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As Marko Dumančić writes in his introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War, "despite the centrality of gender and sexuality in human relations, their scholarly study has played a secondary role in the history of the Cold War. . . . It is not an exaggeration to say that few were left unaffected by Cold War gender politics; even those who were in charge of producing, disseminating, and enforcing cultural norms were called on to live by the gender and sexuality models into which they breathed life." This underscores the importance of this volume, as here scholars tackle issues ranging from depictions of masculinity during the all-consuming space race, to the vibrant activism of Indian peasant women during this period, to the policing of sexuality inside the militaries of the world.

Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose combined research spans fifteen countries across five continents, claiming a place as the first volume to examine how issues of gender and sexuality impacted both the domestic and foreign policies of states, far beyond the borders of the United States, during the tumult of the Cold War.


Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Histories of Gender and Sexuality during the Cold War
Marko Dumančić

Part I: Sexuality

Faceless and Stateless: French Occupation Policy toward Women and Children in Postwar Germany (1945-1949)
Katherine Rossy

Patriarchy and Segregation: Policing Sexuality in US-Icelandic Military Relations
Valur Ingimundarson

Queering Subversives in Cold War Canada
Patrizia Gentile

"Nonreligious Activities": Sex, Anticommunism, and Progressive Christianity in Late Cold War Brazil
Benjamin A. Cowan

Manning the Enemy: US Perspectives on International Birthrates during the Cold War
Kathleen A. Tobin

Part II: Femininities

Indian Peasant Women's Activism in a Hot Cold War
Elisabeth Armstrong

The Medicalization of Childhood in Mexico during the Early Cold War, 1945-1960
Nichole Sanders

Africa's Kitchen Debate: Ghanaian Domestic Space in the Age of the Cold War
Jeffrey S. Ahlman

Mobilizing Women? State Feminisms in Communist Czechoslovakia and Socialist Egypt
May Hawas and Philip E. Muehlenbeck

A Vietnamese Woman Directs the War Story: Duc Hoan, 1937-2003
Karen Turner

Global Feminism and Cold War Paradigms: Women's International NGOs and the United Nations, 1970-1985
Karen Garner

Part III: Masculinities

"Men of the World" or "Uniformed Boys"? Hegemonic Masculinity and the British Army in the Era of the Korean War
Grace Huxford

Yuri Gagarin and Celebrity Masculinity in Soviet Culture
Erica L. Fraser

Scholars and social critics are looking at gender and sexuality, as well as masculinity, in new ways and with more attention to the way cultural ideologies affect men’s and women’s lives. With the rise of an online “incel” (involuntarily celibate) community and the perpetration of acts of violence in their name, as well as increased awareness about the complexities of sexual interaction brought to the fore by the #metoo movement, it has become critical to discuss how men’s sexuality and masculinity are related, as well as the way men feel about the messages they get about being a man. Prior research on masculinity and masculine sexuality has examined the experiences of adolescent boys. But what happens to boys as they become men and as many move away from homo-social environments into sexual relationships? What happens when they no longer have a crowd of peers to posture or perform for? How do their sexual experiences and sexual selves change? How do they prove their masculinity in a society that demands it when they are no longer surrounded by peers? And how do they cultivate sexual selves and sexual self-confidence in a culture that expects them to always already be knowledgeable, desiring sexual subjects? In Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up, Beth Montemurro explores the cultivation of heterosexual men’s sexual selves. Based on detailed, in-depth interviews with a large, diverse group of  heterosexual men between the ages of 20 and 68, she investigates how getting sex, having sex, and keeping up their sex lives matters to men. Ultimately, Montemurro uncovers the tension between public, cultural narratives about hetero-masculinity and men’s private, sexual selves and their intimate experiences.
 

J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn were titanic figures in midcentury America, wielding national power in government and the legal system through intimidation and insinuation. Hoover’s FBI thrived on secrecy, threats, and illegal surveillance, while McCarthy and Cohn will forever be associated with the infamous anticommunist smear campaign of the early 1950s, which culminated in McCarthy’s public disgrace during televised Senate hearings. In Gossip Men, Christopher M. Elias takes a probing look at these tarnished figures to reveal a host of startling new connections among gender, sexuality, and national security in twentieth-century American politics. Elias illustrates how these three men solidified their power through the skillful use of deliberately misleading techniques like implication, hyperbole, and photographic manipulation. Just as provocatively, he shows that the American people of the 1950s were particularly primed to accept these coded threats because they were already familiar with such tactics from widely popular gossip magazines.

By using gossip as a lens to examine profound issues of state security and institutional power, Elias thoroughly transforms our understanding of the development of modern American political culture.