Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment Gender and History

by D'Cruze, Shani; Rao, Anupama

• ISBN13: 9781405120920
• ISBN10: 1405120924
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-05
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Violence, its specificity and significance across temporal and spatial boundaries, is a key topic for feminist scholarship. This well-illustrated collection uses new and interdisciplinary approaches in gender history to explore violence as a form of gendered embodiment across place and time. The contributors discuss violence in a wide range of contexts, from castration and blinding as punishment for treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England, through the rearing of professional female fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia, to the Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India in 2002. They ask why some forms of violence are valorised, permitted or rendered invisible, while others are stigmatised, policed or criminalised; and they consider the relationship between everyday violent acts, and the extraordinary or spectacular use of violence as humiliation or punishment. The book helps readers to understand violence as a as a performative act that can be read symptomatically and as a diagnostic for deeper, more complex historical structures.

Author Biography

Shani D'Cruze is Reader in Gender History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was co-editor of the journal Gender and History between 2000 and 2004. Her main publications are on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and cultural history of violence, crime and gender and the gender history of the nineteenth-century family.

Anupama Rao is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her interests are in Indian nationalism; anti-caste struggles; caste, gender and the family form in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western India; historical anthropology; the anthropology of violence; human rights and feminist and critical theory.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
Introduction
Violence and the Vulnerabilities of Gender	1	(18)
Shani D'Cruze
Anupama Rao
Vulnerabilities
Female Suicide, Subjectivity and the State in Eighteenth-Century China	19	(25)
Janet Theiss
`She is but a Woman': Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System	44	(23)
Ginger Frost
Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post-War El Salvador	67	(27)
Irina Carlota Silber
Potentialities
Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England	94	(15)
Klaus Van Eickels
Precarious Conditions: A Note on Counter-Insurgency in Africa after 1945	109	(23)
Luise White
Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women-Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia	132	(29)
Anna Krylova
`Generous Amazons Came to the Breach': Besieged Women, Agency and Subjectivity during the French Wars of Religion	161	(35)
Brian Sandberg
Visibilities
Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: the Chinese-Indonesian Rape Debate in Post-Suharto Indonesia	196	(37)
Karen Strassler
Woman and Violence in Artistic Discourse of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917--1922)	233	(18)
Anna N. Eremeeva
Dan Healey
Un/safe/ly at Home: Narratives of Sexual Coercion in 1920s Egypt	251	(25)
Marilyn Booth
Possibilities
Rethinking Law and Violence: the Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India, 2002	276	(25)
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Prostitution, Sex Work and Violence: Discursive and Political Contexts for Five Texts on Paid Sex, 1987-2001	301	(19)
Svati P. Shah
Apparitions of Desire: Clive van den Berg and the Art of Historical Unknowability	320	(12)
Rosalind C. Morris
Index	332