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‘The Power of Our Mouths’: Gossip as a Female Mode of Revenge¹

Fiona McHardy

in Revenge and Gender in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Literature

This chapter examines gendered methods of revenge as depicted in ancient Greek literature and court trails. While men favour physical attacks or judicial processes when taking revenge on an enemy, ... More

This chapter examines gendered methods of revenge as depicted in ancient Greek literature and court trails. While men favour physical attacks or judicial processes when taking revenge on an enemy, women are typically thought to be too weak to attack in these ways and are shown using persuasion or trickery to achieve revenge or bringing up their children as future avengers. Gossip provides another mechanism by which women and other disempowered individuals, such as slaves, can take revenge: either directly, by damaging an individual’s reputation, or indirectly, by provoking others to violent behaviour. Focusing on literary texts (such as Aeschylus’ Choephori, Euripides’ Andromache and Hippolytus, and Chariton’s novel Chaereas and Callirhoe) and legal revenge narratives (such as Lysias’ On the Murder of Eratosthenes) the chapter demonstrates how women find circuitous and covert ways to achieve revenge, while simultaneously showing how women’s reputation for gossip allows them to be used as scapegoats for men’s violence. Less

Popular Science Magazines

in Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

The move from books to magazines takes us into different territory, although there was some overlap between the kind of popular science written for self-education in the two formats. Magazines were ... More

The move from books to magazines takes us into different territory, although there was some overlap between the kind of popular science written for self-education in the two formats. Magazines were published for a wide range of different readers, from those with a serious interest in science to those seeking news about how technical developments might affect their everyday lives. The total readership of all kinds seems to have been limited; so many publications tried to reach both the serious and the general reader, but satisfied neither. Peter Broks charts a decline in the coverage of science in popular magazines during the first decade of the twentieth century, and there was even less science during the interwar period. Items relating to science featured regularly in some special-interest publications where there was an obvious link with a particular area of science. Three relatively serious popular science magazines founded in the late Victorian period were Science Gossip, Knowledge, and Illustrated Science News.Less

Fidler Fiddles

Chris Yogerst

in Hollywood Hates Hitler!: Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures

Fidler provided an overview of his life in Hollywood for the past twenty-two years. Beginning as an actor, he transitioned to a press agent, and eventually became a columnist and radio personality ... More

Fidler provided an overview of his life in Hollywood for the past twenty-two years. Beginning as an actor, he transitioned to a press agent, and eventually became a columnist and radio personality where he worked for the past seven years. Fidler’s column, “Jimmie Fidler in Hollywood,” was syndicated across approximately 140 papers. His radio show aired at 6:15pm on Friday nights. Fidler commanded a team of two dozen reporters that helped gather news and review films. Fidler and his team were regularly invited onto studio lots for preview screenings and celebrity interviews. Much of Fidler’s recent coverage had been critical of Hollywood films and their crusade against fascism, something that did not surprise anyone familiar with Fidler’s attitude towards the film colony. Fidler argued that he had taken up arms against film propaganda “because I am sure the public does not want it.”Less

Hollywood Confidential: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

Jon Lewis

in Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal ... More

The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.Less

Hollywood’s Last Lonely Places: The Sad, Short Stories of Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe

Jon Lewis

in Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads ... More

Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.Less

Queering the Post-L Word Shane in the “Garden of Eden”: Chinese Fans’ Gossip about Katherine Moennig

Jing Jamie Zhao

in Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian ... More

This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.Less

Cunhas: Situational Kinship and Everyday Authority

Jon Schubert

in Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola

This chapter looks at practices of situative kinship in everyday interactions between citizens and agents of the state, and the ideas of power and hierarchy expressed in these practices. This reveals ... More

This chapter looks at practices of situative kinship in everyday interactions between citizens and agents of the state, and the ideas of power and hierarchy expressed in these practices. This reveals the tensions between what people see as the real functioning of society, and their perspectives on how society should work. However, the idea of kinship an oppositional discourse must be complicated through the exploration of the everyday practice of mobilising cunhas (personal connections) for one’s own purposes. Exploring these cunhas — based on intimate knowledge of Luandan family networks — allows us to trace the multiple linkages between state and society, combine in the analysis social strata commonly studied separately, and complicate any overly simplistic notions of nepotism and corruption. Less

Performance and Print Culture: Two Eighteenth-Century Actresses and Their Image Control

Joanna Jarvis

in Pen, print and communication in the eighteenth century

The middle of the eighteenth century saw a growing interest in the private lives of public figures and a particular style of press reporting began to shine a spotlight on women who displayed a level ... More

The middle of the eighteenth century saw a growing interest in the private lives of public figures and a particular style of press reporting began to shine a spotlight on women who displayed a level of autonomy in their lives. This chapter examines how two actresses attempted to counter some of the negative attention that this created. The newspapers began to highlight perceived social transgressions and new publications appeared based almost entirely on gossip. The power of an image was added to this through the popularity of satirical prints and the ability to publish these began to be exploited by some of the new magazines. Each of the two actresses examined attempted to take control of the creation of their public persona, with varying degrees of success.Less

Introduction: Life and Letters

Wendy Parkins

in Jane Morris: The Burden of History

This chapter introduces the material and discursive aspects of life writing that underpin this study. That is, it outlines both the textual archive on which previous accounts of Jane Morris have been ... More

This chapter introduces the material and discursive aspects of life writing that underpin this study. That is, it outlines both the textual archive on which previous accounts of Jane Morris have been based (letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies, especially biographies of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the artefacts which may also have a role in re-telling the story of a life, such as embroidery, designs and keepsake books produced by Jane Morris. Integral to this book’s project to present an alternative account of Jane Morris is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus which seeks to foreground how a sense of self and agency are shaped through the conjunction of larger social structures (such as class) and specific material environments and locations (such as the family home or the workplace).Less

Individualism, intrigue and esprit de corps

Christopher Prior

in Exporting empire: Africa, colonial officials and the construction of the British imperial state, c.1900−39

This chapter will argue that, in contrast with the usual argument that officials worked effectively alongside one another, bound by fraternal sentiments fostered in large part by the public school ... More

This chapter will argue that, in contrast with the usual argument that officials worked effectively alongside one another, bound by fraternal sentiments fostered in large part by the public school system, the colonial services of Africa were in fact riven with tensions along a number of axes, including age and different approaches to governance. Most significant of these, however, was officials' ongoing search for individualistic self-fulfillment untrammelled by the endeavours and attitudes of others. Whilst many recognised that socialising was essential to their morale, many officials simultaneously resented the constraints that being a member of a small, inward-looking, and gossip-driven European community placed upon them. Public schools therefore failed in their efforts to inculcate all with a sense of an esprit de corps amongst Britain's overseas officials.Less

‘The Lady Interviewer and her methods’: Chatter, Celebrity, and Reading Communities

Rebecca Roach

in Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period

This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping ... More

This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping figure. Yet she also had her real-life counterparts: women who used this stereotype to break into the print and broadcast media industries in increasing numbers, and who in turn supported the expansion of print media oriented towards women’s professional and social interests. Increasingly close associations between female journalists and Hollywood fan magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, would however, see a decline in the reputation of both the Lady Interviewer and her female readers. This chapter explores the constructions of specific reading communities forged through interviewing in popular media.Less