Social Science : Gender Studies

Birthing the Nation analyses two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British state, and the emergence of the man-midwife as the pre-eminent authority over sex and childbirth. By exploring peculiar episodes in the history of the reproductive body and the body politic, from stories of pregnant men to rumours that a midwife had foisted a 'suppositious' child on the nation as the Prince of Wales, this original and. provocative work proposes how national, religious, ethnic, and gendered identities were experienced through and symbolized by birth and midwifery. - ;How could the professional triumph of man-midwifery and contemporary tales of pregnant men, rabbit-breeding mothers, and meddling midwives in eighteenth-century Britain help construct the emergence of modern corporate and individual identities? By uncovering long-lost tales and artefacts about sexuality, birth, and popular culture, Lisa Forman Cody argues that Enlightenment Britons understood themselves and their relationship to others through their experiences and beliefs about the. reproductive body. Birthing the Nation traces two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British nation, and the emergence of the male expert as the pre-eminent authority over matters of sexual behaviour, reproduction, and childbirth. By. taking seriously contemporary caricatures, jokes, and rumours that used gender, birth, and family to make claims about religious, ethnic and national identity, Cody illuminates an entirely new view of the eighteenth-century public sphere as focused on the bodily and the bizarre. In a monarchy arbitrated by its official religion, regulation of reproduction and childbirth was vital to the very stability of British political authority and the coherence of British culture, challenged as it was by Catholicism, the French Revolution, and social change. In the late seventeenth c more...

Price: $39.95

This book is about how African American males experience masculinity politics, and how U.S. sexism and racial ranking influences relationships between black and white males. Lemelle argues that the only way to accommodate African American males is to eliminate sexism, particularly as it appears in the organization of families. more...

Price: $95.00

This book introduces students to the key concepts and debates surrounding the relationship between bodily boundaries, abject materiality and spaces. It uses interviews, focus group data and case studies and will critically engage the students. more...

Price: $53.95

Since World War II, when the diet and fitness industries promoted mass obsession with weight and body shape, fat has been a dirty word. In the United States, fat is seen as repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose. Bodies Out of Bounds challenges these dominant perceptions by examining social representations of the fat body. more...

Price: $15.95

The contributors to this volume join the discussion of 'the body' and its place in postmodern discourse by focusing on the challenges women face when their externally defined identities and representations as bodies - their body fictions - speak louder than what they know to be their true selves. more...

Price: $15.15