front cover of Emergent Masculinities
Emergent Masculinities
Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age
Ndubueze L. Mbah
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Emergent Masculinities, Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social differentiation in the region. He incorporates over 250 oral narratives of men and women across a range of social roles and professions with material culture practices, performance traditions, slave ship data, colonial records, and more to reveal how Africans channeled the socioeconomic forces of the Atlantic world through their local ideologies and practices. The gendered struggles over the means of social reproduction conditioned the Bight of Biafra region’s participation in Atlantic systems of production and exchange, and defined the demography of the region’s forced diaspora. By looking at male and female constructions of masculinity and sexuality as major indexes of social change, Emergent Masculinities transforms our understanding of the role of gender in precolonial Africa and fills a major gap in our knowledge of a broader set of theoretical and comparative issues linked to the slave trade and the African diaspora.

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front cover of Gendered Power
Gendered Power
Educated Women of the Meiji Empress' Court
Mamiko C. Suzuki
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Gendered Power sheds light on the sources of power for three prominent women of the Meiji period: Meiji Empress Haruko; public speaker, poet, and diarist Nakajima Shoen; and educator and prolific author Shimoda Utako. By focusing on the role Chinese classics (kanbun) played in the language employed by elite women, the chapters focus on how Empress Haruko, Shoen, and Shimoda Utako contributed new expectations for how women should participate in a modernizing Japan. By being in the public eye, all three women countered criticism of and commentary on their writings and activities, which they parried by navigating gender constraints. The success or failure as women ascribed to these three figures sheds light on the contradictions inhabited by them during a transformative period for Japanese women.  
 
By proposing and interrogating the possibility of Meiji women’s power, the book examines contradictions that were symptomatic of their struggles within the vast social, cultural, and political transformations that took place during the period. The book demonstrates that an examination of that conflict within feminist history is crucial in order to understand what radical resistance meant in the face of women-centered authority.

 
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