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This chapter examines the transition from convict leasing to chain gangs, providing an analysis of how white female protection was a condition of possibility for the establishment of chain gangs in Georgia. Focusing on the domestic carceral sphere, this chapter also examines the institution of parole, offering a detailed account of paroled black women’s forced work as domestic laborers for white families. In addition to legislative and cultural transition and domestic carcerality, this chapter also examines imprisoned black women’s widespread prosecution for acts of self defense against intimate and sexual violence.

This chapter discusses gender ideology in the 1930s, specifically during the Great Depression. The common thought was that work and the home were “separate spheres,” but this chapter argues that the reality was much more complex. The Depression serves as a case study for the interweaving of home and work needs, analyzing individual versus group/societal desires and the change in the expectations workers had of their professional roles. Public and private spheres increasingly overlapped, and even women, competing with one another for jobs, protested the social cost. The chapter ends by claiming that separate spheres were not separate, though gender was an element of the complex web of the wage discussion.

Chapter 5 concerns the dilemmas that female shamans face in their quest for power. By exploring the rise and fall of Chimeg, a female shaman, the chapter unpacks the discrepancy between egalitarian rules and hierarchical practice and asks why female shamans’ skills as shamanic practitioners do not translate into political and material empowerment. The author explores how multiple gender systems in domestic, local, national, and state contexts impede female shamans’ ascent to power both during socialism and a market economy. Female shamans are betwixt and between: they need to be married and maintain households in order to fit the moral standards of womanhood, but their marriages and homes become obstacles to their advancement. If female shamans leave their households in order to pursue their shamanic practices, their lack of kinship and household support also impede their empowerment. They encounter a glass ceiling in either case, and so many tend to resort to unconventional sexual unions and creative strategies to maintain their audiences. Most broadly, the author argues that shamanism might give women a temporary escape from the tyranny of household patriarchy, but at the price of making them victims of patriarchy in the public sphere.

This chapter examines the penetration of communication technologies into private space, especially interactive gambling technologies. Technologies of mass entertainment have traditionally met with resistance when crossing the divide into the domestic sphere. As with previous communication technologies, the incursion of the Internet into domestic space has caused concern. To the extent that new in-home communication technologies are used to foster instrumental, network relations in the home, they cross the gendered and largely illusory boundary between public and private, and concerns about the effects that in-home media technologies can have on families emerge. This chapter looks in particular at the "technopanic" caused by online gambling – primarily poker – in the early twenty-first century. It also uses survey data to examine the popularity of interactive, in-home pari-mutuel wagering in the United States and interrogates related domestic practices and relations, discussing their implications.

This chapter investigates the character and impact of the new antibiotech movement. It first presents a sketch of what the movement looks like and of whom it comprises. The chapter also describes the domestic regulatory sphere, the international regulatory sphere, and the corporate sphere, and evaluates their effectiveness. It then addresses the strengths and limitations of this type of activism. Social activism has not only forced the issue of biotechnology firmly onto the regulatory agenda but has also complicated the economic lives of biotechnology corporations. The antibiotechnology movement has certainly not stopped the biotechnology train in its tracks. But it has reduced its velocity, possibly altered its trajectory, and created a great deal of uncertainty for the life sciences firms by means of a vigorous and sustained political engagement with both the industry and governing agencies.

This essay considers how and why Federalist writers turned to the medium of fiction after the Revolution of 1800 in order to continue to express their concerns about the dangers of a Jeffersonian ascendency and the future of national development. By exploring the connections between rhetorical practices before and after Jefferson’s election, I argue that Federalist writers deployed the same tropes and metaphors to reflect on the loss of their authority despite the shift in genre from newspaper editorial to the novel form. Central to this practice was the use of reflections on the Haitian Revolution which served to represent the instabilities of plantation culture and its capacity to erode cultural mores. The essay focuses on Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807) as an emblematic example of the ways in which Federalist writers sought to deploy representations of planter decadence as a means of critiquing Jeffersonian power. Yet more than simply critiquing Jeffersonianism, Read also seeks to reframe the tenets of Federalism by advocating that properly ordered domestic spheres are the true source of cultural stability.

This chapter discusses how the rhetoric of secrecy enters the domestic sphere during and after wartime, and how it intersects with privacy, studying common wartime experiences, including evacuation and conscription, which had various effects on the family group. It includes several war stories. The chapter also discusses the possible effects war and wartime activities might have on the relationships of children and parents.

This chapter analyzes the intersection of American identity, citizenship, and food from the American Revolution to the 1840s. Early American cookbooks sought to define an American cuisine and American national character through the evolving concept of republican cuisine based on local ingredients, simplicity, and virtue. Women, excluded from most political decision making, turned to the cookbook genre to claim full citizenship and a political voice in shaping the young republic. An emerging middle class evoked an imaginary settler-cuisine to define themselves as Americans and to demarcate themselves from European decadence and corruption. Health advocates in the 1830s presented new ideas of what constitutes citizenship in establishing a connection between the individual body and the nation’s well-being. Key texts and art by Joel Barlow, Amelia Simmons, Raphaelle Peale, Lydia Maria Child, Sylvester Graham, Mary Randolph, Eliza Leslie, and Robert Roberts reflect changes in the conceptualization of the nation, identity, and national values.

Explores recent animated films that embrace the idea that belonging to a community does not require conformity to social expectations, but rather builds on the protagonist’s individuality and seeming queerness. In box office hits like Ratatouille (Bird, 2007), Kung Fu Panda (Osborn and Stevenson, 2008), and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller, 2009), and in the lesser known Bee Movie (Hickner and Smith. 2007), The Tale of Desperaux (Fell and Stevenhagen, 2008), character development connects closely with food, which becomes the instrument of the heroes’ redemption even when it would initially appear to be the very cause of their social isolation. This raises the question: What models of acceptable adulthood – in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and body image - does the interaction with food present to viewers, in particular children, who are arguably among the main marketing targets of these productions? Although cooking is still often culturally framed as an element of the domestic and feminine sphere, in these films food is not domestic or related to care work, and as such appears as more culturally acceptable for males.

This chapter studies Chan master Jizong Xingche (b. 1606). Jizong Xingche—as seems to have been the case with many seventeenth-century abbesses—was not content to simply engage in Buddha recitation as would benefit a pious woman, and in particular a pious and loyal widow, of her times. Rather, the taste of joy and freedom impelled her not only to make a more radical break with the domestic sphere but also to actively seek out instruction from qualified teachers. Jizong Xingche’s immersion in religious texts, such as Yunqi Zhuhong’s Progress on the Chan Path, led her to an overly intellectual understanding of enlightenment.

This chapter discusses the erosion of traditional statehood and its consequences for constitutionalism. The modern constitution referred to the state. The emergence of the constitution pre-supposed the existence of the modern state. Its regulatory force depended on the two boundaries that characterized the state: the boundary between the domestic and the international sphere and the boundary between the public and the private sphere. The chapter describes why and how these boundaries became porous in the twentieth century and that, as a consequence, the constitution can no longer fulfil its promise to regulate public power comprehensively. Internally its regulatory force is diminishing. Externally it loses applicability. No full compensation for the loss has yet been reached on the international level. What is called constitutionalization of supranational public power is far from the achievement of constitutionalism.