Erotic Attachment, Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman-as-nation in Canadian Graphic Satire, 1867–1914
Using depictions of ‘Miss Canada’ in editorial cartoons and political campaign posters published in English Canada between 1867 and 1914 as a case study, this article argues that the repetitive deployment of feminised and eroticised images of the nation summoned particular gender, sexual and political identities into being and entangled viewers’ psychic investments in masculine, heterosexual and nationalist subjectivities. It also considers how Miss Canada's normative representation as white conflated racial whiteness and Canadian-ness, and how images hailed viewers into racial subjectivities that were leashed to national identity. Rather than querying how or why the woman-as-nation trope elicited nationalist sentiment in an already-constituted subject, this analysis examines how imagery provoked viewers’ identification with subject positions that were co-constituted with nationalism. Impassioned and even violent nationalism becomes more comprehensible when we consider that the woman-as-nation was capable of producing attachments to national identity that, for some, were inseparable from and tantamount to psychic investments in gender, sexual and racial identities. While Canadian scholars have recognised that Miss Canada was a significant popular culture icon during the long nineteenth century and acknowledged this icon's embeddedness in gender, sexual and national discourses, studies have tended to describe Miss Canada's role in consolidating hegemonic ideologies and power relations and underestimate visual culture's constitutive capacities. The extent of Miss Canada's hetero-erotic coding has also largely escaped historians’ notice. Although a few scholars have explored visual culture's role in Canadian national identity formation during this era, this study makes a unique contribution by foregrounding the productive work of popular imagery in co-constituting and entwining national and sexual subjectivities.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12179
The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race, Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine
Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non-white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth-century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico-scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth-century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race-specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti-abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12177
Gendering Dark Age Jesus
Jesus's body was visualised in strikingly gendered ways in the Carolingian world. The Jesus of the Carolingian Empire could move deftly between gendered styles, from feminised victim to hyper-masculinised victor; at the same time, he could delicately dance between these two modes of gendered existence and do so within the space of one manuscript page. Three manuscripts produced in the ninth century contain bold images of a fleshly Jesus: the Stuttgart Psalter (c.820s), the Sacramentary of Gellone (c.800) and the acrostic poem produced at the abbey of Fulda, In Honour of the Holy Cross (c.810/830s). These codices are associated with a period of cultural flourishing known as the Carolingian renovatio, or the renewal of classical and patristic culture within the reforming agenda of the Frankish church. Each manuscript presents a Dark Age Jesus within distinct, interpretative backdrops – tortured, fecund and imperial – a divergence in style underscoring how the evangelical portrait of Jesus's body and its fluctuating gender were staged in the pastoral North for different audiences. The Carolingians did impart a series of images that defy the stereotypes of early medieval Christianity, including the idea that intimacy with a human saviour is the spiritual legacy of subsequent eras.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12175
Handywomen and Birthing in Rural Ireland, 1851–1955
It is largely agreed among scholars of social history and history of medicine that the medicalisation of maternity was slow to evolve in Ireland as it was beleaguered by competing professional, denominational and political agendas. Such discourses have dominated Irish history of medicine and hindered the progress of the medicalisation debate. A notable feature of the birthing process in Ireland is that for centuries handywomen, or untrained midwives, played a crucial role yet they have not been subject to the attention of historians. This article traces references to them in Irish Folklore Commission (1935–71) manuscripts and places them in wider social contexts to contend that their slight representation was a result of medico-legal awareness and a desire to protect the identity of women who, after 1918, were operating outside the law.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12176