ABSTRACT The association between masculinity and European imperialism is well established. Two texts by German men about travel to Venezuela in the early sixteenth century show how conquest colonialism was connected to, but insufficient for, the achievement of honorable masculinity. Spanish America offered men opportunities to acquire wealth and display bravery, martial prowess, and dominance. The newly formed colony, however, did not offer the opportunity to fulfill the obligations of mature manhood, i.e., the establishment of a household and the continuation of the lineage. During the initial conquests, the search for honor not only pushed men overseas, but also pulled them back.
ABSTRACT This article examines the 1956 Semenyih strip–search scandal in British colonial Malaya during the Malayan Emergency, a counterinsurgency campaign shaped by Cold War politics in Southeast Asia, to explore how non‐elite Chinese women navigated surveillance, humiliation, and limited opportunities to have their grievances recognized. Drawing on Chinese‐ and English‐language newspapers, government records, and inquiry transcripts, it analyses how women's testimonies and experiences of bodily violation were interpreted through different linguistic and political frameworks. English‐language reporting presented the scandal as a matter of imperial reputation and administrative misconduct, while Chinese‐language coverage emphasized humiliation, injustice, and the suffering of the Chinese New Village community. Public outrage led to reforms, including redesigned search booths and new restrictions on forced undressing, yet the broader system of coercive inspection remained in place. By situating Semenyih within the Cold War conflict in Malaya, colonial security policies, and multilingual struggles over public meaning, the article shows how women exercised agency through refusal, strategic testimony, and everyday acts of resistance within severe political constraints.
ABSTRACT This article examines chronicle accounts of the so‐called ‘Waldmann Affair’, a revolt within the territories of the city–state of Zurich in 1489 directed against its mayor, Hans Waldmann. The revolt was partly the consequence of failed economic and political reforms which put pressure on the countryside, but was provoked by the command issued by Waldmann for the slaughter of peasants’ dogs. The article analyses the accounts of the affair through the lens of masculinity, arguing that it provided a means for chroniclers to integrate it into a larger political narrative of the Swiss Confederation's emergence. Masculinity was thus integral to understandings of what the Confederation itself was, as well as to interpreting events in its tumultuous history throughout the late Middle Ages.
ABSTRACT The noetic and affective practices around ‘culturing’ the women of Kerala, South India, and the curation of their sensibilities according to hegemonic social codes, render it difficult to access various archival resources that would shed light on what constitutes ‘women's genres’ in the region. This article attempts to understand how gendered assumptions mediate archival policies in the state by charting the relationship between women's consumption practices, the ideology of taste and the politics of intellectualism in Kerala. By problematising the absence of Ma‐periodicals such as Manorama, Mangalam and Manorajyam from the public archives, this study argues that archival policies in the state are influenced by class‐ed and gendered prejudices. Thus, the objective is to comprehend how knowledge that merits revisiting in the state is constituted. Here, insight into the rationale behind archival policies is gained through interviews with the librarians of various university libraries and public libraries in the state. The article also attempts to understand the cultural value associated with Ma‐periodicals and their intended readers by situating them within the region's socio‐cultural discourses so as to parse the archival worth of these materials.
This article studies the post-1945 literary careers of Gabriele Tergit and Ilse Langner, two ageing German writers. Both had enjoyed promising careers as young women in Weimar Berlin, but Nazism and war disrupted their professional trajectories in varying ways. After 1945, they tried and failed to recapture their Weimar-era success, eventually realising they were no longer 'modern'. Only then did they retrospectively identify with a wider generation of Weimar women; previously, their sense of individuality had dominated. This article argues for investigating generations beyond their original formative periods and adds a new chapter to the history of Weimar's 'Neue Frau'.
This article considers travel writings by metropolitan men in Republican China about Shanxi and western Inner Mongolia as a case study to further explore the transformations and continuities of Chinese masculinities. Drawing upon a range of popular travel narratives, it shows that so-called "Worn-Out Shoes (poxie)" - women perceived as clandestine prostitutes - were a crucial part of an imagined landscape of the Northwest. It argues that these writings reveal continuities in normative masculine values, norms and practices, and the role of women in the configuration of masculinities amid significant social changes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
ABSTRACT This article examines the analytical viability of the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” in the historical study of masculinities in early‐twentieth‐century Iran (c.1890–1941). It argues that a radical problematizing of the concepts of hegemony, class, “the West,” and patriotism helps us move beyond the binaries of Western‐Iranian and modern‐traditional masculinities and opens up new discussions of plurality versus shared patterns in both categories. To achieve a deeper historicization of masculinities in Iran, it engages with recent theoretical debates in masculinity studies to challenge and complicate existing assumptions about the distinctness of a Western‐educated Iranian elite and the singularity of their hegemonic masculinity. The article draws on archival and press materials, memoirs, travelogues, and other texts produced by Iranian nationalist men and European orientalists, while using selected sketches from the life and political activities of the prominent Iranian politician, Hasan Taqizadeh, as analytical entry points. Finally, this article explores the potential contributions of the Iranian case to the ongoing theoretical debates that aim to modify Connell's model for greater analytical precision in historical research.
Today, defined as the 'persistent eating of non-nutritive substances', pica is a lesser-known eating disorder with a long history. Defined in early modern England as the 'desire to eat absurd things', pica was explicitly gendered, associated with pregnant women and pubescent girls. This article examines the prominence of pica in seventeenth-century English medical and cultural sources, particularly its pervasive sex-specific reputation. It investigates pica as a disease concept, arguing that, as transitional states where the female body evaded male control, pregnancy and virginity operated as sites of cultural tension. It then analyses pica onstage in Jonson's The Magnetic Lady and Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Studying pica as a construct intelligible only within culture-bound ideas about the body, as well as a biological reality, this article asks what roles pica played in seventeenth-century discourses and with which social, cultural and political anxieties it became entangled. In doing so, it argues that the gendered representation of pica sheds light on the wider psychosocial tensions of seventeenth-century England, revealing anxieties about female sexuality, maternity, patrilineal transmission, the limits of (male) medical knowledge and ultimately the stable continuation of society itself.
By integrating a study of gender, class, and nationality as categories of analysis, this article identifies nursing mobility as a multidirectional and asymmetric social phenomenon and employs a comparative approach at several levels: national, regional, and transnational. Nursing spatial mobility encompassed three major trends: influx of foreign nurses, intra-state moves, and international fellowship circuits. The article, based on multilingual archival sources, argues that nursing opened new job possibilities for women, but the close cooperation between the state, the army, and the domestic and international humanitarian philanthropy also reinforced traditional and produced new social, cultural, and gender inequalities.
The 1970s were a decade of huge change for women in Colombia, from the legalisation of divorce to increased access to education, labour market participation and contraception. This article examines how the Catholic non-governmental organisation Acci & oacute;n Cultural Popular (Popular Cultural Action, ACPO) responded to women's changing roles and political protagonism through its radio station "Radio Sutatenza." Through close attention to recordings and programme scripts of the 1979 radio series Curso La Familia, it analyses the construction and performance of gender on the radio and draws attention to Catholicism's continued influence over Colombian society in the latter twentieth century.
An analysis of the dual biographies, economic and domestic, of Manuela Xiqu & eacute;s, an enslaver from nineteenth-century Cuba and Spain, deepens our understanding of the role of European and Creole women in the nineteenth-century Atlantic. This essay foregrounds the role of literature, namely family biography, as a locus of the processes of rewriting the nature of colonialism and of refashioning the Cuban origins of a prominent Catalan family. The private, domestic biography becomes a principal technology for rhetorically domesticating the American story of trafficking and enslavement for its Spanish readers.
This article explores the student protests at Bethune College, Calcutta, on 3 February 1928, against the Simon Commission, a British parliamentary delegation that excluded Indian representation. On this day, female students staged a quiet but radical act of defiance by refusing to attend classes, sign apologies or vacate their hostel, despite threats of expulsion from Principal Gertrude Marian Wright. These acts of refusal exemplify what Agamben (1998) terms 'radical passivity', a quiet yet potent resistance that unsettled colonial authority and disrupted established gendered and infantilising narratives of student activism. The Bethune protests are situated within the broader context of colonial education in Bengal, which was simultaneously a tool of imperial control and a site of political dissent. Educational institutions, especially women's colleges, became spaces of revolutionary activity, challenging the colonial government's attempts to depoliticise education. Drawing on archival records, nationalist historiography, and multilingual sources, this article critiques the masculinist framing of the protests and re-centres the experiences of women, who were often reduced to symbolic figures in historical narratives. By adopting feminist historiographical approaches, the article reimagines archival practices to foreground women's voices, revealing the complexities of resistance in colonial Bengal and highlighting the generative intersection of education, gender and political activism.
