Florence in the fifteenth century was in transition from the medieval to the modern world, and sexual attitudes and practices were very much in flux. The most distinctive feature of Florentine sexuality was the city’s international reputation as a hotbed of ‘sodomy’. Traditional structures of marriage and the family coexisted with a widespread culture of male homoeroticism. Female prostitution was sanctioned by the state, in the hope that it would reduce both male homoeroticism and adulterous relations. At the same time the new ideal of romantic love was spreading to all social classes, bringing changes to the ways people thought about marital and intimate relations. This chapter focuses both on the idealization of male homoeroticism in humanist culture and on the repression of male homosexual activity by the Office of the Night, the judicial branch that policed sodomy. It contrasts the celebration of physical beauty in Florentine visual arts with the preaching of the Dominican reformer Savonarola, who harshly condemned worldly luxuries. Savonarola’s public execution by burning in 1498 provides an ironic contrast to his own bonfires of the vanities, in which luxury goods were burned, but it also mirrors the public burning that was the traditional punishment for sodomy.

Locating Wagner’s views about sexuality and social mores in the context of his time, this chapter moves from the opposing arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft towards the end of the eighteenth century, through the idealisation of women in the Biedermeier era and the coterminous radical tendencies critical of such moral codes, to nineteenth-century representations in literature (notably the Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or Bourgeois Tragedy) and, at the end of the century, visual art (women as devils, vampires, castrators, or killers).

Documented sexual experience of the time is discussed, as are the grossly exaggerated aspects of Wagner’s own sexual career. Criticism of Wagner for failing, in his works, to abandon the phallocentric matrix of his time is unhistorical, it is argued. And indeed many of Wagner’s heroines exhibit elements of autonomy, agency, or self-determination with the potential for radical change.

The last chapter recapitulates the arguments in a normative, rather than historical, mode, examining the underlying logic of orthodoxy implicit in each version of conservative Christianity’s pursuit of authentic, historic faith. The chapter argues that orthodoxy is an inherently ambiguous concept that requires an authoritarian leader to determine arbitrary boundaries by policing and punishing the heterodox. So long as orthodoxy remains the normative goal, the culture-war politics of the Christian Right will remain.

Men born male may be immune to cervical cancer, but they play a pivotal role in helping to do away with the disease – with good reason to do so. Men benefit greatly from keeping women alive. But in order to spare persons with cervixes this potent killer, they must put women’s rights at the forefront. The following are among the ways men can demonstrate this alliance: they can lower HPV transmission through condom use and male circumcision, support and advocate for family members and friends fighting cervical cancer, back women in key leadership positions, and empower them to make their own health care decisions. Men can also work to transform patriarchal norms and laws – belief systems often at the root of ignorance, misunderstanding, and stigma about the disease. All of these efforts are instrumental toward the larger goal of reducing cervical cancer rates. As men get involved with cervical cancer elimination in higher- or lower-income countries, their activism alongside or on behalf of women can make an immediate difference. The quest to eliminate this disease simply cannot succeed without the unwavering support, understanding, and commitment of the world’s other half.

Eliminating cervical cancer is about more than just spending money. It requires reckoning with the many intangibles that get in the way of this cause. Widespread adherence to patriarchal value systems, for instance, not only threatens women’s health and well-being, but discourages them from freely pursuing the means to a cure. Persons with cervixes must confrontnot only archaic notions about their worth, but also many other hidden barriers to prevention. These include the fear and superstition that arise from lack of knowledge and medical misinformation, a lack of appreciation for self-care, the burden of unpaid work, and the vulnerability resulting from racial and gender inequality. Challenging these societal factors will increase the volume of women’s voices and ultimately save thousands of lives. But until society is ready to acknowledge and address these barriers – the patriarchal structures thwarting women’s autonomy and decision-making power, the stigma associated with this disease, the religious intolerances and traditional values contrary to its prevention – a cancer that strikes only those with a cervix will continue to kill.

Chapter 1 brings the American state into full view by showing the ways in which its policy arm reinforces gender, economic, and racial inequality. The chapter situates this institutional function within a larger historical context of patriarchal systems that reproduce these inequalities in ways that must be understood when it comes to addressing gendered violence. The chapter then introduces the original concept of intersectional advocacy and explains its theoretical and empirical contours: how it is rooted in Black Feminist theory and developed from a practical understanding of how advocacy groups represent intersectionally marginalized constituents. After establishing the theoretical and empirical groundwork for intersectional advocacy, the chapter ends with a discussion of why this practice is important, how it travels across issue contexts, and how it is studied throughout the book.

Chapter 2 defines and describes the manifestations of patriarchy and inequality in India. It describes the system of patriarchy in rural India and how widespread and entrenched patriarchal norms generate a patriarchal social order that centers on women in the household. It demonstrates how patriarchal norms have enabled the use of violence to control and dominate women, including by internalizing the acceptability of this means of coercion. It further highlights the role of legal and political institutions in perpetuating this social order. Finally, it documents the state of women’s and men’s political participation in rural India, revealing substantial disparities in political participation between men and women and, even more strikingly, between different forms of participation within women.

Chapter 4 brings the household into focus and demonstrates how it denies women political agency and constrains their political participation. Drawing on data from a census survey and interviews, it documents the alignment of the household in political decision-making and the authority of elder men in these decisions. It shows that women lack autonomy in their vote choice and are often coerced into compliance with the wishes of the heads of household. It further documents the inefficiency of household cooperation for women and demonstrate its perpetuation as rooted in coercion and strategic political mobilization.

This chapter revisits the latest trends in the historiography of gender in the Age of Revolutions in current Latin America and proposes the need to put politics at center stage. Based on new scholarship on the rise of political actors in the viceroyalty of Peru in these transitional years, the text argues that the Era of Revolutions saw the emergence of a new patriarchal order that brought about a new masculine identity tightly connected with force, action, and modern politics. While new men found unprecedented opportunities to take on positions of authority and power, this process led to a renewed exclusion of other masculine identities, homosexuals, and women from public and political arenas. Moreover, this exclusion brought about a mysoginistic and machista discourse that dominated reform projects, legal documents, the press, arts, and theater. Studying this discourse, the chapter argues, is crucial to understanding exclusionary practices in politics that remain in place in the region to this day.

This chapter charts historical developments and central themes in the anthropological study of men and masculinities. As the chapter shows, this body of knowledge is not free of frictions and contestations. Early anthropological studies were often motivated by finding globally generalizable patterns of masculinity. Other research has broadened the focus by questioning coherent gender-identities, analyzing how masculinity constructs are shaped by ambivalences, transgressive practices, and intersectional complexities. To chart this rich body of knowledge, the first part of the chapter critically discusses early anthropological research on men and masculinities as well as concepts that dominated the field for a considerable time. The remainder of the chapter focuses on three prominent topics of anthropological masculinity studies: economic crisis and its effect on masculinities, sexualities and nonnormative masculinities, and the role of masculinities in the negotiation of boundaries between others and selves. The chapter argues that anthropological engagements with masculinity can productively trouble our understanding of what it means to be a man.

Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Patricia Parker and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity in Hamlet” offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: unmanliness gets coded as black so the play can suggest certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity.

The chapter augments feminist analysis of patriarchy and women’s citizenship in Africa. Among respondents, men and women emphasize gender equality when discussing legalistic elements of citizenship, such as obeying the law. However, since much of everyday citizenship revolves around daily interactions, women’s expected roles as mothers and men’s constructed roles as protectors and providers are central to the ways that respondents view citizenship. Men and women highlight communal obligations, moral character, and building the nation when discussing citizenship, but these elements manifest differently across genders. Although Afrobarometer findings indicate more men attend local meetings, both men and women are active in local groups and stress legal obligations. Some youth push back against gendered citizenship, crafting new citizen identities rooted in lived experiences. Although surveys show fewer women than men engage in voting and protesting (except in Uganda), some respondents demonstrate micropatterns of contestation through support for women in political office. A case study of Ghanaian youth mobilizing against gender-based violence illustrates both challenges to gendered citizenship and affirmation of this identity.

The family saga novel – predicated on the assumption of knowable genealogies and on the conceit that the stories of single families can convey the stories of nations – is a fertile and yet fraught territory for Caribbean writers. Maryse Condé has explored this territory more extensively than any other; her novels both reiterate the appeal of genealogical claims and register a clear-eyed suspicion of the notion of lineage and the mythologizing that attends it. Focusing mostly on Tree of Life and The Last of the African Kings, this chapter examines Condé’s mapping of women’s role in biological and narrative reproduction – the essential processes of family formation across time and space, and therefore the engines that power diasporic family sagas. Condé elucidates how this dual reproductive role continually brings women up against the demands and strictures of patriarchy, impacts their erotic and intellectual autonomy, and structurally determines their relationships to other women.