Rynetta Davis’s “National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History” considers how nineteenth-century Black women writers contested and revised representations of traditional Black domesticity. Moving outside of the home and beyond traditional forms of domestic work, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Collins, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper suggest that Black domestic work exceeds the home space. Davis thus examines a range of domestic print practices and sensibilities in ways that highlight gender, gendered spaces and work, and print possibilities surrounding such. In this, her chapter considers just what “domestic” citizenship might look like.

This chapter considers the case of the Song of Emergence that has proved central to several contributions collected here, but approaches the comparison as an opportunity to appreciate the distinctive differences reflected in the various relevant sources. This chapter emphasises the role of female wife–mother figures as destabilising elements in Hesiod’s Theogony, in contrast to the more limited roles of female characters particularly in the Song of Emergence, and locates that gendering theme within the wider context of early Greek mythology. This comparison allows us to see the individual element working within its own context, to determine what is distinctive about each tradition and so, finally, to understand all of them better. Genealogy, at least in the way most Classicists would like to practise it, is neither possible nor profitable. But the comparison remains, and its analogy can tell us a lot.

From the invocation to Aphrodite in fr. 1, the gods are a constant force in the world evoked in Sappho’s poetry. Chapter 15 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines cultic and religious presences from a literary point of view.

Modern literature is being challenge and reinvented by fangirls who offer a model for feminist communal practice and are playing an important role in reshaping the practice of writing in public. Their influence is visible now; fandom broadly and fanfiction in particular has become a battleground, and. the visibility of women as fans and authors has brought with it violent backlash. The immediacy of online discourse and the speed with which reactions travel through social media bring the opportunity for fans to share their thoughts and creative work with the original texts’ authors and fellow fans, but this immediacy also extends to those expressing rage and dissatisfaction. Fanfiction and fan art—from “shipping,” or romantically connecting two or more characters, to the crafting of “alternate universes,” “crossovers,” and beyond—circulates on every social media network, offering new visions for whose stories can be told and who gets to tell them.

Lebanese and Syrian immigrant women living in the Americas, or the mahjar, published some of the earliest Arabic novels and women’s journals as part of the nahḍa, or the Arabic literary and cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The cultural hub of this Arabic literary movement in America was New York City’s first Arab immigrant neighborhood, “Little Syria,” located just blocks from what is now known as “Ground Zero.” A consideration of works by diasporic Arab women writers North and South America both 1) reframes the Arab nahḍa as a transnational movement, and 2) expands the definition of what can be considered “American literature.” By shedding light on this neglected archive – and re-inserting Arab women into the wider American historical and literary narratives from which they have long been erased – this essay demonstrates that “Arabs” are in fact an important, yet neglected, part of American history.

How do experiments help us understand the role of gender in electoral decisions and outcomes? In this chapter, we begin by reviewing some of the key questions that gender scholars have addressed through experimental work, looking at gender among office-holders, electoral candidates, and voters. We then address important considerations that experimental scholars must keep in mind when designing their studies. In so doing, we provide guidance for how to overcome the unique challenges of employing experiments to study gender and elections. We conclude by highlighting what we see as particularly pressing areas for future work.

We review experiments in the field of comparative politics that take questions related to gender and power as their central theme. We first document the rise of experimental and quasi-experimental methods in this area and discuss their many advantages. We then summarize the most common types of questions asked in this literature. These include, for instance, how women gain and use bargaining power within the home and the effects of increasing the number of women in politics. We also present three design challenges inherent to the experimental study of gender: (1) that adults’ attitudes on women’s place in society tend to change only very slowly, often making them impervious to short-term interventions, (2) that gender biases often operate in context-specific ways that can elude survey experimental measurement, and (3) that scholars often face ethical challenges when designing interventions intended to alter existing gender power hierarchies. We conclude by discussing emerging topics in the subfield, including work that examines how candidate gender affects vote choice in comparative perspective and research that considers how the content and salience of gender identity varies across individuals and contexts.

Completing the trajectory of the book through text, illustration, recitation, architecture, and iconography, this final chapter looks at a case study for the intersection of text, image, and sound in Hagia Sophia. By looking at a sixth-century plaque from the church’s original construction and its afterlife over the centuries, the chapter studies how iconographies develop and change through various uses and contexts of display, and how these shifts alter the resonances with which the reading of the Gospel in the church was understood. The chapter seeks to unsettle our expectations of iconography and how ritual and space intersect with one another.

The chapter unites anthropological accounts of blood. It introduces refrains that unify themes of the entire book. It argues that blood marks the bounds of religious and social bodies, using Durkheim, Douglas, and Bildhauer; Irenaeus, Maximus, and Aquinas. Iron compounds make blood red, but societies draft its color and stickiness for their own purposes. Inside, blood carries life. Outside, blood marks the body fertile or at risk. But that’s a social fiction. Skin makes a membrane to pass when a body breathes, eats, perspires, eliminates, menstruates, ejaculates, conceives, or bleeds. Only blood evokes so swift and social a response: It brings parent to child, bystander to victim, ambulance to patient, soldier to comrade, midwife to mother, defender to border. The New Testament names the blood of Christ three times as often as his cross – five times as often as his death. The blood of Jesus is the blood of Christ; the wine of communion is the blood of Christ; the means of atonement is the blood of Christ; the kinship of believers is the blood of Christ; the cup of salvation is the blood of Christ; icons ooze with the blood of Christ; and the blood of Christ is the blood of God.

“Jesus and the Gender of Blood.” Here’s a place blood seeps in where it hardly seems to belong: Crucifixion kills not by blood loss but suffocation. Neither crucifixion nor a common meal requires blood. Hands and feet can be lashed without nails. Why must Jesus bleed? Gospel writers portray Jesus at the Last Supper as mobilizing the language of blood to transform a structure of violent oppression – crucifixion – into a peaceful feast. The image of the Woman with a Flow of Blood, read as dysmenorrhea, recognizes a kinship: three gospels identify both the woman and Jesus with their bleeding, as leaky. The stories feminize Jesus by turning his blood away from male-gendered violence and toward female-gendered purposes of new life and rebirth. Reflections on the Eucharist and taboo.

This chapter offers a concluding reflection on the idea of a towering judge, its value, complexity and potential dangers.  Drawing on prior chapters and contributions, it suggests that the idea of a towering judge could be understood in more or less objective/subjective, national/international and relative/absolute terms, as well as across different time frames. It notes the value in asking these questions, as well as in studying the jurisprudence of leading judges cross-nationally.  At the same time, it suggests several potential dangers associated with a focus on ‘towering judges’.  The idea of a towering judge may tend to privilege chief justices over other leading judges, and male over female justices. And it may not always be a good thing for the courts on which a judge serves. The chapter therefore concludes the volume with a note of caution: even while acknowledging the value of studying leading judges, we might ultimately do better to celebrate more collegial, non-dominant forms of judicial leadership.