This chapter investigates Archilochus’ relationship to the tradition of wisdom literature, using the poet as a case study for how we can think about inter-generic and intertextual relationships so early in the Greek literary tradition. Having established that Archilochus is familiar with (and expects his audience also to know) the conventions of didactic moralising, the chapter discusses the case for a stronger proposition: that his poetry demonstrates a specific relationship with the poems of Hesiod. The chapter examines some fragments which demonstrate the best case for an intertextual relationship (frr. 196a, 195, 177) and discusses how reading these through a Hesiodic lens enhances our understanding of what the poems aim to do and how they fit into Archilochus’ broader rhetorical strategy.

Bitch lurked in the English language for centuries, but then it emerged as an everyday word. Why? Bitch changed along with the changing social roles of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the mid 1900s, the use of bitch had exploded; its meteoric rise was a backlash against feminism. In response it was reclaimed by feminists – to some extent, that is. In modern times, bitch is still an insult for a woman who is considered to be unpleasant, disagreeable, or malicious. But in the word’s evolution it has also come to mean a woman who is revered (or reviled) as tough, strong, and assertive. For better or for worse, bitch is interwoven with the history of feminism. It is a word that represents both feminism and anti-feminism at the same time.

Swift has often been labelled an outright misogynist. This chapter focuses on how several of Swift’s most misogynistic poems spoke to wider ideas about gender circulating in the early eighteenth century: in particular, the widespread concern that the idolisation of the female sex as paragons of virtue had lifted women well above their capacities in the name of beauty, morality, and social behaviour. The first section, on the idealisation of female virtue, includes an extended reading of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’, while the second section explores the links between cosmetics and scatology in ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’.

This chapter examines works of Pirandello that feature the act of suicide against the backdrop of a historical epoch in which the issue of taking one’s own life was critical and culturally charged. Some of the suicides of the age were heroic self-immolators, as Carlo Michelstaedter appeared to many to be. Some were simply in desperate existential straits. Still others were women suffering intolerably in erotic relationships. The last two groups abound in Pirandello’s literary fictions, and he shares deep sympathy for them in approximately two dozen stories, many of which are analyzed closely here for their ethical and philosophical implications. Even more interesting “Pirandellian suicides” are symbolic ones, like Vitangelo Moscarda and Mattia Pascal in the novels. These characters reject, but do not end, the lives they have known before the narratives take their turns, producing the radical vitality of a non-life by bourgeois standards.

Chapter 8 retraces Ilf and Petrov’s businesslike investigation of the New York dreamworld of nightclubs, burlesque theaters, and other entertainments. Their exploration of American consumption and leisure provided them with a series of case studies that probed the line between the wholesome, “cultured” consumption promoted in the Soviet Union and capitalist vulgarity. Applying emerging Soviet understandings to the United States, Ilf and Petrov represented American men as often succumbing to the coarse charms of popular commercial spectacles; they associated American women with the obsessive consumption of vulgar things. Deploring women’s commodification under capitalism did not prevent men on the left, in the Soviet Union no less than in the United States, from representing women as “materialist viragoes.”

Eliminating cervical cancer is about more than just spending money. It requires reckoning with the many intangibles that get in the way of this cause. Widespread adherence to patriarchal value systems, for instance, not only threatens women’s health and well-being, but discourages them from freely pursuing the means to a cure. Persons with cervixes must confrontnot only archaic notions about their worth, but also many other hidden barriers to prevention. These include the fear and superstition that arise from lack of knowledge and medical misinformation, a lack of appreciation for self-care, the burden of unpaid work, and the vulnerability resulting from racial and gender inequality. Challenging these societal factors will increase the volume of women’s voices and ultimately save thousands of lives. But until society is ready to acknowledge and address these barriers – the patriarchal structures thwarting women’s autonomy and decision-making power, the stigma associated with this disease, the religious intolerances and traditional values contrary to its prevention – a cancer that strikes only those with a cervix will continue to kill.

This chapter revisits the latest trends in the historiography of gender in the Age of Revolutions in current Latin America and proposes the need to put politics at center stage. Based on new scholarship on the rise of political actors in the viceroyalty of Peru in these transitional years, the text argues that the Era of Revolutions saw the emergence of a new patriarchal order that brought about a new masculine identity tightly connected with force, action, and modern politics. While new men found unprecedented opportunities to take on positions of authority and power, this process led to a renewed exclusion of other masculine identities, homosexuals, and women from public and political arenas. Moreover, this exclusion brought about a mysoginistic and machista discourse that dominated reform projects, legal documents, the press, arts, and theater. Studying this discourse, the chapter argues, is crucial to understanding exclusionary practices in politics that remain in place in the region to this day.

Complaints about the libretto have long shadowed The Magic Flute. The spoken dialogue especially has been disparaged, first regarding plot and, recently, gender and race. This chapter argues that to cut the dialogue is to lose a wealth of detail with respect to character and plot that needs to be understood as essential to the dramatic action. It offers close readings starting at the level of words or phrases that cannot be lost without consequence. Issues examined in speech include class and institutional hypocrisy (Tamino and Papageno); gender (the Queen of the Night); race (Monostatos); and female ambition (Sarastro). Each character conveys in speech a desire to be seen beyond stereotype, demonstrated here alongside relevant social context in Mozart’s time and ours. With nuanced treatment of controversial issues, the chapter debunks a fundamentally flawed justification for cuts – that our society is morally superior to the one that produced this work.

This chapter draws on conceptions of gender in Mozart’s time and ours to explore the opera’s representation of women. This aspect of The Magic Flute, including the misogynistic statements of the priests, is now widely regarded as problematic. The opera sets the rule of Sarastro and his brotherhood against the Queen and her entourage, and the focus on this conflict between the sexes has to some degree obscured the opera’s focus on the construction of gender in the characterization of Pamina and the Queen. Gender is performed on stage within an established context and frame of reference. Pamina is a sentimental heroine whose idealized image, abduction, and abandonment prove her moral virtue; the Queen is a dark and vengeful mother who refuses to accept her restricted position. This focus allows us to see how both mother and daughter complicate patriarchal assumptions by raising important questions about gender and power.

This chapter outlines the Laudian critique of puritan scripturalism, and the ways in which what the Laudians saw as the puritan insistence of the right of every Christian to a private judgement of what the scripture meant and a consequent duty, on the basis of that judgement, to hold the doings of their superiors in church and state to account. This, the Laudians claimed, undermined the authority of both the clergy and the church, not to mention order in church, state and society. At stake was not only a right to interpret scripture, but also claims to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. For the Laudians, such claims upset, indeed inverted, social and gender hierarchies, and utterly subverted the authority of the clergy. Again the result was a de facto, if not all too often, a de jure, separation.

The history of comics and graphic novels often coincides with a history of marginalization of women and misogynistic stereotypes. Conversely, this chapter examines the representation of women by women in graphic novels, with a particular focus on women’s lives. It recalls the early efforts of women cartoonists within the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Julie Doucet, who produced different representations of femininity and sexuality than their male counterparts. It considers the contributions of seminal graphic memoirs by Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, which blended stories of personal awakening with a political context and message, offering new templates for future works. It also highlights the recurrence of the theme of childhood trauma in autobiographical works by women authors, such as Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), as well as the depiction of unequal work, career, household, and parenting demands placed on women. Finally, it reflects on the manner in which graphic novels by women authors may portray women’s experiences such as motherhood, abortion, and menopause, and considers graphic works that expand the notion of women’s discourse beyond binary identities.

This essay addresses three fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women writers who composed erotic and satiric verse: the Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, and the Scottish Gaelic poets, Iseabal Campbell, Countess of Argyll, and her daughter, Iseabal Ní Mheic Cailéan. Adopting an archipelagic feminist approach, Charnell-White locates these figures within the broader context of late medieval bardic culture in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, emphasising their high social status and family connections. While the poetry of Gwerful Mechain was highly regarded in her own time and a significant body of her work remains, far fewer poems by Iseabal Campbell and Iseabal Ni Mheic Cailéan survive; like Mechainߣs, however, they were written to be performed before specific audiences. The essay reads the poetry of all three as playfully reappropriating and subverting the formulaic misogynism typical of the male-authored verse in their bardic or coterie groups. In responding to the kind of anti-feminist motifs characteristic of the European tradition of the querelle des femmes, these poets challenge courtly ideals of women as chaste, silent, and obedient and present female sexuality in empowering terms.

The chapter explores the workings of gender in genocidal processes. It frames the subject inclusively, to address women and men; masculinities and femininities; the specific vulnerabilities of LGBT people; survivor, victim and perpetrator experiences; and structural and institutional forms of sexualized violence alongside event-specific ones. The chapter encourages readers to rethink major categories of analysis and themes in genocide studies as gendered phenomena.

Although pervasive, gender is often overlooked for its role in how genocide is conceived, performed, and experienced. The chapter traces its influence in connection to other explanatory narratives and theories such as the roles of the state, militarism, war, imperialism, racism, and sexism. Was gender one of many facets or a primary force in escalating or de-escalating the violence over time and space? Variables of race and ethnicity, themselves typically intersecting with social class, crucially shape how gender identities are imposed, interpreted, and experienced. The interaction of gender with an age variable is also noted. The coverage spans case studies of genocide in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa in order to illuminate the universal and particular. The authors also present on the role of courts in prosecuting mass rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. The conclusion points out key intellectual, ethical and policy challenges ahead.

Cheryl Foster examines Schopenhauer’s theory of genius, which she situates within a politics of knowledge. Many of our dominant social institutions devalue the arts which are overlooked as potential sources of knowledge. Foster argues that Schopenhauer (despite his own strong resources of bigotry) is in a position to address this injustice by making an argument for the distinction between talent and genius, or conceptual and intuitive understanding, and making a strong argument for the significance and distinctiveness of aesthetic, intuitive cognition. Foster looks carefully at Schopenhauer’s description of the experience of artistic inspiration, the receptivity distinctive of genius that enables artists to create aesthetically significant works. She finds that Schopenhauer has unexpected confirmation in the account Edith Wharton gave of her own artistic process. To realize the potential of Schopenhauer’s analysis, we need to free him from some of his reactionary investments, such as his anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, and mystifications. Foster carefully reconstructs a theory of genius and intuitive cognition that is both free from these elements and consistent with the phenomenology of artistic experience as reported by practicing artists. The result is a useful and accurate account of a vital source of nonconceptual knowledge.

While the first three chapters focus on formal innovations developed by middle-class writers who strove to contest other middle-class writers’ classist portrayals of poor white southerners, the fourth chapter considers techniques pioneered by authors who grew up poor, concentrating on literary devices designed to rebut deep-rooted narratives about poor white southerners’ unhealthy appetites. Reading Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina and Barbara Robinette Moss’s memoir Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter in light of the rise of southern foodways—in 1999, the year Moss published her memoir, the Southern Foodways Alliance was founded and USA Today named Paula Deen’s restaurant The Lady and Sons the International Meal of the Year—I explore how these authors wrote hunger into the bodies of their texts. I also examine how Allison’s and Moss’s works push back against male grit lit writers’ depictions of delectable poor white women by presenting decidedly inedible female characters, as Allison’s heroine’s nickname—Bone—suggests.