A man to whom God grants that he may return will be greatly honoured in this world. Whoever has loved well in his country should preserve the memory of it wherever he goes. And may God allow me to enjoy the best lady, so that I might find her in life and health, when God has completed his business!

The concept of crusading is inextricably linked with men, both in medieval sources and in modern imaginations. The quote above, from an anonymous twelfth-century Anglo-Norman crusade recruitment song, extols the benefits gained by a returning crusader. It links crusading with the manly pursuit of honour, encouraging men to take the cross as a devotional sacrifice, leaving behind women and love. Returning to ‘the best lady’ was the crusader’s reward for completing ‘God’s business’. The idea that crusades were for men, and not for women, was probably widespread at the end of the twelfth century. Crusading had been conceived of and promoted by the medieval Church as a manly endeavour since the preaching of the First Crusade.

‘Lives and Adventures 1: Irish Women and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ traces a line of development in fiction by Irish women, from the works of Mary Davys early in the century, which are concerned with identifying female agency in plot-structure through a variety of narrative strategies, to epistolary works of sensibility by mid century Irish women writers such as Frances Sheridan (1724–66) and Elizabeth Griffith (1727–93) where plot and form exist in tension, with the epistolatory form allowing women’s voices to speak through plots that would inhibit their agency. Through letter writing and the keeping of journals, and incorporating these elements into the novel, a new form of interiority emerges in eighteenth-century novels by Irish women. By the end of the century, the novels of Elizabeth Sheridan portray female lives of confidence and assertion by framing women’s lives in the context of an emerging nationalism.

This chapter examines how the Pan-European Union marketed itself as a feminine political outlet, while also trying to recast heroism/masculinity in a manner that was compatible with its antiwar objectives. Additionally, this chapter delves into women’s experiences in the German government more broadly to establish why PEU members argued governments needed a complete transformation. Despite gaining the right to vote, women involved in Weimar politics faced insurmountable obstacles and hostility. The PEU tried to appeal to politically active women by inviting them to join their movement, where their “unique skills and character” were vital to their success. Rather than being ostracized and shut out because of their sex, the PEU suggested women who supported European federalism would be honored and placed in positions of leadership.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

This chapter examines the significance of fashion in Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Briefly tracing the use of fashion, gloves, and related accessories in American and Black women’s literature, the chapter closely reads two moments in the novel in which the protagonist, Lutie Johnson, dons white gloves. The chapter argues that although the gloves are signs of Lutie’s financial aspirations and facilitate her movement away from her confined apartment, the gloves ultimately fail to protect her from the violence of the street.

Had Giulio Strozzi not recognized Barbara as his daughter, she might have led an entirely different life. Like so many other illegitimate children, she could have grown up within one of Venice’s charitable institutions. This chapter explores the path not taken – the kind of opportunities available to musically talented girls who were not accepted by their family but instead abandoned at the foundling home called the Ospedale della Pietà. Documentation regarding the Ospedale’s musicians reveals the influences of governing patrician men and surrounding social conditions on these orphaned women’s musical activities. Despite strict regulation of women’s public performance, these nonelite female musicians developed successful lifelong musical careers and their own financial autonomy, somewhat comparable to Barbara Strozzi’s, by means of their musical skills, public popularity, and the resultant patronage.

This chapter examines life writing texts created by out gay Black men. These texts – written and cinematic – seek to archive Black gay existence in historical and social contexts that are often threatening. More than just records of life, they question assumed knowledge and the certainty we have about the ideologies that order our lives. For these artists, autobiography, a form of ostensible transparency or showing, is about making transparent destructive ideologies. The chapter is structured around four key themes (sex and sociality, injury and identity, the feminine within, and the power of opacity), each of which identifies a recurring strategy in Black gay art making as well as a narrative mechanism for questioning normativity and revealing the constraints placed on Black gay men’s lives. The discussion centers on the following artists: Samuel Delany, RuPaul, Saeed Jones, and Marlon Riggs.

This chapter explores how multinationals were both embedded in gender norms and actively shaped representations of masculinity, femininity, and domesticity. Multinationals influenced gender roles through the products they marketed to male and female consumers, their gendered labor organization in production sites and company towns, and their hiring practices, which either expanded or restricted opportunities for women. Rather than following a single pattern, multinationals often created hybrid systems, adapting to local gender norms. Through case studies on household technologies – such as Singer sewing machines and Tupperware – and consumer and cultural products – such as Barbie, cosmetics, films, and gendered labor structures in company towns and managerial hierarchies – the chapter highlights multinationals as “gender accomplices.” It examines the factors that led them to reinforce rather than challenge existing norms, shedding light on their role in both maintaining and shaping gendered social structures.

Chapter 3 introduces a new genre of fiction, the Wales novel. Wales novels were set in the Principality, featured Welsh heroines and heroes, and cast Wales as simultaneously the morally and culturally pure cradle of imperial Britishness and, paradoxically, as Britain’s first and final colony. In them, the country becomes the proposed space for experimentation with new methods of colonial discipline and extraction and the site of a proposed recolonization of the British heartland that promised to reinvigorate and purify the Empire as a whole. These fictions, written or satirized by all of the decade’s most famous novelists, were among the best-selling and most critically celebrated works of the period. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the critical reception and generic influence of the Wales novel in the late 1780s, spotlighting several exceptionally interesting deviations from the rapidly consolidating hallmarks of the genre.

Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

Research on rap music in Germany has focused on questions of transnationalism, ethnicity and gender. This chapter advances studies of German rap through an analysis of the rap song and music video “Ich bin Schwarz” (I am Black, 2016) by the popular female rap duo SXTN. Drawing on intersectional, feminist, and hip-hop studies scholarship, we conduct a close reading of the visuals, lyrics, and signifying practices that are mediated in the cultural text. We argue that “Ich bin Schwarz” promotes a new version of a self-empowered, humorous, and unapologetic Black female German identity by remixing the popular German music genre Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), subverting racist and sexist imaginations of Afrodiasporic womanhood, and continuing hip-hop’s political legacy against right-wing extremism in Germany. Ultimately, “Ich bin Schwarz” contributes to a growing body of performances in rap music and larger popular culture that destabilise white-dominated notions of German national identity.

This chapter explores the multifaceted role of gender within extremist ideologies and examines manifestations of masculinity, femininity, and misogyny in various extremist contexts. It shows how different scholarly approaches explain the ways in which gendered narratives shape recruitment, radicalization, and participation in extremist activities. Different explanations of male violence emphasizing the sociocultural construction of masculinity within extremist milieus is discussed and the notion of the “manosphere” and its subcultures like incels is introduced thereby showing how online spaces foster misogynistic ideologies that can escalate into violence. Furthermore, the roles women play within extremist groups, from active participation in violence to providing crucial support functions, are also highlighted. Finally, the implications of gender dynamics for prevention efforts are discussed. Ultimately, the chapter advocates for a nuanced understanding of gender dynamics to inform more effective prevention strategies and policymaking in the fight against violent extremism.

This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.

This is the first of three chapters showing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation techniques in genre-defining novels of the Romantic period. I give an account of anti-caricature rhetoric in the critical reception of Jane Austen’s novels, from contemporaneous reviews and responses to the twentieth century. I describe Austen’s particular moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-indulgence, first examining instances of the word ’caricature’ in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, then close-reading depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, as instances of literary realism’s ’explained caricatures’.