1st Edition
Engendering Transnational Transgressions From the Intimate to the Global
Engendering Transnational Transgressions reclaims the transgressive side of feminist history, challenging hegemonic norms and the power of patriarchies. Through the lenses of intersectionality, gender analysis, and transnational feminist theory, it addresses the political in public and intimate spaces.
The book begins by highlighting the transgressive nature of feminist historiography. It then divides into two parts—Part I, Intimate Transgressions: Marriage and Sexuality, examines marriage and divorce as viewed through a transnational lens, and Part II, Global Transgressions: Networking for Justice and Peace, considers political and social violence as well as struggles for relief, redemption, and change by transnational networks of women. Chapters are archivally grounded and take a critical approach that underscores the local in the global and the significance of intersectional factors within the intimate. They bring into conversation literatures too often separated: history of feminisms and anti-war, anti-imperial/anti-fascist, and related movements, on the one hand, and studies of gender crossings, marriage reconstitution, and affect and subjectivities, on the other. In so doing, the book encourages the reader to rethink standard interpretations of rights, equality, and recognition.
This is the ideal volume for students and scholars of Women’s and Gender History and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as International, Transnational, and Global History, History of Social Movements, and related specialized topics.
1. Introduction: Engendering transnational transgressions: from the intimate to the global
Eileen Boris, Sandra Trudgen Dawson and Barbara Molony
2. Matronage: a useful concept for understanding the involvement of women in the public sphere in ancient societies
Candida Martinez Lopez
Part 1: Intimate transgressions: marriage and sexuality
3. Challenging gender, historicizing gossip: reflections on the life of Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir
Soffia Audur Birgisdóttir
4. The transgressive agency of the crossdressing soldier: the case of Anna Henryka Pustowójtówna (1838-1881), feminized masculinity, and insurgent Poland
Renata Ingbrant
5. Transnational interventions into the intimate: circling around Pandita Ramabai and The Little Wives of India
Margaret Allen
6. Divorce and legal separation in Australia c. 1900: a tale of two transgressive great great grandmothers
Marian Quartly
7. Challenging Indigenous marriage from within: memories of the Tiwi’s Martina and the figure of Malinche
Laura Rademaker
8. Transnational struggles for racial justice: Australian Indigenous women’s marriages to American servicemen during the Second World War
Karen Hughes
9. Women’s movements in 1970s Japan: transgression and rejection
Nobuyo Aizawa and Chiharu Chujo
Part 2: Global transgressions: networking for justice and peace
10. Challenging the national political order with transnational languages: British women at the fourth international suffrage congress in Amsterdam, 1908
Myriam Boussahba-Bravard
11. Petitioning for independence: Syrian and Lebanese women’s transnational anti-colonialism, 1919-1939
Nova Robinson
12. Naming rape: historicizing women’s human rights activism and agency in the Italo-Ethiopian war
Caroline Waldron
13. Anti-fascist feminism: suffrage, sovereignty and Popular-Front Pan-American feminism in Panama
Katherine Marino
14. Transgressive transnationalism: the anti-colonial strategies in the Women’s International Democratic Federation
Giulia Cioci
15. Borderless for peace: how transnational connections shaped Women Strike for Peace
Lara Track
16. The interpreter class: women in conflict engage the international human rights community
Julie Gallagher
17. Transnational and transgenerational connections: gendering US-Japan educational exchange
Mayuko Itoh and Vera Mackie
Biography
Eileen Boris is Hull Professor and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, History, Black Studies, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Sandra Trudgen Dawson is Executive Administrator of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, USA.
Barbara Molony is Professor of Japanese History at Santa Clara University, USA, and specializes in women’s rights, transnational feminisms, and East Asian gender constructions.
"An invaluable contribution to transnational feminist history! With capacious imagination and broad geographic scope, Boris, Dawson, and Molony's volume showcases outstanding scholarship connecting intimate and cross-border transgressions. Its stellar contributors trace how heteronormative and eugenic marriage norms were flouted and reformed around the globe, as well as how anticolonial, communist, and antimilitarism feminist networks and movements were built against several odds. This book underscores how important it is to analytically connect brave personal rebellions against gender norms with the fierce solidarity of those whose search for justice took them beyond their nations."
Ashwini Tambe, Editorial Director of Feminist Studies and author of Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws
"Engendering Transnational Transgressions offers a fascinating collection of essays that explore individual and collective forms of resistance in the realm of the intimate and the explicitly political. The chapters span various parts of the world, most notably the global South and the former second world and focuses predominantly on the 20th century but with contributions that go further back in time as well. This is a valuable contribution that will enrich the historical understanding of transnational feminisms and offer new insights that foreground intersectional analyses of personal and collective resistance that transcend national boundaries."
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, co-President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians; Professor of Asian American History and Director of the Humanities Center, University of California at Irvine, United States, CA, USA
