Women and Gender: Useful Categories of Analysis in Environmental History

In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect, a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution on environmental history for the twenty-first century, and White, in Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature, addressed the need for further work on gender. Environmental history, Norwood noted, is just beginning to integrate gender analyses into mainstream work. 3 That assessment was particularly striking coming, as it did, after Norwood described the kind of ongoing and damaging misperceptions concerning the role of diversity, including gender, within environmental history. White concurred with Norwood, observing that environmental history in the previous fifteen years had been far more explicitly linked to larger trends in the writing of history, but he also issued a clear warning about the current trends in including the role of gender: The danger ... is not that gendering will be ignored in environmental history but that it will become predictable-an endless rediscovery that humans have often made nature female. Gender has more work to do than that. 4 Indeed it does. In 1992, the index to Carolyn Merchant\u27s The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History included three subheadings under women. Women and the egalitarian ideal and women and the environment each had only a few entries. Most entries were listed under the third subheading, activists and theorists, comprising seventeen names. 5 Nine years later Elizabeth Blum compiled Linking American Women\u27s History and Environmental History, an online preliminary historiography revealing gaps as well as strengths in the field emerging at the intersection of these two relatively new fields of study. At that time Blum noted that, with the exception of some scholarly interest being diverted to environmental justice movements and ecofeminism, most environmental history has centered on elite male concerns; generally, women\u27s involvement tends to be ignored or marginalized.

University Scholar Series: Alison McKee

The Woman’s Film of the 1940s: Gender, Narrative, and History On February 25, 2015, Dr. Alison L. McKee spoke in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Andy Feinstein at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Dr. McKee discussed her recent book, The Woman’s Film of the 1940s: Gender, Narrative, and History, which addresses the terrain between official public histories and private experiences of love, desire, and loss against the backdrop of World War II. McKee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Television, Radio, Film, and Theatre Arts at SJSU. She specializes in film history, theory and criticism, and gender issues. In particular, her interests include how gender and sexuality shape and inform narratives across different media.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1021/thumbnail.jp

"He knows me...but not at the museum": women, natural history collecting and museums, 1880-1914

This article examines women collectors of natural history during the period 1880-1914, their natural history practices, and their relationships with museums. It suggests that for women natural history collections could be used to create and modify gender identities

Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports

The history of gender challenges faced by women in elite sports is fraught with controversy and injustice. These athletes' unique physical beauty creates what appears to be a paradox yet is, in fact, scientifically predictable. Intense training for the highest levels of competition leads to unique bodily strength and rare beauty associated with specific anatomic changes, leading top athletes to be singled out as exceptions from their gender and even excluded from competing. Authorities like the IOC and IAF, as well as coaches and fellow athletes, use traditional and sometimes racialized aesthetic norms as the basis for ungrounded judgments of "gender mis-identity." Misjudging the gender identity of elite athletes exemplifies a biased cognitive framework, a form of erroneous and damaging categorical perception that we call "perceptual sexism." We argue that perceptual sexism has a long history within aesthetic and competitive realms and is still perpetuated by popular culture. Correcting this will reduce injustices created by gender identity controversies

You No Real Man : Constructing Gender, Sexuality, and the Asian American Subject in Jana Monji\u27s Kim

Jana Monji\u27s short story Kim offers a stunning plot twist that challenges readers initial interpretations of the characters as well as many assumptions and stereotypes about Asian American identity, gender, sexuality, and culture. Its pedagogical value for introducing basic literary theory, heterogeneity within gender and sexual identities, and Asian American culture and history is immeasurable. In this essay, I offer an overview of the story, my interpretations of the text, and the pedagogical strategies I use to introduce undergraduate students to concepts that often challenge their world views. Ultimately, this story provides instructors with an accessible and multifaceted text through which to present the basic tenets of gender theory, queer theory, and Asian American culture and history

Masculinity as Governance: police, public service and the embodiment of authority, c. 1700-1850

About the book: Public Men offers an introduction to an exciting new field: the history of masculinities in the political domain and will be essential reading for students and specialists alike with interests in gender or political culture. By building upon new work on gender and political culture, these new case studies explore the gendering of the political domain and the masculinities of the men who have historically dominated it. As such, Public Men is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of Britain between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth centuries

Taste à-la-Mode: Consuming foreignness, picturing gender

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday lifeN/

Joining forces: European periodical studies as a new research field

In recent decades, periodical studies have burgeoned into a vibrant field of research. Increasing numbers of scholars working in disciplines across the humanities — literary studies, history, art history, gender studies, media studies, legal history, to name a few — are exploring the press as a key site for cultural production, public debate and the dissemination of knowledge. [...

Variation in adrenal and thyroid hormones with life-history stage in juvenile northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris)

Interpretation of stress responses in wildlife is inadequate due to the range of natural variation and potential confounds of individual and life-history variables. In marine mammals, endocrine response data are sparse and variable across species. Blood adrenal and thyroid hormones were measured in 144 chemically immobilized yearling elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Reserve to characterize variation between sexes and across semiannual haul-outs. There was no relationship between hormone concentration and time needed for collecting blood or diel pattern, suggesting that concentrations represented baseline values. Serum cortisol concentrations did not vary with gender or across fasts but increased dramatically during molting. Cortisol was significantly correlated with aldosterone at all measured life-history. Thyroxine levels were lower in females and decreased with fasting in both sexes during the Fall haul-out. Cortisol concentrations were correlated with reverse T3 concentrations across all measured life-history stages suggesting an important impact of cortisol on deiodinase enzymes and thyroid function. Significant variation in stress hormone concentrations with gender and life- history stage emphasizes the importance of contextual variables when interpreting serum hormone concentrations

Journal Staff

Scandinavian prehistory has hitherto received little attention in the field of history didactics. In Swedish schools, it is taught in the lower grades in accordance with traditional periodization: the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and the Viking Age. The aim of the present thesis is to provide an overview of Scandinavian prehistory as presented by 20th- and early 21st-century history textbooks and to trace its development and revisions. These revisions are situated in relation to contemporary society and concurrent developments in archaeological research. This study attempts to demonstrate the extent to which history textbooks and archaeological research correspond. In a long-term perspective, the textbooks form a developmental chain in which the gradual revision of historical culture is made manifest. As presented in the textbooks, prehistoric history expresses a historical culture valid in the context of a particular era. The concept of cultural memory, a memory that extends so far back in history that it can only be mediated by someone with expert knowledge (e.g. teachers, journalists or scholars), is applied in order to observe changes in its description. Cultural memory reveals how some stories constantly recur, while others are neglected or forgotten. The textbooks have been compared to standard archaeological works and their development and revisions have been examined from dual perspectives - "story" as cultural memory and gender. The present thesis reveals that most of the stories have been remembered and repeated for more than a century, though interpretations sometimes change along with changes in society and progress in research. A gender perspective elucidates the chores and activities ascribed to prehistoric men and women, respectively, and the changes they have undergone. Although archaeological findings have been influenced by gender research, this study indicates that society itself has had the greatest impact on the treatment of gender in the textbooks. Perceptions of "male" and "female" have changed and women have been become visible after previously being as good as ignored. Both history textbooks and archaeological research are clearly affected by general trends in society and the textbooks under investigation have evolved from focusing on nationalistic aspects and the predominance of men to assigning equal value to people of all cultures and to the sexes