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Under the combined effects of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations within and pressure from the Ottoman Empire without, early modern Europe became a site in which an unprecedented number of people were confronted by new beliefs, and collective and individual religious identities were broken down and reconfigured. Conversions: gender and religious change in early modern Europe is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. The varied and wide-ranging chapters in this collection bring the Renaissance 'turn of the soul' into productive conversation with the three most influential ‘turns’ of recent literary, historical, and art historical study: the ‘turn to religion’, the ‘material turn’, and the ‘gender turn’. Contributors consider masculine as well as feminine identity, and consider the impact of travel, printing, and the built environment alongside questions of genre, race and economics. Of interest to scholars of early modern history, literature, and architectural history, this collection will appeal to anyone interested in the vexed history of religious change, and the transformations of gendered selfhood. Bringing together leading scholars from across the disciplines of literary study, history and art history, Conversions: gender and religious change offers novel insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes, and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.
examines their impact upon women. International lawyers generally present the state as being without a sexed identity, a neuter, 11 and thus without consequences for sex or gender. By contrast, we argue that the paradigm state is constructed as a ‘male’ in international law, with ‘female’ features only in particular contexts. The ‘sex’ of the state makes it difficult to represent women’s interests in
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
/or sexed identities unfold in the context of a series of interlinked social upheavals in India: the 1990 protests against the Mandal Commission, the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the anti-Muslim riots that took place in the state of Gujarat in 2002. I will examine not only the tensions between collectivist action and individual freedom in the texts under consideration, but also how these tensions inflect our
with London Society hostesses who were eager to see their social gatherings recapitulated in the press. As the genre developed and blossomed it attracted a disproportionately large number of men with avowed same-sex identities or who indulged in same-sex acts. Linkof argues that gossip columnists, to perform their jobs well, needed to operate on the margins: sufficiently inside High Society so as to be welcomed at its social events and rites of passage but, simultaneously, sufficiently outside so as to speak with objective authority. As popular demand for revelations
so intimate. Indeed, scholars, commentators, and men themselves, in blogs, print, television, and online videos, explore the impact of body image on men’s sense of self and self-esteem.2 Nonetheless, even as people are acutely aware of the personal distress caused by social and cultural pressures to conform to 204 Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 certain bodily ideals, and recognise that bodies and appearances convey gender and sex identities, the emotions associated with them and the roles they play are less often scrutinised. This epilogue suggests some of
problematise the ‘male crisis’ discourse. It does so by demonstrating that the general argument that the visual field in the context of AIDS has transformed sexual identities relies on a reading of images of bodies and body parts that are simply assumed to carry the marks of sexual difference. Two points are made regarding this theoretical assumption. First, I suggest that ironically such theoretical readings of the body and in particular the male body serve to stabilise the very gendered and sexed identities which the visual field is claimed to undo. Second, I suggest that
, these varied chapters pay sustained attention to how discourses and manifestations of gendered identity shaped the experience and actions of the convert. At the same time, they ask how religious change both manifested and reshaped the ideals and realities of sexed identity and behaviour. They demonstrate the intricate and overlapping performances of religious and gendered selfood, and the difficulties
as well as other work related skills is interesting, and echoes an underlying perception of universities as highly political arenas – a perspective that many women see as problematic (Chapter 5). However even in this case there is a reference to somewhat more problematic elements reflected in the word ‘challenging’. The depiction of women’s relationships with each other as uniformly negative can be seen as a key mechanism of patriarchal control (O’Connor, 2002). Many of the women in Morley’s study (1999: 76) resisted ‘forming coalitions on the basis of second sex
example, that the male spectator’s position may be masochistic rather than sadistic (Studlar 1988 ), and that certain cinematic genres encourage male spectatorial identification with female onscreen characters (Clover 1992 ). Moreover, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the insights of gender studies and queer theory, inspired by names such as Judith Butler, have helped to mobilize the meanings attributed to gendered and sexed