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 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

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.

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

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.

Environmental history has traditionally told the story of Man and Nature. Scholars have too frequently overlooked the ways in which their predominantly male subjects have themselves been shaped by gender. Seeing Nature through Gender here reintroduces gender as a meaningful category of analysis for environmental history, showing how women's actions, desires, and choices have shaped the world and seeing men as gendered actors as well. In thirteen essays that show how gendered ideas have shaped the ways in which people have represented, experienced, and consumed their world, Virginia Scharff and her coauthors explore interactions between gender and environment in history. Ranging from colonial borderlands to transnational boundaries, from mountaintop to marketplace, they focus on historical representations of humans and nature, on questions about consumption, on environmental politics, and on the complex reciprocal relations among human bodies and changing landscapes. They also challenge the "ecofeminist" position by challenging the notion that men and women are essentially different creatures with biologically different destinies. Each article shows how a person or group of people in history have understood nature in gendered terms and acted accordingly—often with dire consequences for other people and organisms. Here are considerations of the ways we study sexuality among birds, of William Byrd's masking sexual encounters in his account of an eighteenth-century expedition, of how the ecology of fire in a changing built environment has reshaped firefighters' own gendered identities. Some are playful, as in a piece on the evolution of "snow bunnies" to "shred betties." Others are dead serious, as in a chilling portrait of how endocrine disrupters are reinventing humans, animals, and water systems from the cellular level out. Aiding and adding significantly to the enterprise of environmental history, Seeing Nature through Gender bridges gender history and environmental history in unexpected ways to show us how the natural world can remake the gendered patterns we've engraved on ourselves and on the planet.