This chapter documents how post-Soviet women navigate the complexities of their children’s citizenship status in China, using the concept of ‘embodied border sites’ where racialised geopolitics intersect with individual values and family norms. It explores how issues of citizenship, identity and race shape the experiences of foreign mothers in determining where their children ‘belong’ nationally. I argue that, faced with their own precarious legal and economic status – and the constant fear of separation from their children, these mothers often leverage their native citizenship or informal dual-citizenship arrangements to protect their parental rights within China’s strict single-citizenship rules. The chapter details how China’s citizenship and immigration laws restrict foreign spouses on ‘family visitor’ visas from fully integrating into the reproductive and familial aspects of marriage, leading to difficult negotiations over their children’s citizenship status. These challenges underscore the inequalities embedded in family life for foreign mothers, who continually negotiate their parental rights and sense of belonging within a restrictive legal landscape.

This chapter offers an audiovisual exploration of a group wedding festival held on the Chinese–Russian border during the late summer festival of qixi jie [七夕节]. The official goal of this event is to strengthen Chinese–Russian relations, transforming a traditional celebration into an occasion for the articulation and celebration of international love and desire. The symbolic significance of the location, timing and aesthetics of the event, alongside the national, racial and gender identities of the participants, reveals key insights into China’s national aspirations. I argue that this state-sponsored group wedding is not simply a reflection of China’s foreign relations, nor is it an incidental event – it serves as a crucial site for observing and interrogating China’s geopolitical imaginaries and national desires. Furthermore, it provides a space for both reinforcing and contesting these aspirations through the performance of international love, gender roles, and an ideal form of marriage.

This chapter shows that postwar Britain saw not a Railway Book Mania but a Book Mania tout court, with railway books a tiny proportion of all tomes published. Early book publishing houses serving the railway enthusiast were founded by men with a private enthusiasm for railways. This remains true for railway magazine editors and journalists. 'Not in Ottley' is the proudest claim any British railway bibliophile can slide among his text's footnotes, for George Ottley's work is a major peak in British railway scholarship's eccentric range. Though no prior enthusiasm drew him to this task, in 1952 he began 'Ottley's Folly', trekking through British railway literature's trackless wastes. Supplemented twice in the forty years since his first huge volume appeared, Ottley remains the railway fancy's bookish arbiter.

By the late 1970s railway modelling alone was judged to be male Britons' premier indoor leisure activity. British railway enthusiasm is a social phenomenon. Many other nations can proffer examples of railway enthusiasm then, but Britain gave the modern steam railway to the world. Though widely disparaged, the British railway enthusiast's life-world remains stubbornly lively and commodious. Beyond the crudely economic, a fascination with railways forms the cultural frame through which huge numbers of twentieth-century British men came to apprehend the world. In 1994 Matthew Engel told The Guardian's readers that 'The British have a unique sentimental attachment to their trains. For Britain's railway fancy remains surprisingly populous. In the mid-1990s informed estimates judged that between three and five million Britons entertained a significant interest in trains and railways: a figure inferior only to fishing and gardening as broad leisure activities.

As notions of idyll have emerged in filmic expression, so too have notions of rural childhood idyll. This chapter looks at films made for children and at filmic realisations of famous literary portrayals of children in the countryside and unashamedly idyllic depictions of rural childhood, which deliberately play upon romantic notions of the rural as an ideal childhood environment. It explores two other aspects of childhood in the cinematic countryside. Firstly, heeding Little's concern about the whole notion of idyll, the chapter considers films which go beyond obvious ideas of idyll in two ways. The first are films which show the other side of idyll, or life behind the 'façade' of idyll, raising issues of poverty, but also oppression through patriarchal power, and other harsher realities of children's lives. The second way is films which explore 'the otherness' of childhood. The chapter offers some thoughts on children, rurality and dwelling.

Lesbian narratives of childhood sexuality in the post-war decades, such as Diana Chapman's, reflect this uncertainty, representing childhood crushes as both common aspects of schoolgirl culture and the forerunner of adult lesbian sexuality. Lesbian narratives indicate that this association of lesbianism with masculinity persisted into the post-war period. Narrators overwhelmingly constructed their childhood selves as physically active and 'tomboyish', reflecting the common theme in medical case histories. Lesbian sexual activity was apparently perceived as a more tangible possibility in residential institutions such as boarding schools, approved schools and remand homes. Medical science remained one of the most influential forces explaining the aetiology and characteristics of female homosexuality in the post-war decades. The contradictory representation of schoolgirl sexuality in educational and medical literature in the 1940s and 50s afforded considerable flexibility for the expression of female same-sex desire in adolescence.

The book concludes with an assessment of the different approaches taken to the production of regional television drama by Granada and BBC English Regions Drama in the period under consideration. It is argued that while the representation of regional culture and identity was an important part of Granada’s television production from 1956-82, providing representations of the region for both local and national audiences, this was only one part of the company’s remit within a federal, commercial broadcasting network. BBC English Regions Drama, on the other hand, was established in the 1970s specifically to produce ‘regional’ television drama for the BBC network, although the conceptualisation and realisation of ‘regional’ drama in the department’s work varied considerably within this remit. The second half of the conclusion considers the decline of regional broadcasting since the early 1980s, assessing the impact of the 1990 Broadcasting Act, the consolidation of the ITV network, the emergence of independent production companies which have, to some extent, revitalised regional drama, the preference among regional audiences for local representations, the BBC’s outsourcing of its drama production to regional production centres in Cardiff and Salford, and the new possibilities for regional drama afforded by digital television and the internet.

The emergence of a 'refugee party' threatened to intensify the conflicts between the expellee and indigenous populations. This chapter analyses the attitude and policies of the political parties to the German refugees and expellees. It explores the tensions which often developed within the parties between refugees and their indigenous counterparts. The chapter focuses on the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union, CDU)/Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union, CSU), and the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP). It evaluates the strenuous efforts of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) to win support among the newcomers, and examines the attitude of radical rightwing parties to the refugees and expellees. The chapter also analyses the newcomers' voting behaviour between 1946 and 1950 in the three main refugee states of Bavaria, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

In characterising lesbian relationships as immature and short-lived, Commutator drew on a familiar post-war theme in medical and popular literature. The dominant discourse of feminine domesticity was, however, framed in overwhelmingly heterosexual terms and the experiences of single women and lesbians were conspicuous by their absence. Representations of lesbians in medical literature and fiction overwhelmingly reinforced notions of lesbians as single, marginal figures, existing on the peripheries of society. Freudian medico-scientific attempts to explain the aetiology of lesbianism in terms of a breakdown in the parent-child relationship were replicated in other literary portrayals of the lesbian as the product of a broken home. In the post-war decades, media representations of lesbianism characterised lesbians as a threat to marital and family life, focusing on divorce cases and murder trials.

A major obstacle to an adequate examination of European integration is the definition of political phenomena as requiring either a national or an international relations (IR) approach. European political integration as the emergence of a relatively autonomous and structured European political field is often confused with the modernisation of national economic, social and political lives. The process of structuration of the European political field can be understood both as involving processes of convergence and divergence. This implies the institutionalisation of new political and economic values and patterns of behaviour that unite national politics into a structurally looser entity, the European political field. For politicians like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, integration into the evolving European political field, with its institutions and procedures, presents new fora for the accumulation of a distinct type of political resource.