Performing the self : women's lives in historical perspective
1. Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective Katie Barclay and Sarah Richardson 2. Performing the Self, Performing the Other: gender and racial identity construction in the Nanteuil Cycle Victoria Turner 3. Writing the Self: the journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, 1774-1843 Gillian Beattie-Smith 4. Writing Women's Histories: women in the colonial record of nineteenth-century Hong Kong Jane Berney 5. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives Meritxell Simon-Martin 6. 'A notable personality': Isabella Fyvie Mayo in the public and private spheres of Aberdeen Lindy Moore 7. 'The Subject is Obscene: No Lady Would Dream of Alluding to It': Marie Stopes and her courtroom dramas Lesley Hall 8. Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s-1930s Britain Charlotte Macdonald 9. Performing the Political Self: a study of identity making and self representation in the autobiographies of India's first generation of parliamentary women Annie Devenish 10. Eve Drewelowe: feminist identity in American art Lindsay E. Shannon 11. Women Activists: rewriting Greenham's history Elaine Titcombe 12. The Changing Face of Exhibiting Women's Wartime Work at the Imperial War Museum Alyson Mercer 13. Concluding Thoughts: performance, the self, and women's history Penny Summerfield
Feminising Empire? British Women's Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation
ABSTRACT This article addresses female activism spanning the Empire and creating interconnected networks linking the local and global dimensions of Britain's imperial mission in an era of increasing uncertainty. The transition from empire to commonwealth and, ultimately, independence was marked by anti-colonial challenges from within Britain and in the colonies and threats to empire from international developments post-1918. This era also witnessed a more proactive role for women as both defenders and critics of empire who had an influence on shaping a new discourse of welfare and development, purportedly a ‘feminisation’ of empire. Continuities existed between female activism pre- and post-1918 but also significant differences as the late imperial era witnessed more nuanced and diverse interventions into empire affairs than the ‘maternalist imperial feminism’ of the era before the First World War.
The Politics of Truth: Power in Nietzsche’s Epistemology
This article concerns first a curiosity found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. In the midst of a heated attack on Christianity, Nietzsche detours into a discussion of epistemology. I argue that this turn indicates the importance of epistemology, and illustrates its political and moral character. The weak, who cannot tolerate uncertainty and shades of gray, seek to impose an epistemology of clarity and certainty. At the same time, the strong, who revel in ambiguity, seek to enjoy the richness and subtlety of a non-dichotomous view of the world. This is a political struggle because the weak cannot allow the strong’s epistemology to exist, let alone prevail. It is not surprising, then, that Nietzsche talks about epistemology in the midst of attacking Christianity: its view of truth is essential to its mission of taming the nobles. Here, I consider Nietzsche as a political thinker in a different light. Political battles are fought far beyond the halls of government. Nietzsche is a political thinker; one, however, who looks at politics in an uncommon way.