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This chapter theorizes gender at Fort Caroline and in the early Protestant Atlantic as an historically, culturally specific system for defining relations of power, which marked some as more masculine (powerful, dominant) and others as less masculine or feminine (weak, dependent, submissive) in relation to those with more masculinity. Long after their authors were dead, the Protestant travel narratives that are the sources for this study continued to do the gendered work of colonialism by characterizing Indigenous gender systems, hygienic customs, third gender–specific roles and fashions, and instances when Indigenous women demonstrated power as transgressions of Christian gender norms that Protestant colonizers obliged themselves to “fix” by imposing Christian norms.

This chapter presents the typical profile of the women examined in the book. Autobiographical writings and interviews show that all the women received the same white supremacist education, a combination of racist prejudices and specific gender norms, which rendered any personal interaction with black men and women impossible. It then shows how these women came to reject their education by deliberately unlearning racism and liberating themselves from the prescriptions of white southern womanhood in the process. Typically, the women who became involved in the “long” civil rights movement started with an acute sense of guilt through a traumatic episode or an epiphany constituting the catalyst for their repudiation of white supremacy. The chapter analyzes the main factors of their subsequent transformation, i.e. interracial contact, religion, and higher education. It concludes by showing how these women's racial activism inevitably entailed their emancipation from southern gender norms.

Chapter 4 pictures the rural community of Galle Toubaaco before the Tostan programme. It looks at three aspects of community members’ life that are tracked throughout the HRE part of their participation in the Tostan program. This chapter examines in particular how community members constructed gender relations, made decisions or had access to the decision-making process, and fulfilled roles available to them. It also uncovers existing social norms before the programme began, showing that some human-rights-inconsistent norms and practices were in place and offering an analysis of the reasons for it.

This chapter sketches ideas on effective prevention and ways that different stakeholders may work toward reducing, and ultimately ending, domestic and sexual violence. It categorizes a few general pathways and charts issues that might facilitate or create barriers to preventing violence against girls and women. It draws on discussions from a 2014 violence prevention workshop as well as findings from prevention research on diverse populations in various cultures. Some of the prevention themes have emerged from a focus on systems-level reforms; others focus on larger cultural modifications that would transform whole communities and gender norms.

Chapter 7 explains why and how behavioural and social change happened. It investigates how in the HRE classes, participants contextualised the abstract human rights knowledge within their local understandings of the world and traditional values. That contextualisation fostered revisions in participants’ understanding of themselves and others and expanded individual and collective aspirations and capabilities. This chapter also analyses the role of the programme in creating a space where gender segregation could be overcome, where men and women could sit and talk together, sharing decisions, and how that affected the aspirations, perceived freedoms, and capabilities of the entire community. The theory described in chapter two is critically reviewed and expanded.

After the Civil War, gender and racial expectations remained fluid. The antebellum social hierarchy could not be completely resurrected and the postbellum society could only function with some sort of reciprocity. These expectations changed on every level- from courtship to common law marriage to legal marriage. Women of New Orleans demanded the right to be free from violence.

Since China launched its historic process of economic reform and opening up in the late 1970s, women have become vulnerable to the impact of economic restructuring on employment. This chapter focuses on the impact of economic transition and social transformation on women’s choices of cosmetic surgery. It explores why cosmetic surgery is widely considered as an “investment” to gain “beauty capital” among Chinese girls and women. In particular, it explores the phenomenon of Chinese high school and college students rushing to have cosmetic surgery over summer/winter holidays to get an edge in a tight job market.The obsession with female beauty in workplaces and in the marriage market is rooted in traditional Chinese gender norms, where women’s appearances are more emphasized than their ability and talents.

The work of Francesca Woodman has commonly been read in light of her depression and tragic suicide at the age of just twentytwo as the figuration of (or rehearsal for) an act of disappearance. This essay aligns itself with the scholarship of Claire Raymond (2010) who argues through Kant’s notion of the sublime that, in actual fact, Woodman stages a precise dissection of what it means to be both the subject and object of her own gaze. Drawing on feminist theories of spectatorship and photography, this chapter demonstrates how Woodman engages with visual tropes in order to ‘image’ the fragile and liminal moment of a young girl becoming-woman. As such, the author argues, that Woodman addresses directly the manifold ways in which gender norms are brought to bear on the female body through the mechanics of the gaze.

This chapter examines gender norms and sexuality, drug use, and music—important signifiers of identity, sociability, and agency. In popular parlance, “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” often prompts thoughts of hippies practicing free love while stoned and listening to Jimi Hendrix. A lot of that happened. But the adage also serves as a doorway into a broad range of sensibilities, innovations, and conflicts that lay bare cultural contestations—with generational overtones and sociopolitical implications—during Chile’s road to socialism then dictatorship. Sex, drugs, and rock music were part and parcel of a generation’s Zeitgeist, as many young people searched for things ethereal and new at a unique time in modern history.