‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16
This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper-class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti-black racism and to affirm their identification with upper-class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti-black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12219
Critical Thoughts on Keywords in Gender and History: An Introduction
This introduction lays out the key themes addressed in the Forum and emphasises the importance of understanding historical description and theory as mutually constitutive. The contributions to the Forum interrogate key categories of analysis in feminist history including the gender binary, gender crisis, agency and intersectionality. The articles show how the study of historical events and processes in their particular detail reframes the categories used to construct feminist theories of stability and disruption. The productive encounters between feminist history and feminist theory in this Forum offer new and interesting ways to reframe research questions.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12208
Affection and Assimilation: Concubinage and the Ideal of Conjugal Love in Colonial Korea, 1922–38
This article explores how selective application of Japanese divorce laws between 1922 and 1938, which obstructed Korean women from obtaining divorce on the grounds of concubinage, affected the meaning of conjugal relationships in colonial Korea. I argue that in this period affection and companionship emerged as critical components of a legitimate conjugal relationship among Koreans. This legal process, which I call the affectivisation of the female-spouse, coincided with a popular penchant for romantic love shown in public media and popular novels. Challenging previous scholarship that treated the phenomenon of romantic love as contained in literary discourses, this article shows how literary and legal discourses mutually influenced one another. I further argue that this new ideal of conjugal love had an intricate relationship with overall colonial legal policy: it worked in conjunction (not antithetical) to the family state ideology of the Japanese empire and the family system that the colonial state was trying to implement in Korea. The qualitative transformation of the conjugal relationship contributed to firmer implementation of the family system in Korea and prepared Korean society for the full assimilation of the Korean civil laws in 1940.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12218