Contradictory Representations: Warrior Women in the Seventeenth-century Painting

This study, based on Bem’s (1974) gender schema theory, investigates gender differences in and the relationship between gender role characteristics and entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) of 261 female and 265 male entrepreneurs in China. The results show that male and female entrepreneurs did not differ significantly in ESE or in masculine gender role characteristics, but differed significantly in feminine gender role characteristics. Examining four different stages in the entrepreneurial life cycle, we find that for female entrepreneurs, feminine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the searching and planning stages of entrepreneurship, and masculine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the searching stage. For male entrepreneurs, feminine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the searching and planning stages, and masculine characteristics had a positive influence on ESE in the marshaling and implementing stages. In addition, one feminine characteristic, “Friendly,” showed a positive association with male entrepreneurs’ ESE in the marshaling stage. Overall, the feminine gender role factor of “Friendly” and the masculine gender role factor of “Compete” played a greater role on ESE than other characteristics. Implications of the findings are discussed. This study contributes a new perspective to extant research on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and female entrepreneurship.

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

This study offers a multidimensional analysis of individuals’ self-assessments of their masculine and feminine characteristics to better understand variation from more to less binary gender identities. Through gender’s co-constitution along with various social localities, we expect that a number of socio-political factors differentiate individuals’ gender identities through self-assessments of their masculine and feminine characteristics. Using data from a 2013 Swedish survey, our results show that men and women tend towards traditionally polarised gender identities and that social location is a particularly influential correlate of men’s claims of feminine characteristics and women’s of masculine characteristics. Individuals from younger generations and individuals who are more educated are consistently more likely to ascribe to less binary feminine and masculine characteristics. This suggests that generational replacement and higher education may increase the tendency of populations to ascribe to less binary gender identities.

This paper presents the development of the Japanese Gender Role Index (JGRI) and Japanese men's and women's self-ratings on the scale. Two hundred ninety-six Japanese words that describe masculine and feminine characteristics were gathered. Examination of endorsements by 200 Japanese participants indicated 66 items as socially desirable characteristics for either men or women in the society. The validation process, including social desirability ratings, factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis, identified 2 subscales with 10 items for each. Internal consistency and the means and standard deviations of social desirability ratings for the subscales were also examined. Self-ratings on the JGRI by 423 Japanese participants showed that there was no significant difference between men and women on feminine and masculine characteristics. It was also found that both men and women possessed an equivalent amount of masculine and feminine characteristics.

In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris , dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.[1][1] Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first

O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. By Amanda Eubanks Winkler. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. 232 pp. To study the English stage during the turbulent seventeenth century inherently involves grappling with disorder. Before and after regicide and revolution divided England, disharmony and faction seemed a permanent condition of the kingdom, so the most a monarch could hope for wasn't the containment of discord (not that was ever really a possibility) but escape from it (9). In O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage Amanda Eubanks Winkler unveils the English theater as a mediating space for public discourse during a century when the nation continually, and often violently, redefined the boundaries of political, religious, and social order. Winkler delves into the heart of this uneasy dramatic period and focuses the reader's attention on character types that defy easy categorization and reflect the underlying anxieties of a nation struggling to retain control. Specifically, she studies representations of the witch, lovesick, melancholic, and mad and thereby reveals shifting views of the gendered body and mind that influenced social interaction over the course of the seventeenth century. While her argument thus far is likely familiar to early modern English historians, literary critics, and gender theorists, Winkler reaffirms music's prominent role within this study. She emphasizes music's central symbolic value in seventeenth-century England's Neoplatonic understanding of the relationship between the political nation and the individual and offers her subsequent analysis of the dramatic stage as an answer to the following question: In this age of conflict, this century that completely reformulated the relationship between monarch and subject, between man and woman, between the macrocosm and microcosm, how did music, dance, and theater negotiate this obvious social tumult? (11) Although Winkler draws on abundant early modern print sources as well as contemporary literary and critical theory to support her observations, her deep familiarity with the masques and plays of the entire seventeenth century and her rich musical analyses of the theatrical music therein are the most persuasive evidential sources in the book. Winkler's concise survey of the wide variety of musical genres found on the English public and private stages provides a nuanced introduction for novice readers; she does not assume her readers' familiarity with the drama and genres she discusses, and she situates her examples before detailing their particular relevance. She also provides ample musical excerpts for readers to trace her observations if they so desire. The inclusion of a recording of these examples (either included with the text or available online) would have been an additional bonus and would have encouraged readers, like seventeenth-century audiences, to listen for the meaning encoded in the music. Following opening critical and structural commentary, Winkler introduces readers in her second chapter to the ideological contractions in musical representations of witchcraft and shows how onstage English witches threatened social and religious authority by challenging conventional gender roles (12). From the start of the seventeenth century, the roles of English witches were typically performed by adult men, while young boys played other feminine characters. Winkler points to this casting decision as the first among many physiological and behavioral factors to contradict Jacobean ideals of femininity. English witches recited and sang lines in deep unnatural voices, and they moved across the stage in erratic dances that symmetry and harmony of form (20). (1) Furthermore, these unnatural witches who consorted with devilish familiars and mimicked sacred rites in their demonic rituals directly subverted normative patriarchal authority and incited anti-Catholic sentiment. …

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Old Landmarks, New Landscapes

Jan van der Heyden's urban prose*

The present study was designed to systematically investigate the functional relationships among biological sex; masculine and feminine gender-role characteristics; and sociosexual behavior, attitude toward, and desire for uncommitted casual sex as three facets of sociosexual orientation. For this purpose, facets of sociosexuality were assessed by the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI-R) and masculine and feminine gender-role characteristics were assessed by a revised German version of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory in 499 male and 958 female heterosexual young adults. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed differential mediating effects of masculine and feminine gender-role characteristics on the relationship between biological sex and the three facets of sociosexual orientation. Sociosexual behavior was shown to be primarily controlled by an individual’s level of masculine gender-role characteristics irrespective of biological sex. Sociosexual desire was identified as being a sole function of biological sex with no indication for any effect of masculine or feminine gender-role characteristics, while sociosexual attitude was influenced by biological sex as well as by masculine and feminine gender-role characteristics to about the same extent.

Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat

Adults (151 female, 130 male; 17.4% African American/Black, 48% Caucasian, 22.8% Latino/Hispanic, 11.7% “other”) assigned postdivorce parental care and custody for four combinations of traditional/nontraditional mothers and fathers described in vignettes of divorcing parents. Parental gender characteristics influenced the assignment of parental care and child custody to divorcing mothers and fathers described in the scenarios and interacted with child gender. Across scenarios, female participants assigned more parental care and custody to mothers than did male participants. When feminine qualities were paired with masculine qualities, greater custody was assigned to the parent described with feminine characteristics (whether a father or mother) than when that parent was described with masculine characteristics. The role of feminine gender characteristics for child custody and care was discussed with regard to maternal primacy and possible changes for father involvement in the aftermath of divorce.

This study tested the hypothesis that adult readers would identify with story characters who display a similar gender role orientation. Male and female readers rated their identification with male and female characters who acted in either a masculine or feminine manner in short story vignettes. The primary finding was an interaction between gender role of reader and gender role behavior of character: as predicted, androgynous and undifferentiated readers identified equally with both masculine and feminine characters, masculine readers identified more strongly with masculine characters than feminine characters, and feminine readers identified more strongly with feminine characters than masculine characters. Further, androgynous readers identified somewhat more strongly with both types of characters than undifferentiated readers. However, the predicted effect of gender similarity between reader and character did not exert a strong influence on the identification process. In addition, feminine subjects reported greater identification across all four stories than masculine and undifferentiated subjects. Finally, of three questionnaire measures of empathy tested, only Davis's (1983) Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Empathic Concern subscale) significantly predicted general level of identification; as expected, these scores were significantly correlated with femininity gender role scores.

The recent identification of a lead-tin-antimony yellow, very similar to lead-tin yellow type II and lead antimonate yellow, and the coincidence in the use of these artificial pigments in seventeenth-century Italian paintings, has revived interest in the manufacture and historical use of these pigments, the evolution of their chemical composition over time, and their analytical study. This paper presents an account of the historical manufacture of lead-tin-antimony yellow, based on the study of Italian glass-industry manuscripts dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The use of this pigment in paintings, as reported by other authors, is also described. Finally, the molecular characterization of this ternary oxide of lead-tin-antimony by Raman spectroscopy is presented, through the analysis of reference compounds manufactured according to the theoretical pyrochlore formula and historical recipes. Spectra obtained for the reference compounds are in good agreement with those obtained for yellow pigments in seventeenth-century Italian paintings, in particular in works by Giovanni Battista Langetti and Luca Giordano.

Maxine Hong Kingston's first book The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, more than three decades ago. Since then, she has published a second memoir, China Men (1980); a collection of essays on Hawai'i, Hawai'i One Summer (1987); a novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989); a book of and about poetry, To Be the Poet (2002); and a mixed-genre volume, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003). She has also recently edited a volume of writings by war veterans, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006). Kingston's oeuvre covers a range of genres coming out of a powerful literary imagination. At the same time, the psychic and spiritual sources of her writing are evident in her responses to the questions raised in this interview which followed her February 22, 2006 reading at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The interview is framed to cover the thirty years of Kingston's production, rather like the way exhibitions of paintings by visual artists are structured frequently in a retrospective chronology to follow the growth and development of the artist's mind and art. In organizing a retrospective exhibition, the curator is offering the spectator not merely one or some of the artist's paintings in isolation but a valuable sweeping vision of the major works, so as to clarify, even to insert, an understanding of the genius not otherwise apprehensible. The bringing together of an individual artist's separate works and achievements paradoxically also permits the reader a view of the author as a writer treading the years between the texts. A retrospective frame may illuminate the historicity that solidifies an artist's seemingly arbitrary series of works. In setting the individual works in relationship to each other and to those works appearing earlier and later, I hope to suggest the larger patterns, motifs, and linguistic and stylistic characteristics that bind the individual works to an authorial totality (no matter how discontinuous, fluid, and tentative that single authorial identity may be). This retrospective interview may, then, lead to interpretations enriched by layers of primary and secondary readings, each and all held in the suspension of decades of production and reception. Shirley Lim: When The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, you were about thirty-five or thirty-six years old. It brought you tremendous recognition, not only from Asian American readers but also from a mainstream US literary and cultural intelligentsia. How did such immediate and widespread success affect you and your writing, if at all? Maxine Hong Kingston: Well, publishing big when you are thirty-five years old doesn't really change your life that much. If I had been younger if I were in my twenties--I might have gotten really excited and wild and let it all go to my head. At thirty-five, I'm settled. I'm living the life that I want, and so emotionally, psychologically, it did not change me at all. But for the practicalities of the writer's life, it made a difference in that I did not have to do any other work for money. What happened was that I was teaching at a boarding school in Honolulu and it meant I was on duty twenty-four hours a day. You're always on call at a boarding school. I had been teaching there exactly six years during which time I wrote The Woman Warrior. When it was published and I got an advance, it just so happened that I was there for six years so I got a sabbatical. I had made up my mind that during the sabbatical I would write the next book. The conditions of the sabbatical are you have to come back to teach for an additional two years. I got my advance for The Woman Warrior and paid off my sabbatical, so I did not have to come back, and I quit teaching. At that time I got a $5000 advance, enough to pay for one year's salary of my teaching. I thought of it as buying my freedom and then I could write without doing any other [work], no more moonlighting, I could concentrate on writing. …