Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment: Gender and History (Gender and History Special Issues) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405120924 ISBN 13: 9781405120920

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005

Synopsis

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, from the medieval world to the twenty-first century. It considers the issues across time, from the classical world to the twenty-first century. It covers a wide range of locations, including Africa, China, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. It is academically and theoretically innovative. It includes work by authors from different countries and different disciplines. It helps readers to understand violence both as a diagnostic for deeper, more complex historical structures, and as a performative act that can be read symptomatically.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1405120924
• ISBN 13: 9781405120920
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: D'Cruze Shani, Rao Anupama