Chapter 2 examines the ECOWAS Court’s jurisprudence on gender-based discrimination in light of the judgment in Dorothy Njemanze and 3 Ors v. Nigeria. This case is the pioneering decision of the ECOWAS Court that pronounced on the Maputo Protocol and held the Republic of Nigeria responsible for gender-based discrimination against a marginalised group of women – alleged sex workers. The decision significantly influenced the African women’s rights legal framework on holding states accountable for violations of women’s rights. I argue in this chapter how the principle of due diligence made its debut, albeit implicitly, in the Court’s use of the letter and spirit of the Maputo Protocol. The chapter also highlights the ripple effects of the Njemanze decision in other regional courts, such as the African Court, which took judicial notice of the case and expressed its opinion on vagrancy laws across Africa.

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.

Explicitly queer elements arise in the earliest accounts of life in New Orleans and again over a hundred years later in the mid nineteenth century in the major Gothic novel of the city. A primary presence in the celebrated bohemian community in the French Quarter of the 1920s, queerness also figures centrally among the literary celebrities of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans in such icons as Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, John Rechy and William March, as well as in the literary heroes of recent times, Brad Richard and Joe Westmoreland. Beyond these high-culture leaders of the city’s queer literary legacy, there is also a substantial queer presence in recent popular genre writing associated with the city (fiction of a young-adult or romantic-comedy or horror-slasher sort), even as frightened bigots, bent on backlash, have risen to high government office and seek to ban such books from libraries and curricula.

Whitewashing and the zealous pursuit of white garments is at the heart of this chapter, a phenomenon entangled with race thinking and a whiteness agenda. This phenomenon grew from the 1600s, altering trade and labour regimes and the need for skilled care Atlantic-wide. This soap saga directed domestic and personal priorities and employed legions of women, typically low-ranked, gendered and racialized. Light, white shirts and shifts carried cultural weight, understood as the social skin. The chapter argues for the skill and stamina inherent in whitewashing, a sector overlooked until recently, demanding attention not least for the colonial dimensions of this history. Whether Hudson Bay or the Caribbean, soap stood out as a colonial feature. The Caribbean was unique in economic and cultural power, where Black women directed the making and remaking of fashion. I present the history of enslaved and free Caribbean washerwomen, with arguments for their cultural force and essential functions. Allied with Black seamstresses, they built a dynamic fashion ecology that informed Atlantic norms. This cohort defied reductionist claims, even as imperial thinking celebrated all things White.

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.