Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment: Gender and History

Violence, its specificity and significance across temporal and spatial boundaries, is a key topic for feminist scholarship. This well–illustrated collection uses new and interdisciplinary approaches in gender history to explore violence as a form of gendered embodiment across place and time. The contributors discuss violence in a wide range of contexts, from castration and blinding as punishment for treason in Normandy and Anglo–Norman England, through the rearing of professional female fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia, to the Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India in 2002. They ask why some forms of violence are valorised, permitted or rendered invisible, while others are stigmatised, policed or criminalised; and they consider the relationship between everyday violent acts, and the extraordinary or spectacular use of violence as humiliation or punishment. The book helps readers to understand violence as a as a performative act that can be read symptomatically and as a diagnostic for deeper, more complex historical structures.

Notes on Contributors. INTRODUCTION. 1. Violence and the Vulnerabilities of Gender (Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao). VULNERABILITIES. 2. Female Suicide, Subjectivity and the State in Eighteenth–Century China (Janet Theiss). 3. ‘She Is But a Woman’: Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System (Ginger Frost). 4. Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post–War El Salvador (Irina Carlota Silber). POTENTIALITIES. 5. Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo–Norman England (Klaus Van Eickels). 6. Precarious Conditions: A Note on Counter–Insurgency in Africa After 1945 (LuiseWhite). 7. Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women–Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia (Anna Krylova). 8. "Generous Amazons Came to the Breach’: Besieged Women, Agency and Subjectivity During the French Wars of Religion (Brian Sandberg). VISIBILITIES. 9. Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese–Indonesian Rape Debate in Post–Suharto Indonesia (Karen Strassler). 10. Woman and Violence in Artistic Discourse of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1922) (Anna N. Eremeeva) Translated by (Dan Healy). 11. Un/safe/ly at Home: Narratives of Sexual Coercion in 1920s Egypt (Marilyn Booth). POSSIBILITIES. 12. Rethinking Law and Violence: The Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India, 2002 (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan). 13. Prostitution, Sex Work and Violence: Discursive and Political Contexts for Five Texts on Paid Sex, 1987–2001 (Svati P. Shah). 14. Apparitions of Desire: Clive van den Berg and the Art of Historical Unknowability (Rosalind C. Morris). Index.

Shani D′Cruze is Reader in Gender History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was co–editor of the journal Gender and History between 2000 and 2004. Her main publications are on the nineteenth– and twentieth–century social and cultural history of violence, crime and gender and the gender history of the nineteenth–century family. Anupama Rao is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her interests are in Indian nationalism; anti–caste struggles; caste, gender and the family form in nineteenth– and twentieth–century western India; historical anthropology; the anthropology of violence; human rights and feminist and critical theory.