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Once, My Husband

Diane Daniel (ed.)

in Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina

In the personal essayOnce, My Husband, Diane Daniel describes the day of the transsexual surgery of her husband-then-wife.

Agency, Alterity, and the Two Bodies of the King

Isaac Ariail Reed

in Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies

This chapter begins with a contrast: between the language and action of Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., leader of Bacon's Rebellion (1676) and Herman Husband, a leader in the Whiskey Rebellion (1794). Bacon ... More

This chapter begins with a contrast: between the language and action of Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., leader of Bacon's Rebellion (1676) and Herman Husband, a leader in the Whiskey Rebellion (1794). Bacon claimed to be a true representative of the King, over and against the Colony of Virginia's appointed governor. Husband preached millenarian visions of the perfect democratic republic. To understand the contrast, one needs to understand the pragmatic deployment of the King's Two Bodies—the king's mortal, natural body and his ethereal, sacred "second body," represented on coins and seals, as well as at his funeral and in the next King's coronation—as a way to do politics in the first British Empire, and, more broadly, throughout the early modern Atlantic world. One effect of the three great Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century was to creatively destroy the King's Two Bodies as the cultural background with which long chains of power were built. Without the King's Two Bodies to solve agency problems, different cultural solutions to the recurrent problems of shoring up hierarchy were needed. This is how to understand Herman Husband's enchanted sermons, which were obsessed with delegation from the body of the people to the leader.Less

Imaginings of Home

Francisca Yuenki Lai

in Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires

The chapter investigates the imaginings of home projected by Indonesian domestic workers while they are working in Hong Kong. Their imaginaries of future home provide important information for ... More

The chapter investigates the imaginings of home projected by Indonesian domestic workers while they are working in Hong Kong. Their imaginaries of future home provide important information for understanding their desires and sexuality in relation to the local ideology of migration and marriage as well as the political economy of family, that is, the gender division of labor and earnings contributed by women. The chapter also enriches the notion of Asian queer subjectivity by addressing how Indonesian women insinuated their homoerotic desires into the heteronormative logic of home. Addressing the Islamic context, the chapter also attends to the unmarried women who would not continue a same-sex relationship after returning to their natal family.Less

Twenty-Eight

Sherri Snyder

in Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood

Six weeks behind schedule due to run-ins with film censors, Sandra (1924), Barbara’s first film under her starring contract with Arthur Sawyer’s Associated Pictures Corporation and First National, ... More

Six weeks behind schedule due to run-ins with film censors, Sandra (1924), Barbara’s first film under her starring contract with Arthur Sawyer’s Associated Pictures Corporation and First National, enters production. Feeling intense pressure to succeed in the role, Barbara pushes through filming; Sawyer, exercising complete control over the production, again underscores her vamp image.My Husband’s Wives (1924), written four years earlier by Barbara for the Fox Film Corporation, is released the same day as Sandra; details relating to plot synopses, critical reception, and production are given for both films. Barbara, haunted by the medical diagnosis she received months earlier, lives life to the fullest, diving headlong into an affair with socialite Benjamin (“Ben”) Finney. Wanting to marry Finney but lacking legal clearance to do so, Barbara becomes the center of another scandal near the chapter’s close: a purported suicide attempt.Less

Fighting back: resistance and responses to marital violence, 1922–65

Cara Diver

in Marital Violence in Post-Independence Ireland, 1922-96: 'A Living Tomb for Women'

This chapter focuses on the ways in which wives resisted their husbands’ abuse. Although the options available to them were limited, abused wives responded to their husbands’ violence in a variety of ... More

This chapter focuses on the ways in which wives resisted their husbands’ abuse. Although the options available to them were limited, abused wives responded to their husbands’ violence in a variety of ways: they fought back with retaliatory violence; appealed to family, friends, or neighbours for help; sought guidance from parish priests; reported the abuse to the Gardaí; charged their husbands with assault; petitioned for judicial separations; and/or left the marital home. In the process of reacting to and resisting their husbands’ violence, abused women involved a wide variety of people in their private plight and drew upon a broad network of support. Indeed, marital violence blurred the boundaries between ‘private’ and ‘public’ behaviour because so many people outside of the conjugal unit were forced to confront the issue. In assessing how the wider community understood and reacted to marital violence, this chapter draws broader conclusions about gendered expectations within marriage, the nature of family life, and the relationship between family and community.Less

A Dark-Haired Dame and Her Scottish Admirer

Andrew Talle

in Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter four uses the travel diary of James Boswell, a Scottish aristocrat and future biographer of Samuel Johnson, as the basis for a discussion of how keyboard music figured in courtship. Women ... More

Chapter four uses the travel diary of James Boswell, a Scottish aristocrat and future biographer of Samuel Johnson, as the basis for a discussion of how keyboard music figured in courtship. Women were generally expected to remain passive in courtship, as revealed by novels, poems, paintings, and self-help manuals. The keyboard offered a means of showcasing talents for suitors and also a kind of innoculation against more nefarious entertainments during the vulnerable years before marriage. Some women, however, employed music making in a multivalent manner. Boswell’s flirtations with the daughter of Berlin’s city council president, Caroline Kircheisen, offer a vivid case in point. Her late-night harpsichord performances for Boswell expressed the exact opposite of what he wanted them to mean.Less

Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One’s Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies and Calculated Cross-Dressing

Vara S. Neverow

in Contradictory Woolf

This chapter offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, focusing on the four Marys in the novel. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three Marys: Mary ... More

This chapter offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, focusing on the four Marys in the novel. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three Marys: Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael. The narrator also hints that we may also call Mary “George,” as in Hamilton. The chapter then cites the historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf's text. While scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish Ballad narrated by Mary Hamilton, the chapter here raises the possibility that Woolf may have also been influenced by Henry Fielding's fictionalized 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement, with lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton as the protagonist. It also suggests that Woolf counters Fielding's patriarchal views by endorsing her own Sapphism and the expression of female sexual desire.Less

Resourceful Odysseus

M. L. West

in The Making of the Odyssey

This chapter examines the figure of Odysseus and argues that he came from ancient tradition but was at first a trickster, celebrated for ingenuity and guile. As the saga of the Trojan War developed, ... More

This chapter examines the figure of Odysseus and argues that he came from ancient tradition but was at first a trickster, celebrated for ingenuity and guile. As the saga of the Trojan War developed, taking in heroes from other legendary contexts, Odysseus became attached to it as the man who devised the Wooden Horse and so brought about the final victory. He was also made the hero of two folk-tale narratives that came to Greece from abroad: the stories of the Blinded Cyclops and of the Returning Husband. The attachment of the latter story to Odysseus laid the basis for the first Odyssey, a generation or two before the one we have.Less