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Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal position in the Roman Empire, emergent Christianity found embodiment, as an aspect of being in the world, problematic. Those identified and identifying as Christians developed two broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of being in, yet not of it. The first response, martyrdom, was witness to the strength their faith gave to fragile bodies, particularly those of women, and the ability by suffering to overcome bodily limitation and attain the resurrection life. The second, asceticism, complemented and later continued martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence and participation in the spiritual world.
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.
Having a satisfying sex life is important to older adults. Thus, this study aimed to provide information about the sexual satisfaction of older adults in a relationship, using the Interpersonal Exchange Model of Sexual Satisfaction (IEMSS) as a theoretical framework. Participants were 187 sexually active individuals (98 men and 89 women) in a romantic relationship (age 65–75 years). They were recruited using Amazon's Mechanical-Turk, and completed the Interpersonal Exchange Model of Sexual Satisfaction Questionnaire and two open-ended questions asking what they enjoyed most and least about their sexual relationship. On average, participants were highly sexually satisfied. In keeping with the IEMSS, greater sexual satisfaction was predicted by a more favourable balance of sexual rewards to costs, greater equality of sexual costs and higher satisfaction with the non-sexual aspects of the relationship. Four themes emerged regarding what participants liked most and least about their sexual relationship: emotional aspects of the relationship, physical aspects of the relationship, dyadic aspects of the relationship and age-related aspects of being sexual. None of the four themes were specific to men or women, although some gender/sex differences were found. The results paint a positive picture of the sexual relationships of older adults and support the utility of the IEMSS as a framework to understand sexual satisfaction in older adults.
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.
Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.
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.
This article examines the industrial relations systems constructed by Ford and United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders for the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s. Ford’s industrial relations systems extended privileges to men and male-dominated groups to the detriment of their female counterparts and women seeking employment and advancement. Systemic male privilege was integral to Ford’s operations throughout conversion to military production for World War II and reconversion back to civilian production.
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.
We investigate the impact of male–female conflict over gender norms on marital outcomes. As marriage requires mutual agreement regarding the role of husband and wife, we hypothesize that a person who is less likely to encounter a potential mate with similar gender norms will face a lower chance of marrying. Even if two parties marry despite a difference in gender norms, their marriage may be more vulnerable to external shocks, making divorce more likely relative to their counterparts without gender norm conflict. Finally, we predict that in the presence of gender norm conflict, high-skilled individuals may be less likely to get or stay married relative to low-skilled individuals, as the former group faces better outside options. Estimates from an analysis of U.S. marriage markets differentiated by birth cohort, state, race, and skill level support our theoretical predictions. Additional extensions explore heterogeneous effects and additional outcomes such as the presence of children in the household.
What do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.
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.
Short stature may reflect health in early life and be an enduring disability. How birth weight, gender, household, elementary schooling, and diet play a role in associations between stature and overall school competence (OSC) have been assessed.
Design:
The 2001-2002 Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan for elementary school children (n = 2274, 52.1% boys) was linked to birth records. It provided sociodemographic, dietary quality, body compositional, and school performance (as Scale for Assessing Emotional Disturbance, SAED; OSC as an SAED subscale) data. Lower birth weight was ≤15th percentile: 2850 g for boys and 2700 g for girls, and stature as z-scores for Taiwanese. Multivariable linear regression was used for relationships between OSC and stature. Trends in OSC by stature and school grade were assessed.
Setting:
The 2001-2002 Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan for elementary school children.
Participants:
2274 schoolchildren aged 6-13 years.
Results:
Compared to normal height (-2< height z-score (HAZ) <2), shorter girls (HAZ ≤ -2) had a lower OSC (8.87 vs. 10.5, p<0.05), and taller girls (HAZ ≥ 2) had a better OSC (12.3 vs. 10.5, p<0.001). Maternal education and household income each contributed more than 5% of OSC variance. OSC and HAZ among girls were positively associated; and emotional disturbance negatively associated. Shortness-associated lower OSC underwent remediation with advancing school-grade. Stature and OSC were not evidently related in boys.
Conclusions:
Shorter stature can compromise OSC among school girls. The major determinants in shorter girls are less household income and limited parental education.