A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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remind us that the impact of economic development, and of other social and political changes, was very different for elite urban dwellers than for rural people. According to Deborah Simonton, complex and conflicting gender ideologies in the modern era intersected with industrialism and urban development in Europe, and Linda Kealey emphasizes the same processes in Canada.
The scholarship of the last forty years has made clear, however, that the centrality of gender is not limited to social issues, and many of the chapters examine themes that have traditionally been the province of political, diplomatic, and even military historians. Though some mainstream national history – the accounts that legitimate nations and their governments – remains cut off from the interpretative richness gender analysis provides, the process of building and ruling societies has always been carried out according to gendered principles. Judith Tucker examines the relationship between nationalist struggles and women’s movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth‐century Middle East; Anne Walthall and Barbara Molony do the same in East and Southeast Asia. Sonya Lipsett‐Rivera analyzes the roles women assumed in the rebellions and wars of independence in Latin America, and Sean Redding those in Africa. Barbara Molony and Karen Petrone suggest ways that the study of war – long viewed as a primarily masculine realm, though rarely studied as such – benefits from closer analysis of gender. According to Molony, the sex slavery that was part of World War II in Asia came into the headlines in 1991 when Korean and Chinese women forced into prostitution to serve the Japanese imperial army during World War II as so‐called “comfort women” came forward to demand reparations. Comfort women’s memoirs deepen our understanding of conflict worldwide, as have the accounts of Holocaust survivors, refugees, and other war victims. Because sex slavery, rape as a tool of combat, and similar practices are not, nor have ever been, unique to Japan, the history of war can be better understood when it incorporates these deeply troubling issues. Engendering war, as these chapters do, brings to mind the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s terse dismissal of the heroism of masculine combat: “Not all soldiers are rapists, but every army rapes.”3
Along with tracing the actual experiences of women and men, many of the chapters examine symbolic and metaphorical uses of gender, as well as other topics that have been central in the new cultural history over the last several decades. Darlene Juschka discusses how gender ideology and gendered identities are given materiality in myth and ritual. Mary Sherriff’s analysis of the study of gender in the art world argues that feminist art history has challenged the way many scholars approach and interpret any representation of the human form, as well as the way art historians and critics look at cultural production in general. Meha Priyadarshini scrutinizes the contribution that the material culture studies approach has made to gender history, evaluating the effects of the consumption and production of material goods on gendered identity and societal norms. Focusing on colonial Latin America, Sonya Lipsett‐Rivera traces the way in which notions of honor served to gender space, with interiors characterized as feminine and the street as masculine. Jocelyn Olcott, Barbara Molony, and Sean Redding all point to anxieties about the “modern woman” or the “modern girl” in early twentieth‐century Latin America, East Asia, and Africa, including concerns that women who created this identity effaced sexual difference and eroded family relations.
The chapters in this edition range widely in terms of approach as well as chronological and geographic coverage, and also in terms of theoretical perspective, matching the way that historical scholarship as a whole does. Laura Frader and Barbara Winslow draw on Marxist feminist theory in their emphasis on the intersection of gender and class, while Nupur Chaudhuri, Utsa Ray, and Deirdre Keenan develop insights drawn from postcolonial theory to explore the gendered construction of race. Mary Sheriff’s chapter poses the implications of queer theory for the field of art history, noting the ways in which new types of sources that have emerged as part of gay and lesbian studies have dramatically altered approaches to images and objects in general. In their explorations of societies that have left no or very few written texts, Marcia‐Anne Dobres, Raevin Jimenez, and Rosemary Joyce weave in anthropological theory, while observing that gender bias has skewed the interpretations of the material record. All the authors have what we would term a feminist perspective in their work – indeed, this book and everything else in women’s and gender history would not exist without feminism – but, like gender, they all define feminism somewhat differently and vary in the level to which it stands as an explicit theme. Moreover, as the image of the Ghanaian woman on the cover of this book implies, women’s advancement in much of the world depends on the political activism of feminism and other women’s movements, but also on democratizing the production and distribution of clean water, along with other of the world’s essential resources. Gender equality remains illusive so long as millions of women and girls across the globe continue to spend large chunks of their days simply supplying water for drinking, cleaning, and growing crops, as they have been doing since ancient times.
As a field of study, women’s history is now almost five decades old, and gender history more than three. Those of us who have been involved with them for a long time sometimes become depressed at how difficult it has been to insert women – to say nothing of gender – into the traditional historical narrative. A number of the chapters in this collection note similar omissions, absences, and invisibility, but the overall impression we hope the essays convey to you – as they did to us – is that from the earliest human cultures until today, the process of defining societies, ruling them, settling them and building them has been carried out by women, men, and people who understood themselves to be another gender entirely, but always according to gendered principles. There is no aspect of human existence – labor and leisure, family and kinship groups, laws, war, diplomacy, foreign affairs, frontier settlement, imperialism, aggression, colonial policy and the resistance to it, education, science, romance and personal interaction, the construction of race and ethnicity – that is untouched by gender.
The scope of this volume is daunting, as is the coverage of each chapter, for every author struggled to keep her or his essay to a manageable word limit and worried about overgeneralizing. Nonetheless, these broad strokes give meaning to the social construction of gender, illuminate its variations according to time and place, and demonstrate its complexity in relation to far‐reaching historical epochs. We are indebted to our contributors for the depth and range of their efforts, and the brilliance of their results.
NOTES
1 1 Joan Scott, “Gender, A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (December 1986): 1056, 1087.
2 2 “Forum: Revisiting Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” with articles by Joanne Meyerowitz, Heidi Tinsman, Maria Bucur, Dyan Elliott, Gail Hershatter, and Wang Zheng, and a response by Joan Scott, American Historical Review, 113/5 (2008): 1344–1430.
3 3 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017): 27.
Chapter One Sexuality
Robert A. Nye
As a field of scholarly investigation, the history of sexuality is about as old as gender history in its modern, social constructionist form, dating from the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike gender history, whose roots reach back into a variety of disciplines and scholarly fields, the history of sexuality was long regarded as at best a catalogue of anthropological curiosities and at worst a pornographic amusement for social elites. In the 1880s medically informed writers such as Iwan Bloch, Paolo Mantegazza, and Richard von Krafft‐Ebing tried to fit the spectrum of human sexual expression into an evolutionary scenario, but the foundations of the field’s contemporary respectability