Philippa Levine

Gender and empire

1. Why Gender and Empire? 2. Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century 3. Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century 4. Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century 5. Medicine, Gender, and Empire 6. Sexuality, Gender, and Empire 7. Gender and Migration 8. Nations in an Imperial Crucible 9. Legacies of Departure: Decolonization, Nation-making, and Gender 10. Empire and Violence 1900-1939 11. Childhood and Race: Growing up in the Empire 12. Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family 13. Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories

THE MULTIPLE JEOPARDY OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER FOR AIDS RISK AMONG WOMEN:

This article focuses on the ways that sexual risk behaviors are related to race, class, and gender among low-income, culturally diverse women in South Florida. Data concerning sexual risk (frequency of condom use) and gender (decision making with regard to condom use and gender attitudes) are presented in terms of race and class variations. Results indicate that, in general, these women have a high degree of knowledge about acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), a quite contemporary awareness of womens gendered subordination, and a lack of trust in heterosexual relationships. Attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge, however, are not translated into sexual behaviors with men partners that would reduce their vulnerability to infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The data indicate that race is a major factor that places women into an underclass position. Consequently, without socioeconomic resources, gendered behaviors have a direct influence on sexual risk. Multivariate analyses indicate that those women who are sex workers are significantly more likely to negotiate safe sex with clients than with main partners. The research not only challenges mainstream thinking about race, class, and gender but also provides overdue information on the vulnerability of women to HIV infection.

Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment.

Preface: configuring feminism historically. Part 1 Private lives: family, faith and politics reappropriating adulthood understanding the empty places - love, friendship, and womens networks. Part 2 Public commitment: disrupting the dark continent breaking the male monopoly - politics, law and feminism invading the public sphere - employment, education and the middle class women nurturing the sickly plants - women, labour and unionism. Conclusion: organizing principles - re-reading the political geneaology of feminism.

States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination

The politics and aesthetics of nakedness was, for Victorians, both complex and slippery, the result of ambivalent nineteenth-century attitudes toward the unclothed body. This essay argues that such vexed attitudes about nudity and nakedness in Victorian Britain cannot fully be comprehended without reference to the experience of empire. Colonialisms seemingly timeless fascination with indigenous undress provoked a number of questions about human difference, evolution, and the nature of civilization. Analyzing different readings of nakedness in the worlds of science (especially anthropology), high art, and popular culture, this essay examines the enduring association between savagery and the lack of clothing.

Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia

A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta— Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects. Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities

In what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed the ‘colonial imaginary’ issues of femininity, and who possessed it, were of prime importance. An orientalizing sociology sought to distinguish, and indeed to fix, differences between metropolitan and indigenous women as a rhetoric of hierarchy which secured proper and western femininity to white women. One critical route which colonial commentators and authorities took to produce that knowledge was to measure womens proximity to the practice of prostitution, a means which permitted discussion and judgement of racialized sexualities as well as of proper models of feminine behaviour. This article will explore the ways in which the new sociology of the Victorian period, wielded in a colonial context, served to separate women through race-based ideas of sexual behaviour and sexual order. It will deal with British India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as “Constitutional Crisis” in Britain and British India

My tale is an eloquent one, with heroes and villains, crises and angst, passion and fury. What it lacks in resolution it more than makes up for in dramatic tension. It is a story set in Britain and India in the 1890s, a time of intense polarities. This was the decade in which Oscar Wilde, Britains most lionized playwright, was imprisoned for homosexuality; in which the spark of “new unionism” flared and then fizzled; in which Britain competed in the “scramble for Africa,” adding new colonial possessions to its already ample stockpile. It was the decade of imperial budgets, of mounting tension in South Africa, of the call for tariff reform, of the “new Woman,” and of that curious political hybrid, Liberal-Unionism.

Battle Colors: Race, Sex, and Colonial Soldiery in World War I

The First World War saw the adoption in Britain of significant measures of constraint aimed at white working-class women and at black colonial, especially Indian, soldiers. While British and Dominion troops enjoyed considerable freedom of movement away from the battlefield, black mens and working-class womens mobility and their sexuality were closely controlled. In both instances, the most visible mark of disloyalty was the contraction or passing on of a sexually transmitted disease. Venereal disease control became one of the key justifications for wartime restrictions of these already disadvantaged groups. This article connects the discourse of imperial racism and its associated sexual anxieties to the ways in which such apparent disloyalties allowed authorities to deny citizenship claims from women and from colonial men through a reading of their sexuality.

“So Few Prizes and So Many Blanks”: Marriage and Feminism in Later Nineteenth-Century England

Marriage, for the nineteenth-century woman, was perhaps the single most profound and far-reaching institution that would affect the course of her life. For the woman who did not marry, whether by choice or by chance, spinsterhood marked her as one of societys unfortunates, cast aside from the common lot of the sex. For the woman who did enter wedlock, marriage spelled, simultaneously, a loss of freedom in both political and financial matters, perhaps domestic drudgery and frequent pregnancy, but undoubtedly a clear elevation in social status. Class position aside, marriage had a far greater effect on the lives of women than of men, and the pressures for women to marry were correspondingly far greater than those brought to bear upon men. The meaning and significance of marriage in Victorian England represented a central pressure point in the lives of all women. It was undoubtedly one of the major agencies of socialization to which women were exposed; the pressures it imposed were enormously persuasive and difficult to resist. Family expectation and even self-esteem competed with the public assessment of women on the basis of their marital status. For women, marriage and its effects permeated every aspect of their daily existence and shifted the focus of their emotional and social contacts—what Patricia Jalland has dubbed their “bedroom-bathroom intimacy”—from their own families to those of their husbands. The growing demographic imbalance between the sexes during the course of the nineteenth century was viewed with alarm by contemporary commentators who feared that the changing ratio of men to women would increase the numbers of unmarried women.

Substance Use among Women at Risk for HIV Infection

This article reports results from a survey of culturally diverse women at risk for HIV infection in south Florida. Data concerning their substance use and its association with HIV risk behaviors are presented. Results indicate levels of consumption which exceed expectations based on general estimates of female substance use. Further, substance use was associated with specific behaviors and lifestyles which placed the women at increased risk for HIV infection.