Elizabeth Bentley and cold war representation: Some masks not dropped
During the 1930s and 1940s Soviet intelligence operated spy rings within the United States. America Communist Elizabeth Bentley managed these networks until she defected to the FBI in 1945. Bentley's story of Communists in government ‐ the first of the Cold War — caused a public scandal. Some commentators, offended by Bentley's failure to fulfil traditional gender prescriptions, ridiculed her and shed doubts upon her story, which received less serious consideration than Whittaker Chambers’ similar tale. This article explores these criticisms, Bentley's attempts to counter them with her own public performances of traditional feminity, and, implicitly, gender's role in American Cold War politics.
Re-examining Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Helen Gahagan Douglas, Gender, and New Deal Liberalism in the United States Senate Election in California, 1950
This thesis examines the 1950 United States Senate election in California that pitted the New Deal liberal Helen Gahagan Douglas against the hard-line anti-communist Richard Nixon. By considering the election within the context of a changing economic landscape, the push to re-traditionalize gender norms following the upheaval of wartime the Douglas - Nixon senate race is a powerful example of how the subtle use of gender and sexism in political contests has historically been used to discredit women candidates. In this thesis I work to situate the Douglas vs. Nixon race within the broader nexus of American anti-communism and the politics of containment while combating some of the historical myths surrounding Douglas to demonstrate the extent to which gender and the re-orientation of liberal political philosophy in the postwar period contributed to the political defeat of one of the most promising political women of the twentieth century.
The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
* Introduction: The Arab Spring: The End of Postcoloniality * 1. Decentering the World: How the Arab Spring Unfolded * 2. Towards Liberation Geography * 3. A New Language of Revolt * 4. Discovering a New World * 5. From the Green Movement to the Jasmine Revolutions * 6. The center cannot hold * 7. The End of Postcolonialism * 8. Race, Gender, and Class in Transnational Revolutions * 9. Libya: The Crucible * 10. Delayed Defiance * Conclusion. The People Demand the Overthrow of the Regime