This book explores gendered aspects in the memory of work by looking at auto/biographical narratives and political writings of women workers in the garment industry. The author draws on cutting edge theoretical approaches and insights in memory studies, neo-materialism and discourse analysis, particularly looking at entanglements and intra-actions between places, bodies and objects. Tamboukou aims to enrich our appreciation of the role of women’s labour history in the wider realm of cultural memory, as well as in the politics of women’s work. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the memory of work from a gendered perspective. It also examines the relationship between workspaces and personal spaces: the intimate, intense and often invisible ways through which workers occupy workspaces and populate them with their ideas, emotions, beliefs, habits and everyday practices. The book will be a theoretical and methodological toolbox for students and researchers in the interface of the social sciences and the humanities, as well as a vital resource in women’s labour history. It will be particularly relevant for sociologists, cultural theorists, feminist scholars and social historians.

Gender and the Great War provides a global, thematic approach to a century of scholarship on the war, masculinity and femininity, and it constitutes the most up-to-date survey of the topic by well-known scholars in the field.

Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Women in urban China have lived through decades of political turbulence, extensive socio-economic change, and the transformation of gender practices, expectations, and relationships. Among these is the mother-daughter relationship, one that has profound influence on women's gendered subjectivity but one that has been overlooked in research on gender and family in China. In The Subject of Gender, Harriet Evans reflects on how women in urban China make sense of the shifts in practices and representations of gender that frame their lives and how their self-identification as mothers and daughters contributes to the redefinition of those practices. Based on the memories and experiences of educated and professional women of different ages, this book discusses the mother-daughter relationship through various themes: separation, communication, domestic/public boundaries, male privilege, the sexed body, reproduction, and filial responsibilities. This fascinating work draws on feminist and critical theory and on anthropological and historical research to analyze the changing articulations of gender subjectivity that emerge from the links between discursive shifts, generational difference, and individual experiences of the mother-daughter relationship.

At no point in recorded history has there been an absence of intense, and heated, discussion about the subject of how to conduct relations between women and men. This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to these omnipresent issues and debates, mapping the present and future of thinking about feminist theory. The chapters gathered here present the state of the art in scholarship in the field, covering: Epistemology and marginality Literary, visual and cultural representations Sexuality Macro and microeconomics of gender Conflict and peace. The most important consensus in this volume is that a central organizing tenet of feminism is its willingness to examine the ways in which gender and relations between women and men have been (and are) organized. The authors bring a shared commitment to the critical appraisal of gender relations, as well as a recognition that to think ‘theoretically’ is not to detach concerns from lived experience but to extend the possibilities of understanding. With this focus on theory and theorizing about the world in which we live, this Handbook asks us, across all disciplines and situations, to abandon our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and interrogate both the origin and the implications of our ideas about gender relations and feminism. It is an essential reference work for advanced students and academics not only of feminist theory, but of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences.

This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to chart how various forms of violence – domestic, military, legal and political – are not separate instances of violence, but rather embedded in structural inequalities brought about by colonialism, occupation and state violence. The book explores both case studies of individuals and of groups to examine experiences of violence within the context of gender and structures of power in modern Indonesian history and Indonesia-related diasporas. It argues that gendered violence is particularly important to consider in this region because of its complex history of armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the diversity of people that have been affected by violence, as well as the complexity of the religious and cultural communities involved. The book focuses in particular on textual narratives of violence, visualisations of violence, commemorations of violence and the politics of care.

White women cut an ambivalent figure in the transnational history of the British Empire. They tend to be remembered as malicious harridans personifying the worst excesses of colonialism, as vacuous fusspots, whose lives were punctuated by a series of frivolous pastimes, or as casualties of patriarchy, constrained by male actions and gendered ideologies. This book, which places itself amongst other "new imperial histories", argues that the reality of the situation, is of course, much more intricate and complex. Focusing on post-war colonial Rhodesia, Gendering the Settler State provides a fine-grained analysis of the role(s) of white women in the colonial enterprise, arguing that they held ambiguous and inconsistent views on a variety of issues including liberalism, gender, race and colonialism.

To date, the history of military and war has focused predominantly on men as historical agents, disregarding gender and its complex interrelationships with war and the military. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 investigates how conceptions of gender have contributed to the shaping of war and the military and were transformed by them. Covering the major periods in warfare since the seventeenth century, the Handbook focuses on Europe and the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia. Thirty-two essays written by leading international scholars explore the cultural representations of war and the military, war mobilization, and war experiences at home and on the battle front. Essays address the gendered aftermath and memories of war, as well as gendered war violence. Essays also examine movements to regulate and prevent warfare, the consequences of participation in the military for citizenship, and challenges to ideals of Western military masculinity posed by female, gay, and lesbian soldiers and colonial soldiers of color. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 offers an authoritative account of the intricate relationships between gender, warfare, and military culture across time and space.

Memory Work demonstrates the evolution of the pioneering minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt. An artist determined to make her way through a new aesthetic in the 1960s, Truitt was tireless in her pursuit of a strong cultural voice. At the heart of her practice was the key theme of memory, which enabled her not only to express personal experience but also to address how perception was changing for a contemporary viewership. She gravitated toward the idea that an object in one’s focus could unleash a powerful return to the past through memory, which in turn brings a fresh, even critical, attention to the present moment. In addition to the artist’s own popular published writings, which detail the unique challenges facing female artists, Memory Work draws on unpublished manuscripts, private recordings, and never-before-seen working drawings to validate Truitt’s original ideas about the link between perception and mnemonic reference in contemporary art. De Baca offers an insider’s view of the artist’s unstinting efforts to realize her artistic vision, as well as the cultural, political, and historical resonances her oeuvre has for us today.