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The book provides a systematic scientific overview of gender mainstreaming in Europe. It recalls the main steps of the origins and the development of the European gender mainstreaming (GM) strategy. The book also connects this framework with the current situation of gender equality and explores the strength and weak points of the strategy. To do so, it provides a critical evaluation of the instruments used to measure gender equality and explores how societal aspects, such as the opportunity structure defined by work-family balance policies and practices, affect the individual values of gender equality supporting the development of gender egalitarian cultures. Further, it develops an outline of the current and future challenges of the gender mainstreaming strategy, that run in parallel with the general European Union’s challenges, such as the integration process, economic crisis, migration and refugees crisis, and the rise of right-wing Euroscepticism. In addition, the old but always current problem of conceptualizing gender equality in different ways leading to jeopardized results. The book offers a critical review of the GM strategy in Europe and analyses whether and how gender equality in Europe is improving, with a specific interest in the cultural differences between the European countries where this common strategy is implemented.

Breaking Protocol tells the story of the first female ambassadors in US history (1933–1964): Ruth Bryan Owen, Florence Jaffray Harriman, Perle S. Mesta, Eugenie M. Anderson, Clare Boothe Luce, and Frances E. Willis. This is the first group biography of the Big Six, one that places these women in a wider historical context based on deep and broad research in archival sources. It restores these women to their rightful place in history, and it assists the larger project of rendering women in international history visible. It begins by establishing the historical context, the male-dominated world of American diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century. It then devotes one chapter each to the six female ambassadors, describing their backgrounds and appointments, analyzing the issues they faced and experiences they had on the job, and assessing their performances. It also traces the ambassadors’ reception by host countries; their sometimes fraught relations with the male-dominated State Department; the press coverage they received; the complications of protocol and the spouse issue; and how they practiced “people’s diplomacy”—getting to know, and representing America to, the host country’s whole society, not just its ruling elite. It ends by outlining the progress made and obstacles faced by women since the mid-1960s, and it concludes that, through their successful performances, the Big Six significantly contributed to gender progress in US foreign relations.

This book history scrutinizes the production, advertising, contents, compilation and circulation – locally and globally – of an Arabic-language volume of biographies of world women, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur. The analysis of this volume of over 500 folio-size pages views it as an early work of Arab feminist history within the prolific career of Zaynab Fawwaz (c1850-1914), a Lebanese immigrant to Egypt and early feminist writer there. The study considers how Fawwaz drew on the venerable tradition of biography writing in Arabic but also turned to contemporary sources (magazines, an encyclopedia, world histories); how she centred Arab subjects and Islamic history but included women from across the world and from ancient eras right up to the fin-de-siècle; how she incorporated a quiet celebration of Shi‘i women (of which she was one), especially from the early Islamic period; how the work suggests a collective and cooperative female intellectual presence in the 1890s Arab capitals, and also responds to works on women’s history by her male contemporaries; and how Fawwaz’s writing became implicated in the project for a Women’s Library at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.

Most histories of the American South describe the conflict between evangelical religion and honor culture as one of the defining features of southern life before the Civil War. The Sacred Mirror is a comprehensive reinterpretation of that relationship that examines how the success of evangelicalism during this period actually depended on its ability to address and draw on this vital part of the traditional culture of the South. Evangelical churches embraced the same understanding of communal authority that nourished a culture of honor in the South, serving as a kind of cultural bridge between old and new ways of understanding the self, and ushering in a southern modernity. Previous accounts of the rise of evangelicalism in the South have told the tale as a tragedy in which evangelicals initially opposed but eventually capitulated to many of the central tenets of southern society in order to win souls and garner influence. But through an examination of evangelical language and practices, The Sacred Mirror shows that evangelicals always shared honor’s most basic assumptions about how to shape individual identity, making it clear that evangelical beginnings and eventualities in the South were more closely linked than we have understood.

The book provides a critical and systematic analyses of the role of queens, eunuchs and concubines in medieval Islamic history. Spanning over six centuries. It explores gender and sexual politics and power from the time of the Prophet Muhammad through the Umayyad and Abbasid empires to the Mamluks in the 15^th century. Based on primary sources, documents, the study looks at the role of women, mothers, wives, concubines, and their close political relationship with eunuchs and atabegs to secure their interests. The book examine in details how, despite the male dominated society, women managed to come to power under the Abbasids and their impacts. The creation of the eunuch institution, and its transformation from a body associated with the –Harem- to eunuch rulers under the Abbasids. The book unravel the military-political power of eunuchs and their relations with women under the Abbasids and the appearance of the first sovereign eunuch ruler and army commander. Also the gradual rise of female power under the Fatimids, and the appearance of the first queen in Islamic history. The book also examines the power of the Turkmen women in politics and how and why they introduced the unique post of atabeg. Examines the role of the first Sunni queen in Islam, Dayfa of Aleppo and how she paved the way for another queen, Shajar al-Durr in Egypt in mid 13^th century. This book is the first comprehensive study of sexual politics in medieval Islam. It challenges the traditional Muslim institutions spread in vast area in the Muslim world, which think of women as children of a lesser God according to their patriarchal readings of Islamic laws, and exposes the misogynist doctrine of organizations such as IS, Qaida, Buko Haram.

Performing women takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the “exceptional” staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. These two creators have remained anonymous, despite the perceived rarity of this familiar episode; this study of their lives and performances brings the elusive figure of the female performer to center stage, however. Beginning with the Catherine of Siena play and broadening outward, Performing women integrates new approaches to drama, gender, and patronage with a performance methodology to trace connections among the activities of the actor, the patron, their female family members, and peers. It shows that the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that included and extended beyond the theater: decades before the 1468 play, for example, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of a young woman named Claude, who was acknowledged formally in a series of civic ceremonies. This in-depth investigation of the full spectrum of evidence for female performance – drama, liturgy, impersonation, devotional practice, and documentary culture – both creates a unique portrait of the lives of individual women and reveals a framework of ubiquitous female performance. Performing women offers a new paradigm: women forming the core of public culture. Networks of gendered performance offered roles of expansive range and depth to the women of Metz, and positioned them as vital and integral contributors to the fabric of urban life.

Driven by exacting methods and hard data, this volume reveals gender dynamics within the dance world in the twenty-first century. It provides concrete evidence about how gender impacts the daily lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, educators, and students through surveys, interviews, analyses of data from institutional sources, and action research studies. Dancers, dance artists, and dance scholars from the United States, Australia, and Canada discuss equity in three areas: concert dance, the studio, and higher education. The chapters provide evidence of bias, stereotyping, and other behaviors that are often invisible to those involved, as well as to audiences. The contributors answer incisive questions about the role of gender in various aspects of the field, including physical expression and body image, classroom experiences and pedagogy, and performance and funding opportunities. The findings reveal how inequitable practices combined with societal pressures can create environments that hinder health, happiness, and success. At the same time, they highlight the individuals working to eliminate discrimination and open up new possibilities for expression and achievement in studios, choreography, performance venues, and institutions of higher education. The dance community can strive to eliminate discrimination, but first it must understand the status quo for gender in the dance world.

After decades of flying beneath the radar, co-operation as a principle of business and socio-economic organisation is moving from the margins of economic, social and political thought into the mainstream. In both the developed and developing worlds, co-operative models are increasingly viewed as central to tackling a diverse array of issues, including global food security, climate change, sustainable economic development, public service provision, and gender inequality. This collection, drawing together research from an interdisciplinary group of scholars and co-operative practitioners, considers the different spheres in which co-operatives are becoming more prominent. Drawing examples from different national and international contexts, the book offers major insights into how co-operation will come to occupy a more central role in social and economic life in the twenty-first century.

Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none has gone beyond and above the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan. This book demonstrates that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried.  Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world.  The book is based on the author’s painstaking research in Brazil and Japan between 1997 and 2013, involving extensive life history interviews (and follow-ups) with 116 Japanese Brazilians of several generations and diverse social backgrounds, in combination with substantial archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork.  This book examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity that comes from their engagement or experience of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure.  Each chapter illustrates how Japanese Brazilian identity is in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations.

This edited collection explores the figure of the female werewolf in art, folklore, history, film, literature and gaming culture. Female werewolves are less prevalent in mythology and popular culture than their male counterparts, and this collection offers some possible reasons for this. However, the essays in this volume also explore the particular challenges female werewolves pose – to gender construction, to ideals of femininity and corporeality, to racial and sexual norms, and to our concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘monstrosity’. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day, and deals with a range of media and texts; nevertheless, the thematic links between the chapters create a coherent ‘narrative’ of the female werewolf, while also rejecting a simple linear chronology. With chapters on folklore, witchcraft trials, history, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and role-playing games, the collection offers a number of critical approaches to the figure of the female werewolf.