Title: The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850
Author: Kuchta, David 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese femininities, chinese masculinities: a reader
Author: Brownell, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: The past two centuries have witnessed tremendous upheavals in every aspect of Chinese culture and society. At the level of everyday life, some of the most remarkable transformations have occurred in the realm of gender. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities is a mix of illuminating historical and ethnographic studies of gender from the 1700s to the present. The essays in this highly creative collection are organized in pairs that alternate in focus between femininity and masculinity, between subjects traditionally associated with feminism (such as family life) and those rarely considered from a gendered point of view (like banditry). The chapters provide a wealth of interesting detail on such varied topics as court cases involving widows and homosexuals; ideal spouses of early-twentieth-century radicals; changing images of prostitutes; the masculinity of qigong masters; sexuality in the era of reform; and the eroticization of minorities. While most of the essays were specifically written for this volume, a few are reprinted as a testament to their enduring value. Exploring the central role of gender as an organizing principle of Chinese social life, Chinese Femininities/ Chinese Masculinities is an innovative reader that will spark new debate in a wide range of disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: Hanging out in the virtual pub: masculinities and relationships online 
Author: Kendall, Lori 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | American Studies | Technology and Society | Anthropology | Electronic Media | Media Studies | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: Lori Kendall is one of the first to explore the brave new world of social relations as they have evolved on the Internet. In this highly readable ethnography, she examines how men and women negotiate their gender roles on an online forum she calls BlueSky. The result is a first-rate analysis of the emerging social phenomenon of Internet-mediated communication and a ground-breaking study of the social and cultural effects of a medium that allows participants to assume identities of their own choosing. Despite the common assumption that the personas these men and women craft for themselves bear little resemblance to reality, Kendall discovers that the habitués of BlueSky stick surprisingly close to the facts of their actual lives and personalities.   [brief]
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Title: Still a man's world: men who do "women's" work
Author: Williams, Christine L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Economics and Business | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: Men who do "women's work" have consistently been the butt of jokes, derided for their lack of drive and masculinity. In this eye-opening study, Christine Williams provides a wholly new look at men who work in predominantly female jobs. Having conducted extensive interviews in four cities, Williams uncovers how men in four occupations - nursing, elementary school teaching, librarianship, and social work - think about themselves and experience their work.Contrary to popular imagery, men in traditionally female occupations do not define themselves differently from men in more traditional occupations. Williams finds that most embrace conventional, masculine values. Her findings about how these men fare in their jobs are also counterintuitive. Rather than being surpassed by the larger number of women around them, these men experience the "glass escalator effect," rising in disproportionate numbers to administrative jobs at the top of their professions. Williams finds that a complex interplay between gendered expectations embedded in organizations, and the socially determined ideas workers bring to their jobs, contribute to mens' advantages in these occupations.Using a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, Williams calls for more men not only to cross over to women's occupations, but also to develop alternative masculinities that find common ground with traditionally female norms of cooperation and caring. Until the workplace is sexually integrated and masculine and feminine norms equally valued, it will unfortunately remain "still a man's world."   [brief]
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Title: In the midst of life: affect and ideation in the world of the Tolai
Author: Epstein, A. L. (Arnold Leonard)
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The Tolai are among the most distinctive of Papua New Guinea's indigenous peoples. For all their success in the pursuit of modernity, the Tolai remain traditional in their attitudes toward death, the cultural elaboration of which colors almost every aspect of their existence.In his new book, A. L. Epstein develops an emotional profile of the Tolai, contending that societies are distinguished as much by the shape of their emotional life as they are by their social arrangements and cultural styles. Epstein describes a wide range of mourning ceremonies and other more and less public occasions. By investigating not only the words that stand for emotions but also the way affect enters into and informs people's conduct, he charts a new course for ethnography that seeks to integrate the study of the emotions into anthropological analysis.   [brief]
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Title: After the lovedeath: sexual violence and the making of culture
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | Music
Publisher's Description: This elegantly written book is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to their nineteenth-century sources, drawing on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.To make his case, Kramer uses operatic lovedeaths, Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" and the Tolstoy novella named after it; the writings of Walt Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, psychoanalysis, and the logic of dreams. In formal and informal reflections, he explores the self-contradictions of masculinity, the shifting alignments of femininity, authority, and desire, and the interdependency of hetero- and homosexuality. At the same time, he imagines alternatives that could allow gender to be freed from the existing system of polarities that inevitably promote sexual violence.Kramer's writing avoids the conventional dress of intellectual authority and moves between music and literature in a style that is both intimate and effective. He combines informed scholarship with candid personal utterance and makes clear what is at stake in this crucial debate. After the Lovedeath will have a profound impact on anyone interested in new ways to think about gender.   [brief]
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Title: Musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music scholarship
Author: Solie, Ruth A
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most . . . [more]
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Title: Going for gold: men, mines, and migration
Author: Moodie, T. Dunbar
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | African Studies | Social Theory | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: This book tells the story of the lives of migrant black African men who work on the South African gold mines, told from their own point of view and, as much as possible, in their own words. Dunbar Moodie examines the operation of local power structures and resistances, changes in production techniques, the limits and successes of unionization, and the nature of ethnic conflicts at different periods and on different terrains of struggle. He treats his subject thematically and historically, examining how notions of integrity, manhood, sexuality, work, power, solidarity, and violence have all changed over time, especially with the shift to a proletarianized work force on the mines in the 1970s. Moodie integrates analyses of individual life-strategies with theories of social change, illuminating the ways in which these play off each other in historically significant ways. He shows how human beings (in this case, African men) build integrity and construct their own social order, even in situations of apparent total repression.   [brief]
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Title: Diasporas and exiles: varieties of Jewish identity
Author: Wettstein, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Jewish Studies | European History | Social and Political Thought | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Diaspora, considered as a context for insights into Jewish identity, brings together a lively, interdisciplinary group of scholars in this innovative volume. Readers needn't expect, however, to find easy agreement on what those insights are. The concept "diaspora" itself has proved controversial; galut, the traditional Hebrew expression for the Jews' perennial condition, is better translated as "exile." The very distinction between diaspora and exile, although difficult to analyze, is important enough to form the basis of several essays in this fine collection. "Identity" is an even more elusive concept. The contributors to Diasporas and Exiles explore Jewish identity - or, more accurately, Jewish identities - from the mutually illuminating perspectives of anthropology, art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German history, philosophy, political theory, and sociology. These contributors bring exciting new emphases to Jewish and cultural studies, as well as the emerging field of diaspora studies. Diasporas and Exiles mirrors the richness of experience and the attendant virtual impossibility of definition that constitute the challenge of understanding Jewish identity.   [brief]
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Title: What is sexual harassment?: from Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne
Author: Saguy, Abigail Cope 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Gender Studies | American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | European Studies | Men and Masculinity | Women's Studies | Law | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In France, a common notion is that the shared interests of graduate students and their professors could lead to intimate sexual relations, and that regulations curtailing those relationships would be both futile and counterproductive. By contrast, many universities and corporations in the United States prohibit sexual relationships across hierarchical lines and sometimes among coworkers, arguing that these liaisons should have no place in the workplace. In this age of globalization, how do cultural and legal nuances translate? And when they differ, how are their subtleties and complexities understood? In comparing how sexual harassment - a concept that first emerged in 1975 - has been defined differently in France and the United States, Abigail Saguy explores not only the social problem of sexual harassment but also the broader cultural concerns of cross-national differences and similarities.   [brief]
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Title: Contemplating the ancients: aesthetic and social issues in early Chinese portraiture 
Author: Spiro, Audrey
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Architecture | China
Publisher's Description: Drawing on a wide variety of contemporaneous sources from Chinese history, literature, religious writings, and art and literary criticism, Spiro provides the modern reader with an aesthetic and social context for understanding early Chinese portraiture. Contemplating the Ancients introduces portraits that were never intended to be physical likenesses of their subjects and illuminates the meaning they held for the viewers for whom they were made.Spiro focusses on fourth- and fifth-century sets of almost identi- cal portraits of individuals known collectively in Chinese history as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. Unlike the earlier Han dynasty portraits whose messages were universal, these exemplary portraits addressed a specific elitist audience. The subjects of these portraits served as idealized representations for a largely nouvel-arrivé aristocracy.Spiro examines the complex and sometimes ironic changes that occur when historical individuals are transformed by tradition into classical exemplars. She shows how the visual arts translate ideals of personal character into stylistic cues and how these cues, in turn, affect the values and behavior of human beings.   [brief]
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Title: Printed poison: pamphlet propaganda, faction politics, and the public sphere in early Seventeenth-century France 
Author: Sawyer, Jeffrey K
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Print Media | Politics | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Combining a broad analysis of political culture with a particular focus on rhetoric and strategy, Jeffrey Sawyer analyzes the role of pamphlets in the political arena in seventeenth-century France. During the years 1614-1617 a series of conflicts occurred in France, resulting from the struggle for domination of Louis XIII's government. In response more than 1200 pamphlets - some printed in as many as eighteen editions - were produced and distributed. These pamphlets constituted the political press of the period, offering the only significant published source of news and commentary.Sawyer examines key aspects of the impact of pamphleteering: the composition of the targeted public and the ways in which pamphlets were designed to affect its various segments, the interaction of pamphlet printing and political action at the court and provincial levels, and the strong connection between pamphlet content and assumptions on the one hand and the evolution of the French state on the other. His analysis provides new and valuable insights into the rhetoric and practice of politics.Sawyer concludes that French political culture was shaped by the efforts of royal ministers to control political communication. The resulting distortions of public discourse facilitated a spectacular growth of royal power and monarchist ideology and influenced the subsequent history of French politics well into the Revolutionary era.   [brief]
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Title: Same-sex affairs: constructing and controlling homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest
Author: Boag, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Gender Studies | History | Men and Masculinity | Californian and Western History | Urban Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: At the turn of the twentieth century, two distinct, yet at times overlapping, male same-sex sexual subcultures had emerged in the Pacific Northwest: one among the men and boys who toiled in the region's logging, fishing, mining, farming, and railroad-building industries; the other among the young urban white-collar workers of the emerging corporate order. Boag draws on police logs, court records, and newspaper accounts to create a vivid picture of the lives of these men and youths--their sexual practices, cultural networks, cross-class relations, variations in rural and urban experiences, and ethnic and racial influences.   [brief]
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Title: Getting married in Korea: of gender, morality, and modernity
Author: Kendall, Laurel
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | East Asia Other | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity
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Title: Tran sforming desire: erotic knowledge in Books III and IV of the Faerie queene 
Author: Silberman, Lauren
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Men and Masculinity | Women's Studies | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: The Faerie Queene anticipates postmodernist concerns with destabilizing language, and Lauren Silberman's stimulating study of Books III and IV of the poem proceeds from the assumption that Spenser has something important to say to us in the late twentieth century.In these books, Spenser exposes fictions of total control for what they are - fictions. The text affirms the value of risk and improvisation over the temptation to seek guarantees. The books examine the role of desire in moving us to function in an uncertain world and tempting us to foreclose that uncertainty by strategies that seek to frame knowledge through total mastery of it.   [brief]
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Title: Wandering, begging monks: spiritual authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity
Author: Caner, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Classics | Religion | Classical Religions | Christianity | Classical History | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere - including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes - to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.   [brief]
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Title: Dearest beloved: the Hawthornes and the making of the middle-class family 
Author: Herbert, T. Walter (Thomas Walter) 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity | Autobiographies and Biographies | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne - for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness - was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.   [brief]
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Title: The beginnings of Jewishness: boundaries, varieties, uncertainties
Author: Cohen, Shaye J. D
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Religion | Judaism | Classical Religions | Classics | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: In modern times, various Jewish groups have argued whether Jewishness is a function of ethnicity, of nationality, of religion, or of all three. These fundamental conceptions were already in place in antiquity. The peculiar combination of ethnicity, nationality, and religion that would characterize Jewishness through the centuries first took shape in the second century B.C.E. This brilliantly argued, accessible book unravels one of the most complex issues of late antiquity by showing how these elements were understood and applied in the construction of Jewish identity - by Jews, by gentiles, and by the state.Beginning with the intriguing case of Herod the Great's Jewishness, Cohen moves on to discuss what made or did not make Jewish identity during the period, the question of conversion, the prohibition of intermarriage, matrilineal descent, and the place of the convert in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. His superb study is unique in that it draws on a wide range of sources: Jewish literature written in Greek, classical sources, and rabbinic texts, both ancient and medieval. It also features a detailed discussion of many of the central rabbinic texts dealing with conversion to Judaism.   [brief]
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Title: MeXicana encounters: the making of social identities on the borderlands
Author: Fregoso, Rosa Linda
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Film | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.   [brief]
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Title: Unheroic conduct: the rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man
Author: Boyarin, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Jewish Studies | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel , this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.   [brief]
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