This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This is the first of three chapters showing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation techniques in genre-defining novels of the Romantic period. I give an account of anti-caricature rhetoric in the critical reception of Jane Austen’s novels, from contemporaneous reviews and responses to the twentieth century. I describe Austen’s particular moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-indulgence, first examining instances of the word ’caricature’ in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, then close-reading depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, as instances of literary realism’s ’explained caricatures’.

Chapter 5 explores key aspects of the gendered dichotomy assumed to underlie entrepreneurial endeavour and achievement. Entrepreneurial success is predominantly understood in gendered terms as a consequence of qualities associated with masculinity while women are assumed to play supportive roles in business and enterprise. Even though successful female entrepreneurs are increasingly acknowledged, their ability to perform as business leaders is typically associated with masculine ideals of success, through an accomplishment of female imitations of masculinity. Chapter 4 challenges such persistent dichotomic approaches to gender in entrepreneurship. It is shown on the basis of data drawn from China’s new generation of entrepreneurs that women and men strategically display gender in the company and in the marketplace, in a manner that will maximize growth and profit for their firms. These women and men are not constrained by stereotyped gender ideals but rather utilize existing imagery and norms, and, when necessary, create new ones in doing business. In addition, the involvement of grandparents in supporting their daughters and daughters-in-law who are in business, wholly overlooked in consideration of female entrepreneurs, constitutes a hidden factor in the interplay of constructions of gender, family, and business experienced by female entrepreneurs in China.

Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race: to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic act. Extending the second chapter’s emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: the White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. I depict the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr., has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.” Through Cleopatra’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance and white women as props: patriarchal, theatrical, cultural, economic, domestic props.

Historiography has long relegated women’s roles in Latin American independence to stories of heroines who left home to support the movement only to return once battles were won. This chapter argues, by contrast, that shifting models of femininity and masculinity were central to a political transformation from colonies governed by paternal monarchs to republics that celebrated national fraternity among male citizens. Using intersectional analysis, it traces the multiple ways in which roles for both women and men of various social strata were in flux from the eighteenth century through independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, ideologies of separate spheres became dominant, allowing elite and middling women to extend their maternal influence into educational and charitable endeavors, but only by mobilizing as women. Poor women and women of color could neither live up to domestic ideals nor earn rights, like their male peers, through military service or as household heads. Rather than simply a colonial legacy of patriarchal domination, then, gender norms changed as women went from sharing with men differentiated ranks as colonial subjects to their exclusion from citizenship.

The forms of punishment and informal privatization in schools have wide-ranging implications for student subjectivities and practices. This chapter focuses in particular on the resulting patterns of noncompliance, failed disciplinary supervision and gendered contestation. It provides background on the wide-ranging negative consequences of harsh punishment for young people. It focuses in particular on noncompliance and its assumed links to working class education, to gender traditionalism and to assumptions about authoritarian Arab schools. It charts patterns of contestation and retaliation among girls and boys and the responses of school authorities to them, and explains the attempts of educational authorities to uphold a semblance of discipline and educational supervision. In contrast to depictions of authoritarian Arab schooling and its role in producing obedient submissive citizens, the chapter describes the collapse of this model of schooling and the kind of authoritarianism it implies in the case of Egypt. In the place of obedience or submissiveness, it highlights pervasive forms of noncompliance and illusory forms of control over schools in the context of state withdrawal and de facto privatization.

I see feminism as a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men, and a dismantling of the patriarchal values that inhibit this.

My essay is interested in David Foster Wallace’s complex and evolving relationship with feminism and the feminine, as well as in how this relationship has been figured over time within the literary community. This investigation involves an account of how critical practices surrounding Wallace have transformed over the past decade—from readings that take as universal the “human being” of Wallace’s work, instead of reading it as emblematic of a particular nexus of privileged observer-positions, to intersectional readings that acknowledge Wallace’s embodiment as a white middle-class American male whose work reflects that embodiment in important ways, to, finally, #MeToo-era readings that foreground the actual misogynistic violence inflicted by Wallace in his personal capacity, which, morally and politically, would seem to foreclose the possibility of further reading and set up an existential crisis for the burgeoning field of Wallace Studies.

As I engage with each of these critical approaches in my essay, three central questions emerge. First: How has the history of feminism in America shaped Wallace’s work and its reception? Second: If feminism is “a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men,” where does Wallace’s empathy expand in this regard and where does it break down, on the page and in the flesh? Third: In our present historical moment, does acknowledging Wallace’s ultimate betrayal of this commitment in the form of his abuse mean a complete disavowal of the author and the man—an end to the conversation, as it were—or is there space for the #MeToo movement within Wallace Studies?

This chapter focuses on apologies, another active, face-saving politeness strategy. Apologies are a way of conducting politeness and preserving interpersonal relationships. There is a clear perception that women apologize more, or apologize unnecessarily, and this chapter examines if that is reflected in Disney and Pixar films. Quantitatively, both male and female characters apologize in these films, and in a certain proportion of the cases the authors suspect this is determined more by the specifics of the plot than by gender or any other characteristic of the speaker. At the same time, the authors find some patterning at the extremes that seems more clearly linked to gender. While apologizing may not be marked as specifically associated with femininity, non-apology strategies do seem to be mostly used by the male characters. One explanation for this is that women have been held more responsible for maintaining social relations and catering to the face needs of others. Femininity may be tied to a focus on making sure the social harm is repaired, while masculinity involves more of an emphasis on producing the speech act of the apology while (if possible) hedging against the inherent face threat it involves.

This chapter explores how representations of obesity intersect with discourses relating to other aspects of identity, focusing in particular on gender. The analysis is divided into two halves. The first half of the chapter examines the representation of men and women with obesity using collocation and compares the representations against each other, relating these to wider gendered discourses in society. The second half analyses a particular type of article where a focus on gender is foregrounded – weight loss narratives. Specifically, this part of the analysis compares the ways in which men’s and women’s weight loss is reported in the press. Overall the analysis reported in this chapter points to the ways in which representations of obesity can depend on the gender and sex identity of the person or group in question. While men’s obesity is represented as exceptional and their weight loss methods as unusual or extreme, obesity in women is depicted as something that is more widespread but also more harmful, including to their children and other relatives.

There is an extensive vernacular conduct literature of the twelfth and thirteenth century that has barely been used by social historians.This is all the more surprising as it has a considerable amount to say on central social issues, not least gender. This chapter analyses what several conduct tracts have to say about just one such aspect, femininity, beginning with the earliest conduct tract of all, addressed to women by the aristocratic Occitan author Garin lo Brun in the first half of the twelfth century. We find that Garin and other authors, notably the prolific thirteenth-century social commentator Robert de Blois, described and defined an idealised superior woman: the preudefemm or biderbe wip who summed up in herself the contemporary gender expectations of the female of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Importantly, it is an ideal of femininity generated within lay society and not out of the Latin literature of the schools previously used for the purpose by scholars, tainted with clerical misogyny as it is. The result goes a long way to explain the potential and limits of the female agency recent gender scholarship has suggested was to be found in medieval society.

This chapter explores the genealogies between Surrealism’s quest to express or represent the unconscious unrestrained by rational thought, and the pursuit in 1970s avant-garde feminism of a new language – an “écriture féminine” – that would be uncontaminated by phallocentric logic. Through a reading of selected works by two figures situated at the intersection of these two aesthetic and theoretical movements – feminist theorist Xavière Gauthier and artist and writer Dorothea Tanning – the chapter demonstrates that these links are not unidirectional but a dynamic dialogue. This dialogue signals not only an allegiance to Surrealism at the heart of poststructuralist/psychoanalytic feminism but also a germinal feminist poetics in historical Surrealism – that would come to full fruition in 1970s Surrealist activity.

Chapter 2 examines US survivors’ layered belonging as it played out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s ground zero in 1945. In partucular, the chapter argues that their cross-nationality remained persistent as their culture – clothes, medicines, and food – became the essential means of surviving, rescuing, and caring in the bomb’s immediate aftermath. Despite the enormous destruction that appeared to erase any human distinctions, cultural diversity and gender differences came back powerfully in the hours and days after the bomb’s explosion. Women emerged as chief caretakers of the ill and injured in the utter absence of hospitals, doctors, and nurses, crafting what might be called improvisational practices of folk medicine. Men, in contrast, felt as if it was their duty to rescue others at any cost, sometimes at the sacrifice of their own safety. Not only universality of nuclear destruction, but also uniqueness of individuals and cultures affected by it, came to light. Altogether, US survivors’ experiences are explored as a cross-cultural history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which became the basis of US survivors’ memory, identity, and activism after the war.

This chapter looks at the influence of “decorative orientalism,” in which Asian objects and images inspired acts of consumption, display, and performance in American homes, on the literary imagination of a persistent racial type: the “Butterfly.” This figure of submissive and suicidal Asian femininity was central to a set of popular stories of interracial romance between Asian women and white European or American men, including Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (1887), John Luther Long’s story Madame Butterfly (1898), and Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly (1904). These works have been interpreted as pointed indictments of Western colonialism, as grossly racist misrepresentations, or both. My objective here is less to monitor the degree of accuracy within these representations than to consider how they articulate and manage anxieties about not only intercultural desire, but also consumption and excess. I conclude by examining how Winnifred Eaton’s interracial romance, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), subtly but significantly varies the terms of decorative orientalism in order to provide a biracial heroine with a measure of lasting value.