Gender and the Southern Body Politic

Gender and the Southern Body Politic
Author: Nancy Bercaw
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781578062577

A re-examination of history through the unique lens of gender Download Plain Text version In recent years an exciting new branch of scholarship has contributed to revising our understanding of politics and history. Expanding our definition of southern politics, a new generation of historians is challenging us to reconsider the most hallowed subjects in southern history -- the origins of slavery, Bacon's Rebellion, the Nullification crisis, the origins of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Lost Cause, Populism, and Jim Crow. Taking gender as a lens of analysis, these subjects are envisioned in a new light. As Gender and the Southern Body Politic examines literature and art, labor and law, manhood and womanhood, the historians contributing to this volume argue that politics is not limited to the machinations of parties, candidates, and voters. Instead, they suggest that private matters -- family, home, and sexuality -- are integral to the construction of public power. Focusing on gender and ranging from the colonial period to the present, these essays explore the politics of memory, masculinity, domestic violence, political obligation, the male body, and affirmative action. In revising southern political history, each author challenges our conceptualization of history itself. Jacquelyn Hall calls for a new form of writing that questions the tired boundaries of public and private and that "emphasizes not our expertise but our common condition, writing that troubles the boundaries between poetics and politics, memory and history, witnessing and writing, acting and research." In questioning politics, these and other new-thinking historians have opened our eyes to fresh ways of seeing and practicing the art of history. These papers were presented in 1997 at the at the University of Mississippi. Nancy Bercaw is an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi.

An American Body-politic

An American Body-politic
Author: Bernd Herzogenrath
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 1584659335

A reflection on the metaphor of the body politic throughout American history

American Body Politics

American Body Politics
Author: Felipe Smith
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820319339

Felipe Smith tracks the emergence of particular gender images--such as white witch, black madonna, mammy, and white lady--and their impact on early African American literature. Smith gives us a remarkable synthesis of historical readings combined with a highly original contribution to the comprehension of racial thought and literary writing.

Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan

Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan
Author: Denis Gainty
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135069905

In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai’s efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Author: Nancy Bercaw
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2014-02-01
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1469616726

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture reflects the dramatic increase in research on the topic of gender over the past thirty years, revealing that even the most familiar subjects take on new significance when viewed through the lens of gender. The wide range of entries explores how people have experienced, understood, and used concepts of womanhood and manhood in all sorts of obvious and subtle ways. The volume features 113 articles, 65 of which are entirely new for this edition. Thematic articles address subjects such as sexuality, respectability, and paternalism and investigate the role of gender in broader subjects, including the civil rights movement, country music, and sports. Topical entries highlight individuals such as Oprah Winfrey, the Grimke sisters, and Dale Earnhardt, as well as historical events such as the capture of Jefferson Davis in a woman's dress, the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, with its slogan, "I AM A MAN." Bringing together scholarship on gender and the body, sexuality, labor, race, and politics, this volume offers new ways to view big questions in southern history and culture.

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World
Author: Pamela Scully
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2005-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822387468

This groundbreaking collection provides the first comparative history of gender and emancipation in the Atlantic world. Bringing together essays on the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, West Africa and South Africa, and the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, it shows that emancipation was a profoundly gendered process, produced through connections between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Contributors from the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil explore how the processes of emancipation involved the re-creation of gender identities—the production of freedmen and freedwomen with different rights, responsibilities, and access to citizenship. Offering detailed analyses of slave emancipation in specific societies, the contributors discuss all of the diverse actors in emancipation: slaves, abolitionists, free people of color, state officials, and slave owners. Whether considering the construction of a postslavery masculine subjectivity in Jamaica, the work of two white U.S. abolitionist women with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, freedwomen’s negotiations of labor rights in Puerto Rico, slave women’s contributions to the slow unraveling of slavery in French West Africa, or the ways that Brazilian abolitionists deployed representations of femininity as virtuous and moral, these essays demonstrate the gains that a gendered approach offers to understanding the complex processes of emancipation. Some chapters also explore theories and methodologies that enable a gendered reading of postslavery archives. The editors’ substantial introduction traces the reasons for and patterns of women’s and men’s different experiences of emancipation throughout the Atlantic world. Contributors. Martha Abreu, Sheena Boa, Bridget Brereton, Carol Faulkner, Roger Kittleson, Martin Klein, Melanie Newton, Diana Paton, Sue Peabody, Richard Roberts, Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva, Hannah Rosen, Pamela Scully, Mimi Sheller, Marek Steedman, Michael Zeuske