This chapter is a comparative long-term community study of Muslim Roma who migrated from North Macedonia to New York City starting in the 1960s and who now number several thousand people. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, it illustrates the multiple identities of varied community members via family, work, ritual and cultural productions. It especially examines music as a window into community expression; tellingly, song lyrics often deal with migration. Music is highly valued in all social occasions and as part of the ritual and economic web. Music is shared in a wide transatlantic social media network that forms the soundscape of Macedonian Romani family and community life. In fact, some musicians are the most mobile members of their communities. Ethnographic fieldwork from which this chapter has developed took place among Macedonian Roma in North Macedonia, the United States, Western Europe, Canada and Australia since 1988.

Although potential immigrants had an opportunity to migrate abroad, some gradually become disenchanted with the future life they envisioned they would have in countries of immigration. Synthesizing their narratives illuminates a common sequence of processes, with immigrants first becoming bored and disappointed with a host society unlike what they had envisioned, then frustrated with the language barrier and sentiments of cultural alienation due to their unfamiliarity with cultural references, customs, and norms. Then even after they culturally assimilate, aspiring immigrants encounter both racial discrimination that they perceive as hostile and local gender norms that make it difficult to find a stable relationship. After working for several years, they gradually become aware of how they are unable to advance their career within their job as an immigrant. The social forces and restrictive immigration policies discussed earlier can lead aspiring immigrants to cut their losses from their immigration project out of the belief they will have a happier life as an ex-immigrant in their homeland than “just an immigrant.”

This chapter considers the microfoundations of power relations in Hobbes’s Leviathan, and applies the Hobbesian model to consider power relations between men and women. It argues that in Leviathan, dominion is no longer conceived as the general form of power relation. Rather, drawing on Leviathan’s remarkable Chapter 10, the chapter argues that power’s general form is diffuse multilateral deference, with dominion merely as one extreme possibility. While Hobbes himself only considers the power of men over women on the model of dominion, this chapter argues that the revisionist "deference" model of power offers a superior rubric for grasping power’s contemporary logic.

Potential immigrants do not even apply for a visa because they also confront social forces from the community bearing on their families that deter them from leaving. Many young adults become deterred from migrating not merely from visa requirements, but also due to opposition and pressure from the family. Despite how most of China has a patrilocal kinship system and culture that more strongly sanctions men from marrying outside their bloodline, Chinese parents are much more likely to oppose women going abroad than men, even if this opposition decreases as they age. Aside from overt opposition children may face, many women specifically are discouraged from migrating abroad or even traveling abroad due to concerns about their daughter’s physical safety, socioeconomic dependence on their parents, and societal peer pressure. Such concerns are particularly strong in the patriarchal context of China as it is mediated by a traditional filial duty amongst the one-child-only generation toward their parents and the intense influence that parents exercise over the educational, career, and marital choices of their adult children – both of which have a stronger deterrent effect on daughters than on sons.

Representations of misogyny in Martin Amis’s fiction serve multiple purposes: critiquing excesses of late capitalism, documenting social mores in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, parodying genre conventions, examining discursive constructions of the self. But Amis’s asymmetrical gender dynamics go beyond the demands of realism, satire, or postmodernist play, creating problematic subject positions for readers interested in dismantling, rather than normalising, cultural male supremacy and its literary expressions.

Chapter 7 discusses anger in relation to gender. A character’s ability to display or suppress anger is tied to expectations of external judgment. In the Iliad, male characters frequently express anger; mortal women do not. Homer’s text highlights the gap between a female character’s words and her inner thoughts, creating an ambiguity that puzzles male audiences and characters attempting to read their minds. The chapter surveys theories of anger (from Aristotle to cognitive science) and analyses Homeric emotional expressions, including the emotional ‘script’ of anger. It focuses on ancient readings of Achilles’ anger. Aristotle’s influential definition of anger, presupposing Achilles as a model, shaped scholarly understanding but excluded anger from the emotions women could feel. Later, Seneca and Plutarch opposed this, linking anger to a lack of self-control, associating it particularly with women and barbarians. Ancient theories consistently stressed the connection between anger, rationality, and revenge.

Over the past several decades, a handful of scholars have focused on the role that women poets have played in the medieval and early modern Irish literary tradition. While women typically did not have access to the ranks of professional poets ensconced in noble houses and monasteries (nor to the education and literacy that they might have achieved there), there are women poets named in the historical record, some of whose poems survive. This chapter will have a triple task: to account for what is can be known about specific Irish women poets and their work before the eighteenth century; to discuss the more general ways in which woman participated in the early Irish poetry, even if some of the specifics of such participation remain elusive because it largely takes place within an oral culture outside of the elite classes; and to consider how poems by women worked with and against the highly gendered generic and rhetorical conventions implicit in prominent modes of Irish poetry such as elegy, encomium, and, later, the aisling.

Like Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh, Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche [The Midnight Court] (c. 1780) is at the center of the canon of Irish poetry. Merriman’s long comic poem, a counter or mock aisling that splices together Gaelic verse patterns and Augustan rhyming couplets, combines two lines of critique: one of the Protestant Ascendancy and the decline of Gaelic culture, and another on the conservative ideologies on sex, marriage, and eros. Merriman was a radical thinker but also tuned to continental literature and philosophy, and Cúirt an Mheán Oíche – the only substantive work of his that survives – is a powerfully funny and subversive anatomization of Irish society. This chapter pays especial attention to the force of Merriman’s appraisal of gender roles and representations in eighteenth-century Irish culture.

Chapter 14 examines significant moments in the Brazilian novel through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality, all framed by postcolonial theory. This perspective exposes deep-seated blind spots around abusive behaviors and hidden biases in the texts, showing just how these attitudes have been normalized by enduring colonial power structures. The chapter reveals how Blackness and Indigeneity have long been overshadowed by dominant white, masculine literary viewpoints. At the same time, it highlights counter-hegemonic works that actively challenge and resist patriarchal ideas. A standout example is the analysis of Coelho Neto’s Esfinge (1908), a lesser-known neo-Gothic “Frankensteinian” story about a character surgically fused from a man’s body and a woman’s head. The chapter covers a diverse range of authors – from José de Alencar to Conceição Evaristo – and works – from Bernardo Guimarães’ A escrava Isaura (1875) to Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan (1985).

During the twentieth century, significant legal, social and cultural changes occurred in Britain and Ireland which provided opportunities for an increasingly diverse pool of symphonic composers. Changing attitudes and laws regarding women and the LGBTQ+ community, the path the UK has charted regarding ethnicity, and shifting definitions of class have had a significant impact on who had access to a musical education and to the networks necessary to forge a career as a composer. This chapter examines the broader socio-cultural history of Britain and Ireland since 1900 to investigate the important milestones and small gestures that have led to the present. It explores the various demographic frames of reference for the composers discussed in the book, including gender, ethnicity, social class and sexual orientation, establishing a context for the discussions that follow.

The chapter starts by examining the backlash among Orangemen in the Border Counties to Éire’s 1948 unilateral decision to leave the British Commonwealth and become a republic. Coming to terms with the new constitutional reality was traumatic, and adaptation was not facilitated by the Catholic hierarchy, which was in full crusading mood against domestic heresy and foreign communism. The chapter examines a few high-profile cases – including the 1956 Hungarian refugees episode and the 1957 Fethard-on-Sea Boycott – and explores the mix of complacency, insecurity and resignation with which both Jews and Protestants responded to the mounting intolerance of the church hierarchy. An age of anxieties, the 1950s was also an age of extremes for the Irish minorities. Just when they seemed to be at their lowest ebb, supine under clerical dictation, while the Orange Order was fighting and losing old peripheral battles, Irish civil society came to the rescue and liberal opinion started to question traditional deference to Catholic power.

In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

This chapter is devoted to the Romantic women philosophers, and it groups their reflections on subjectivity. This chapter aims to identify a common thread that unites these women thinkers and contributes to the understanding of the Romantic Self. Despite the diversity of their perspectives, they shared a common understanding of the self as shaped by relationships with others and nature, and as incapable of imposing herself on them, a view that echoes arguments presented by the men philosophers of Romanticism. However, these women thinkers tend to focus on a particular point: the possibility for the self to create a space for her own voice and, on occasion, her actions. After the explanation of Sophie Mereau’s notion of agency, and the differences between her and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s political thought, the chapter focuses on Mereau’s and de Staël’s interpretations of Fichte's philosophy and their idea of autonomy. The role of memory and love in Sophie Tieck's and Dorothea Veit’s conception of the self is then analysed. The chapter closes with Günderrode’s and Bettina von Arnim’s notion of subjectivity, and its relationship with nature and society.

To gain insight into the political meaning of the Romantic Self, it is essential to consider the relationship between subjectivity and nature on the one hand and the subject and the norms established within a community on the other. These two lines of inquiry converge in the examination of gender, specifically in the question of whether our sexual-biological identity, which constitutes our most nature-bound aspect, affects our subjectivity – that is to say, whether our mode of thinking, feeling, and relating to others is determined by our sexual identity. A consideration of Romantic reflections on gender will complete our investigation about the extent to which Romanticism regards the self as determined by nature or as independent from it. The first part of the chapter explains the meaning of the word Geschlecht (‘gender’ or ‘sex’) in the German philosophical debate at the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the role played by women within the Romantic ‘symphilosophy’. It closes with a focus on some Romantic women philosophers and their own idea on the role women should play in the cultural and philosophical debate.

Throughout U.S. history, women have served and participated in war efforts in both official and unofficial capacities, playing central roles in furthering U.S. war aims and achieving the mission at hand. At times, military authorities have acknowledged women’s unofficial contributions by offering payment for services and access to postwar benefits. Military leaders have also recognized the value of servicewomen when personnel needs required them. Since the end of the Vietnam War-era draft in 1973, the U.S. armed forces have gradually opened military occupation specialties, including combat positions, to women. Yet in the civilian world and within the military ranks, resistance to women’s service remained steady over the decades. Critics have cited unit cohesion and readiness as reasons to keep women out of the forces, and they have also made cultural arguments grounded in the links between gender, power, and military service to oppose the mobilization of women. Although U.S. military leaders have opened opportunities for women due to pragmatic needs for personnel, Americans have held on to the notion that soldiers are men, and women belong on the homefront.

Kira Sanbonmatsu focuses on gender in state elections. She examines the presence and performance of women who ran for the state legislatures and statewide executive offices in 2022 and 2024, analyzes the reasons for the underrepresentation of women in these offices, and highlights changes in women’s candidacies in recent years. The chapter also investigates the factors driving variation across states in women’s officeholding and assesses the status of women of color and LGBTQ+ women as candidates in state elections. Sanbonmatsu also includes analysis of the role certain issues, particularly abortion rights, play in state elections. Understanding why women have not fared better in the states is critical to understanding women’s status in electoral politics and their prospects for achieving parity in higher office in the future.

Erin C. Cassese and Yueshan Long document gender differences in public opinion and vote choice. They provide evidence of the emergence and trajectory of the gender gap in vote choice over time and in the most recent elections but demonstrate how the influence of gender is variable and contingent on other voter characteristics such as race, class, geography, and party. Cassese and Long outline common theoretical explanations for the gender gap and situate the American gap in global perspective. Shifting their attention from cause to effect, Cassese and Long explore how beliefs about women and men voters – including social constructions of key voting groups – shape campaign strategy and political communications. They evaluate the specific appeals to women and men voters in the 2024 presidential election, with particular attention to the influence of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in voter mobilization.