New Historical Perspectives Gender, Emotions and Power, 17502020

A wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between gender, emotions, and power. The fact that emotional expectations have gendered, racialized, and class-based components has only recently begun to be a topic of discussion in general society. This book tackles contemporary debates around the issue, considering the ways emotional expectations have been attained, stratified, and maintained by institutions, societies, media, and those with access to structural or personal power. The contributors draw upon a diverse set of case studies to present a chronologically and geographically broad intervention. The authors identify and explore connections between the depiction of twentieth-century transnational radical feminists, the settler colonies of southern Africa, post-unification Italy, Maoist China, the twentieth-century Soviet Union, and the medicalized spaces of the British Raj. Contributions also move across time from notions of eighteenth-century British masculinity through Victorian Britain to the Liverpool docks of the 1990s and contemporary Russia. Collectively, the volume’s authors seek to understand how the normalization of emotions as a range of gendered feelings forms the basis upon which notions of self and social identities are performed.