Had Giulio Strozzi not recognized Barbara as his daughter, she might have led an entirely different life. Like so many other illegitimate children, she could have grown up within one of Venice’s charitable institutions. This chapter explores the path not taken – the kind of opportunities available to musically talented girls who were not accepted by their family but instead abandoned at the foundling home called the Ospedale della Pietà. Documentation regarding the Ospedale’s musicians reveals the influences of governing patrician men and surrounding social conditions on these orphaned women’s musical activities. Despite strict regulation of women’s public performance, these nonelite female musicians developed successful lifelong musical careers and their own financial autonomy, somewhat comparable to Barbara Strozzi’s, by means of their musical skills, public popularity, and the resultant patronage.

This chapter examines life writing texts created by out gay Black men. These texts – written and cinematic – seek to archive Black gay existence in historical and social contexts that are often threatening. More than just records of life, they question assumed knowledge and the certainty we have about the ideologies that order our lives. For these artists, autobiography, a form of ostensible transparency or showing, is about making transparent destructive ideologies. The chapter is structured around four key themes (sex and sociality, injury and identity, the feminine within, and the power of opacity), each of which identifies a recurring strategy in Black gay art making as well as a narrative mechanism for questioning normativity and revealing the constraints placed on Black gay men’s lives. The discussion centers on the following artists: Samuel Delany, RuPaul, Saeed Jones, and Marlon Riggs.

This chapter explores how multinationals were both embedded in gender norms and actively shaped representations of masculinity, femininity, and domesticity. Multinationals influenced gender roles through the products they marketed to male and female consumers, their gendered labor organization in production sites and company towns, and their hiring practices, which either expanded or restricted opportunities for women. Rather than following a single pattern, multinationals often created hybrid systems, adapting to local gender norms. Through case studies on household technologies – such as Singer sewing machines and Tupperware – and consumer and cultural products – such as Barbie, cosmetics, films, and gendered labor structures in company towns and managerial hierarchies – the chapter highlights multinationals as “gender accomplices.” It examines the factors that led them to reinforce rather than challenge existing norms, shedding light on their role in both maintaining and shaping gendered social structures.

Chapter 3 introduces a new genre of fiction, the Wales novel. Wales novels were set in the Principality, featured Welsh heroines and heroes, and cast Wales as simultaneously the morally and culturally pure cradle of imperial Britishness and, paradoxically, as Britain’s first and final colony. In them, the country becomes the proposed space for experimentation with new methods of colonial discipline and extraction and the site of a proposed recolonization of the British heartland that promised to reinvigorate and purify the Empire as a whole. These fictions, written or satirized by all of the decade’s most famous novelists, were among the best-selling and most critically celebrated works of the period. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the critical reception and generic influence of the Wales novel in the late 1780s, spotlighting several exceptionally interesting deviations from the rapidly consolidating hallmarks of the genre.

Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

Research on rap music in Germany has focused on questions of transnationalism, ethnicity and gender. This chapter advances studies of German rap through an analysis of the rap song and music video “Ich bin Schwarz” (I am Black, 2016) by the popular female rap duo SXTN. Drawing on intersectional, feminist, and hip-hop studies scholarship, we conduct a close reading of the visuals, lyrics, and signifying practices that are mediated in the cultural text. We argue that “Ich bin Schwarz” promotes a new version of a self-empowered, humorous, and unapologetic Black female German identity by remixing the popular German music genre Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), subverting racist and sexist imaginations of Afrodiasporic womanhood, and continuing hip-hop’s political legacy against right-wing extremism in Germany. Ultimately, “Ich bin Schwarz” contributes to a growing body of performances in rap music and larger popular culture that destabilise white-dominated notions of German national identity.

This chapter explores the multifaceted role of gender within extremist ideologies and examines manifestations of masculinity, femininity, and misogyny in various extremist contexts. It shows how different scholarly approaches explain the ways in which gendered narratives shape recruitment, radicalization, and participation in extremist activities. Different explanations of male violence emphasizing the sociocultural construction of masculinity within extremist milieus is discussed and the notion of the “manosphere” and its subcultures like incels is introduced thereby showing how online spaces foster misogynistic ideologies that can escalate into violence. Furthermore, the roles women play within extremist groups, from active participation in violence to providing crucial support functions, are also highlighted. Finally, the implications of gender dynamics for prevention efforts are discussed. Ultimately, the chapter advocates for a nuanced understanding of gender dynamics to inform more effective prevention strategies and policymaking in the fight against violent extremism.

This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.

This is the first of three chapters showing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation techniques in genre-defining novels of the Romantic period. I give an account of anti-caricature rhetoric in the critical reception of Jane Austen’s novels, from contemporaneous reviews and responses to the twentieth century. I describe Austen’s particular moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-indulgence, first examining instances of the word ’caricature’ in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, then close-reading depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, as instances of literary realism’s ’explained caricatures’.

Chapter 5 explores key aspects of the gendered dichotomy assumed to underlie entrepreneurial endeavour and achievement. Entrepreneurial success is predominantly understood in gendered terms as a consequence of qualities associated with masculinity while women are assumed to play supportive roles in business and enterprise. Even though successful female entrepreneurs are increasingly acknowledged, their ability to perform as business leaders is typically associated with masculine ideals of success, through an accomplishment of female imitations of masculinity. Chapter 4 challenges such persistent dichotomic approaches to gender in entrepreneurship. It is shown on the basis of data drawn from China’s new generation of entrepreneurs that women and men strategically display gender in the company and in the marketplace, in a manner that will maximize growth and profit for their firms. These women and men are not constrained by stereotyped gender ideals but rather utilize existing imagery and norms, and, when necessary, create new ones in doing business. In addition, the involvement of grandparents in supporting their daughters and daughters-in-law who are in business, wholly overlooked in consideration of female entrepreneurs, constitutes a hidden factor in the interplay of constructions of gender, family, and business experienced by female entrepreneurs in China.

Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race: to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic act. Extending the second chapter’s emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: the White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. I depict the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr., has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.” Through Cleopatra’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance and white women as props: patriarchal, theatrical, cultural, economic, domestic props.

Historiography has long relegated women’s roles in Latin American independence to stories of heroines who left home to support the movement only to return once battles were won. This chapter argues, by contrast, that shifting models of femininity and masculinity were central to a political transformation from colonies governed by paternal monarchs to republics that celebrated national fraternity among male citizens. Using intersectional analysis, it traces the multiple ways in which roles for both women and men of various social strata were in flux from the eighteenth century through independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, ideologies of separate spheres became dominant, allowing elite and middling women to extend their maternal influence into educational and charitable endeavors, but only by mobilizing as women. Poor women and women of color could neither live up to domestic ideals nor earn rights, like their male peers, through military service or as household heads. Rather than simply a colonial legacy of patriarchal domination, then, gender norms changed as women went from sharing with men differentiated ranks as colonial subjects to their exclusion from citizenship.

The forms of punishment and informal privatization in schools have wide-ranging implications for student subjectivities and practices. This chapter focuses in particular on the resulting patterns of noncompliance, failed disciplinary supervision and gendered contestation. It provides background on the wide-ranging negative consequences of harsh punishment for young people. It focuses in particular on noncompliance and its assumed links to working class education, to gender traditionalism and to assumptions about authoritarian Arab schools. It charts patterns of contestation and retaliation among girls and boys and the responses of school authorities to them, and explains the attempts of educational authorities to uphold a semblance of discipline and educational supervision. In contrast to depictions of authoritarian Arab schooling and its role in producing obedient submissive citizens, the chapter describes the collapse of this model of schooling and the kind of authoritarianism it implies in the case of Egypt. In the place of obedience or submissiveness, it highlights pervasive forms of noncompliance and illusory forms of control over schools in the context of state withdrawal and de facto privatization.

I see feminism as a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men, and a dismantling of the patriarchal values that inhibit this.

My essay is interested in David Foster Wallace’s complex and evolving relationship with feminism and the feminine, as well as in how this relationship has been figured over time within the literary community. This investigation involves an account of how critical practices surrounding Wallace have transformed over the past decade—from readings that take as universal the “human being” of Wallace’s work, instead of reading it as emblematic of a particular nexus of privileged observer-positions, to intersectional readings that acknowledge Wallace’s embodiment as a white middle-class American male whose work reflects that embodiment in important ways, to, finally, #MeToo-era readings that foreground the actual misogynistic violence inflicted by Wallace in his personal capacity, which, morally and politically, would seem to foreclose the possibility of further reading and set up an existential crisis for the burgeoning field of Wallace Studies.

As I engage with each of these critical approaches in my essay, three central questions emerge. First: How has the history of feminism in America shaped Wallace’s work and its reception? Second: If feminism is “a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men,” where does Wallace’s empathy expand in this regard and where does it break down, on the page and in the flesh? Third: In our present historical moment, does acknowledging Wallace’s ultimate betrayal of this commitment in the form of his abuse mean a complete disavowal of the author and the man—an end to the conversation, as it were—or is there space for the #MeToo movement within Wallace Studies?