Etiquette Manuals Research Articles

Contours of Status and Power: Seats and Sitting Postures in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

Abstract The Victorians were notorious for their preoccupation with the posture and carriage of men and women, by which they outlined the contours of their refinement and moral characters. Drawing on Victorian etiquette manuals and modern social psychological studies regarding sitting postures, this article addresses scenes and melodramas featuring seats in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend so as to reveal how Dickens has created a scathing satire on the respectable pretension and deep moral vices of Victorian society through his seemingly exaggerated description of characters’ sitting manners. It argues that seat performance is not only a crucial means for Victorians’ self-representation but also a shrewd strategy for domination. While Dickens’s caricatured depictions of Lammle’s and Fledgeby’s abominable sitting manners manifests his biting attacks on Victorian predatory fortune-hunters’ thirst for power and money, his rendition of Jenny’s and Bella’s questionable sitting poses lays bare the miseries and imprisonment of women in that era.

The Cultural Construction of the Domestic Space in France: Women’s Lived Experience and the Materialization of Customs

This article explores the intersecting processes of construction of the home, social, and individual identities through domestic practices inside French housing. It examines the design and occupation of French homes as crucial moments for the consolidation of subjectivities, beliefs, and ideologies manifested through daily actions that are influenced by normative cultural systems. In specific, it looks at codified domestic behaviours and their aesthetic dimension, focusing on how the French “art of living” has influenced taste, design, appropriation, and decoration of domestic interiors. Architectural treatises along with etiquette manuals are analysed as they both represent—through the written word and architectural drawings—cultural and gender stereotypes as well as societal norms and expectations that inform housing design and domestic practices. These documents directly assist in the cultural construction of the domestic space, uncovering mechanisms of reproduction and representation that inform the use and design of residential architecture. By focusing on women’s lived experiences, this research looks at the consolidation of feminine domestic cultures and how they fostered small-scale physical transformations of dwellings’ interiors through daily negotiations that define self-identity and interpersonal power relations. These dynamics are referred to as “cultural domesticity.” The latter frames this study along with feminist literature, situating women’s contribution to the aesthetic and spatial development of French apartments. What emerges from this study is that the French state historically exercised a regulatory power that impacted daily life and housing design.

Minding your manners in the Gilded Age

ABSTRACT Etiquette manuals may be used as a tool in which to investigate the intricacies associated with dining during the Gilded Age. An exploration of these dining habits, using historic etiquette manuals as primary sources, enhanced by the analysis of secondary sources, deepens understanding of a complicated age in American history. These sources reveal that food could be a curse, particularly to those not tutored in the table manners of a wealthy and hypercritical social climate. Newcomers to the volatile landscape of late 1800s society strived to increase their rank in the social hierarchy. Those with upper class lineage were alarmed by the upheaval of the system that once deemed them superior. Unnerved by this threat to their authority, the established elite encouraged systems of behavior which judged and classified newcomers. The minutiae associated with dinner parties, menus and eating, was one way to sort unwelcome new arrivals. Etiquette manuals cautioned insecure readers that the dinner table was a dangerous arena, one which could expose “imposters,” who now had money, but not pedigree. These guides advised on all aspects of social interaction, with special detail given to the act of eating; arming anxious readers with the particulars needed to negotiate the treacherous rules of dining in the Gilded Age.

Gesten schreiben

Abstract The article reads Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde focusing on the written gestures she describes in the remembered and imagined encounters with Goethe. Based on the rhetorical devices of actio and ekphrasis, Bettina von Arnim establishes a rhetoric of bodily interaction, which subverts the restricted gestural codes recommended for women in 18th/19th Century etiquette manuals. Thereby she transforms an instrumental actio based on disciplining and controlling the (female) body into a bodily relation to the self and to the word that resonates with female wants.

‘Girls, Don’t Talk Slang!’: late-Victorian verbal hygiene and contested gender roles

ABSTRACT Late-nineteenth-century efforts to discourage women and girls from using slang constitute a classic example of what Deborah Cameron terms ‘verbal hygiene’ or ‘the urge to meddle in matters of language’. Using excerpts from a variety of conduct books, etiquette manuals, and opinion pieces published in the United States between 1868 and 1900, this article will investigate the relationship between this practice of verbal hygiene and a broader cultural anxiety over challenges to traditional gender norms during this period. It will discuss how verbal hygienists’ efforts to convince women not to use slang helped to construct a particular cultural ideal of femininity, and it will explore what this rhetoric can tell us about the role of this linguistic choice in negotiating a gendered identity. Finally, it will look at the practice of verbal hygiene as an important, and often overlooked, means by which compliance with normative femininity is monitored and enforced.

Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative ed. by Rocío del Águila and Vanesa Miseres

Reviewed by: Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative ed. by Rocío del Águila and Vanesa Miseres Elvira Sánchez-Blake Águila, Rocío del, and Vanesa Miseres, editors. Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative. The U of Arkansas P, 2021. Pp. 248. ISBN 978-1-68226-181-1. This book offers an engaging collection of essays about food culture and literature from the pre-Columbian times to the present spanning discussions of class, race, gender, and nationalisms. This volume is part of the University of Arkansas Press Series on foodways exploration in global food studies. The compilation offers a critical lens to examine broader cultural environmental and ethical issues around food as the center of literary criticism. The authors coin the term “gastronarrative” to describe the object of study (food and literature) and to refer to the methodology, which analyzes literary text in the context of culinary expression. They also establish the correlation between what one eats and who one is as the premises of gastronarratives. Thus, the book presents key moments in Latin American traditions in which foodways are central to the shaping of the continent’s identity politics with food at the core of the literary scene. Throughout the essays contained in the book, the authors do not limit the analysis to literature, but rather as they explain, “insert literary topics, metaphors, and strategies to discussions on food within the humanities” (11). The analysis includes manuscripts, magazines articles, cookbooks, menus, etiquette manuals, visual culture, and other resources to allow for narrato-logical and historiographical inquires. This also brings about the analysis of the intersection of race, gender and class, consumption and consumerism, culinary imaginaries, and a cartography of food culture in Latin America. Food Studies in Latin American Literature opens with a compelling introduction to the field of food studies and its intersection to literature. The analysis departs from Terry Eagleton’s concept of “edible écriture” in which “connections between food and literature allow[s] us to analyze power structures, coloniality, the paradoxes of modernity, and our own complexity as humans in terms of exchange” (4). The authors propose the idea of food as a narrative in and of itself as an expression of aesthetic, political and cultural statements. [End Page 139] They subscribe to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic structure to create their “own gastrolinguistic sign” as a space where meaning is created. The essays also explore the traditions of Latin American food as rituals and cultural marks from pre-Columbian texts to well-known literary pieces of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. An important discussion deals with how food shaped the modern concept of citizenship, as a mark of national identity, social class, and racial distinction. The chapters in the book organize thematically in four different sections. Part I focuses on indigenous heritage and colonialism. One article discusses food and power as a means of resistance in colonial Andes by examining texts by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in Peru. Another text refers to the importance of potatoes as a subject or earlier chronicles of the seventeen century and its subsequent incorporation in European diets. A third article focuses on the culinary world of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, discussing the Recetario de Sor Juana, a collection of recipes attributed to the famous nun. It showcases the complex mestizaje of food reflecting the cultural diversity of eighteenth-century Mexican society. Part II illustrates the interaction of national identities, regionalisms and transnational food-ways in nineteenth-century Latin America. One chapter explores how the flow of immigrants affected the ways in which food was incorporated in the social fabric of Mexico and Peru. The argument is that in these countries the elites sought to create societies that were modern, progressive, and up to date looking like United States and Europe. Another essay centers on travel literature of the nineteenth century in Colombia to enlighten discussions of coloniality, race, class, and food. Other essays focus on travel journals where food was a symbol of class. One chapter is devoted to Argentine author Eduarda Mansilla’s Recuerdos de viaje, 1882...

American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith

This study of gold diggers is illuminating and original. Donovan defines gold digger as a woman who pursues romantic relationships primarily for economic gain. In five chapters organized chronologically and thematically, he examines the evolution of this stereotype from its emergence before World War I through Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage to an elderly billionaire in 1994. One chapter explores a moral panic about alimony in the 1920s; another investigates a 1930s crusade to end heart balm laws (prohibiting seduction, breach of promise, and alienation of affection); and a third analyzes a furor over “Allotment Annies” who married multiple servicemen apiece during World War II to pocket their military allowances. Another covers the Lee Marvin–Michelle Triola palimony case of the 1970s.According to Donovan, the trope originated in the early 1910s from the urban-amusement culture of dance halls and popular theater. In this setting, on the boundary between prostitution and dating, the custom of “treating” arose—women exchanging sex and companionship for money and gifts from men. Women who participated in these exchanges were young, good looking, sexually charged, deceptive, and manipulative; most of them appear to have been white and to have come from working-class backgrounds. Although few were actual sex workers, they nonetheless offended genteel sensibilities and, perhaps as a legacy of the recent Klondike gold rush, became known as “gold diggers.”A playwright named Avery Hopwood, who overheard dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies call each other gold diggers, borrowed the term to entitle his 1919 play about the travails of New York City chorus girls. The phenomenal success of The Gold Diggers and its remake as a silent film in 1923 and as a musical in 1929 turned what had been a slang phrase into a powerful, enduring stereotype. From the outset, the stereotype was pejorative and gendered, with class and racial overtones. Notwithstanding that the chorus girls who inspired Hopwood embraced the slang term and applied it to themselves knowingly and even affectionately, Donovan says that the stereotype has always been wielded against women, often when established systems of marriage and courtship break down. Gold diggers are vilified for being childlike, frivolous, and unsophisticated, as well as scheming and sexually adventurous. The stereotype has persisted because it allows Americans to concentrate their wrath on supposed individual misbehavior, diverting attention from larger cultural transformations and social inequities.Much of American Gold Digger comprises an analysis of popular culture, particularly the understandings spawned by movies, television shows, and celebrities. He correctly suggests that the messages promulgated by popular culture are essential to this kind of history. For example, Anita Loos’ development of her Lorelei Lee character played an outsize role in fixing the gold digger in the American imagination, first through the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a book in 1925 and later as a film that starred Marilyn Monroe. Loos also wrote the screenplay for Red-Headed Woman (1932), the archetypal portrait of a femme fatale, played by Jean Harlow, who uses sex to improve her social position.As enlightening as this perspective is, however, it hides a flaw in its methodology. As his study moves beyond the 1920s, Donovan becomes so narrowly focused on popular and celebrity cultures that he cannot say how the stereotype waxed and waned on the ground or how ordinary people received it, revised it, and used it in their daily lives. It is not clear how or whether some women could mount a defense of their materialism. Nor do we learn whether women ever applied a variant of the stereotype against men, as fortune hunters. In this book, the gold-digger stereotype floats freely through popular culture, its direction unalterable by regular people.A historical study that Donovan cites in his text and that navigated similar terrain, Beth L. Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore,1988), employs a better methodology. In addition to consulting sources like advice and etiquette manuals that prescribed dating rules, Bailey incorporated the voices of young women by conducting research in college newspapers and in letters to the editors of popular magazines. In Bailey’s telling, women were not just victims of popular culture; they both interacted with it and acted of their own volition. American Gold Digger is insightful, but Bailey’s approach would have strengthened it.

Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life by Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Reviewed by: Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life by Jennifer Jensen Wallach Beth Fowler Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life. By Jennifer Jensen Wallach. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Pp. x, 225. $36.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-5390-2.) “We turned survival food into a delicacy,” director Byron Hurt proclaims in his 2012 documentary, Soul Food Junkies. African American chefs have indeed turned soul food, which describes African American cuisine from the [End Page 159] South and its northern urban adaptations, into a celebrated part of the epicurean world over the past thirty years after centuries of denigration. Many examinations of African American foodways have cropped up to accompany the boom in restaurants, cookbooks, and celebrity chefs devoted to remaking and popularizing soul food, but Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life takes a different, and decidedly refreshing, approach. Using a wealth of secondary literature across fields of interest within African American studies, as well as cookbooks, dining and etiquette manuals, and the stories and oral histories of people who have shaped these foodways, she has created a unique look at African American history from the perspectives of growing, selling, cooking, and eating. The book offers a necessarily broad survey of both historical shifts and the ways that food and dining cultures are intertwined with politics, social movements, and everyday life to the extent that deep analysis of any one connection will have to be pursued elsewhere. But Wallach has provided a fascinating introduction to the examination of African American foodways by revealing how familiar stories and arguments may be understood through the lenses of agricultural processes and dining customs. The book begins with a look at West African foods, recipes, and dining traditions, and the hybrids that emerge through globalization, particularly within the context of the transatlantic slave trade. This question of what constitutes African American food and dining practices is one that is asked throughout each chapter, but Wallach mainly focuses on thematic studies that show how evolving relationships to cooking, growing, and dining reflect the consequences of, and reactions to, living within white supremacist structures in what will become the United States. The way that she traces women’s work as cooks in white kitchens during enslavement and into the post–Civil War period, for instance, allows readers to understand how wages and working conditions could be stifled even as the meals Black women created were celebrated as stylish southern cuisine by the early twentieth century. Similarly, the cooperative grocery stores and luncheonettes opened in Black neighborhoods during the Depression as a means of feeding communities ravaged by economic downfall reappear during the 1950s and 1960s. The food drive was run by members of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther party, who saw how continuing racial injustice led many Black families to face the threat of hunger, even within a supposedly affluent society. As Wallach traces threads that detail how Black Americans used food and dining culture to both define their own identities and oppose assimilationism and white-dominated institutions, she also shows how this history cannot be neatly divided into events and time periods detached from one another, even if the brief anecdotes she provides often leave the reader wanting to learn more. The book’s penultimate chapter, which moves from diner sit-ins in the 1950s and 1960s to Black vegetarian movements in the 1970s, is most indicative of this issue, as the many intriguing subjects she tackles within a civil rights movement framework do not always comprise a clear narrative or argumentative line. But Getting What We Need Ourselves is a book that is meant to be [End Page 160] expansive, despite its short page length, and it ultimately succeeds in establishing unexpected connections among familiar events. It provides an excellent introduction to the study of foodways and addition to cultural histories of African American life. Beth Fowler Wayne State University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Professoras: narrativas de vida sob a influência dos manuais de etiqueta e civilidade (1950-1970)

Este artigo é um recorte da dissertação de mestrado do programa de pós-graduação em Ensino de humanidade e Linguagens – UFN. Portanto, o interesse dessa pesquisa parte da necessidade de (re) pensar as relações de gênero a partir da formação de professoras. Ao trazer essas questões tem-se como intuito compreender o discurso que normatizou, naturalizou e determinou o lugar de homens e mulheres no espaço educacional. Isso permite rever as relações enquanto ser humano e sujeito. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa tem como objetivo apresentar as narrativas das professoras egressa das décadas de 1950­ – 1970 a partir do discurso dos etiqueta e civilidade, evidenciando as possíveis influência na formação de professoras. A metodologia se caracteriza por ser de natureza qualitativa a partir do embasamento em referenciais documentais e nas análises das narrativas. “A voz das professoras”. Para coleta de dados foi aplicado um questionário e a técnica utilizada consistiu no método hermenêutico que permitiu relacionar as narrativas com a contextualização social e histórica entrelaçamento com os manuais de etiqueta e civilidade. Como resultado contatou-se que os manuais de etiqueta e civilidade imprimiram signos considerados indispensáveis a natureza feminina. Diante disso, a Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras – FIC, no período de 1953 a 1979, teve predominância de turmas femininas, e, dessa maneira, observou-se a importância e a necessidade de inúmeros exemplares de manuais na biblioteca da Faculdade. Conclui-se que os manuais influenciaram na escolha bem como no modo de agir das professoras normatizando as relações de poder e gênero no espaço de formação docente.

Nella Larsen's Etiquette Lesson: Small Talk, Racial Passing, and the Novel of Manners

AbstractThis essay explores how novelists of the Harlem Renaissance deploy small talk to disrupt racial identification. Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) serves as a case study showing that small talk magnifies a strange intimacy between passing narratives and etiquette manuals in the early twentieth century. While critics have tended to view small talk under the rubric of gossip, writers of the Harlem Renaissance call attention to the way that small talk enables racial passing by keeping dialogue on neutral and impersonal grounds. Nella Larsen makes peculiarly pronounced use of small talk, which emerges in her fiction as a self-accenting style of racial embodiment and a bold revision to the American novel of manners and to early twentieth-century etiquette manuals. Drawing on sociolinguistics and microsociology, this essay argues that Larsen unsettles the cultural tendency to equate passing with self-denial, converting small talk to an equivocal medium for passing that, paradoxically, makes audible a protest against racial segregation and social regulation.

Teaching African American History and Culture Through Cookbooks and Etiquette Manuals

Teaching African American History and Culture Through Cookbooks and Etiquette Manuals

Fashion: From attitudes to poses

Abstract Borrowing some of Aby Warburg’s methods from his Mnemosyne Atlas, this paper experiments with an anti-linear, non-teleological method of writing fashion history. It investigates fashion movement, gesture and pose, and their afterlife in images and objects. It thus looks at the intersection of time and the gesture, particularly in relation to the idea of the ‘now’, a central organising principle of fashion. To this end, it juxtaposes images of the body in motion from a wide range of sources, including scientific photography, etiquette manuals and fashion magazines. Spanning three centuries, though not chronologically, the images show a range of activities: not only fashion posing, but also tennis-playing, duelling, dancing, military marching, social gestures, and going to the races. The paper proposes that each image is charged with some quality or attribute that is also immanent in one or more of the others, even though they have no causal or temporal relationship.

Protecting the borders: etiquette manuals and ethnology in the erstwhile South African Defence Force

This paper describes the rise and fall of the Ethnological Section of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and examines two inter-related conundra: Why were senior policy makers’ pleas for officers’ courses in ethnology unsuccessful when the SADF had large numbers of ethnologists in its employ? Second, why were they fixated on etiquette manuals which were, content-wise, often laughable? On the available evidence, I suggest that the raison d’être for the use of ethnologists was to encourage white soldiers to accept black fellow soldiers and to improve relations with the local populace. However, rather than promote good relations, the etiquette manuals frequently reinforced the racial order because of their ambiguity. The SADF ethnologists’ insistence on the rigid adherence to etiquette also laboured under the delusion that compelling dominant parties to behave politely would solve the problems arising from structural inequality and exploitation. For their part, senior officers dismissed these poorly qualified ethnologists as impractical and lacking credibility, limiting their use in strategic and tactical operations.

'Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women’s language' Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)

Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women's language Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)Women's language is a highly salient category in Japan, which most large Japanese language dictionaries define as the style of speech spoken by women since ancient times. For a long time, it has been assumed that this 'speech peculiar to women' is naturally derived from nyooboo kotoba (court-women's speech), the speech created by women in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century, and also from yuujogo (play-women's speech), the speech used by women in the licensed quarters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Japanese society, there is a widespread notion that women have always spoken differently from men, and that these differences are the result of their feminine nature.In this book, Momoko Nakamura emphasizes the heterogeneity of women's linguistic practices in Japan and defends the notion of women's language as an ideological construction, closely linked to historical, political and economic processes. In opposition to the common assumption of women's language as women's actual speech and as a reflection of 'innate femininity', she provides a historical-discourse analysis of written documents, such as conduct books, school textbooks, dictionaries, grammar books and commentaries by intellectuals, in which women's language is prescribed, marginalized and conceptualized in different ways, depending on the historic and political context. This genealogy of women's language in Japan is of great interest for both researchers on Japanese language and language and gender, as it illuminates the importance of history, discourse and ideology in order to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language. To this end, the author discusses the implications of the analysis in each chapter from this general perspective. The book comprises ten chapters that are organized into four parts, chronologically ordered, from the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII (1945-1952).Part 1 addresses how norms of feminine speech are constructed in the discourses of conduct books (etiquette manuals) from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Strongly influenced by the androcentric view of Confucianism dominant in this age, these conduct books establish appropriate ways of speaking for women, thus treating women's speech as an object of regulation, control and normalization. Chapter 1 shows that these normative discourses include not displaying intelligence and not using Chinese words, but are specially focused on limiting women's right to speak, regarding their talk as a dangerous act that can bring trouble to families. It is worth mentioning that these historical discourses on silence or 'not speaking too much' as an ideal for women, and on women's talk as malicious gossip, have also been documented by studies with reference to Spanish (Lozano Domingo, 1995; Acuna Ferreira, 2015) and to many other languages (Spender, 1980; Romaine, 1999).Chapter 2 focuses on the establishment of court-women's speech as another norm of feminine speech in a large number of conduct books which appeared from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Court-women's speech was created by women serving in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century and it consisted of creative word formation to refer to domestic items such as food, kitchen utensils and clothes. Nakamura analyses funny stories and dramatic comic novels in which court-women's speech is represented as a symbol of being upper-class, a way of speaking that servant women refused but probably needed to attain employment at samurai mansions, and even as a style of speech that was also used by men, though this was later prohibited. Conduct books in this period, however, redefined court-women's speech as a norm of feminine speech, as a list of words that all women should use. …

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

How to realize your self? This question, reflective of neoliberal understandings of individual subjectivity and the sacred, is the basis of the Egyptian self-help guide whose artwork graces this issue's cover. The book is one among hundreds like it that can be bought in Egypt's bookstalls and bookstores, from where they circulate through the homes and workplaces of readers. This growing and popular corpus is the focus of Jeffrey T. Kenney's “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self: Self-Help Literature, Capitalist Values, and the Sacralization of Subjective Life in Egypt,” the first of two articles that make up the section “Therapeutic Discourses.” Kenney argues that as capitalism has expanded in Egypt, it has given rise to a pervasive consumer culture and, relatedly, a self-help literature that competes with Islamic etiquette manuals. Mixing modern ideas and ethical practices to form varied and unpredictable combinations, self-help has become a flat universal idiom, but what has given it its legitimacy in Egypt is its association with local tradition. “The inherent message of self-help,” Kenney writes, “is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.”

Manuales de urbanidad en la Colombia del siglo XIX: Modernidad, pedagogía y cuerpo

El objetivo principal de este artículo es realizar una revisión bibliográfica sobre la relación entre los conceptos de modernidad, pedagogía y cuerpo, enfatizando en los discursos de algunos manuales de urbanidad publicados en Colombia a lo largo del siglo XIX. Para ello, fue estudiada la bibliografía más relevante publicada en los últimos años sobre estos puntos, así como cuatro manuales de urbanidad decimonónicos, con el fin de indagar sobre cómo los cuerpos de hombres y mujeres fueron retratados y moldeados explícita o implícitamente, cómo fueron idealizados sus comportamientos y de qué manera se buscó educarlos para un Estado-nación moderno y civilizado. Esto significó entender la forma en que los manuales de urbanidad expusieron los espacios privados y públicos y comprender de qué manera estos espacios fueron constitutivos de la subjetividad de los géneros. Todo con el objetivo de relacionar los discursos de la urbanidad y los argumentos académicos de los investigadores que se han dedicado a estudiar estos textos.

The Decline in Shared Collective Conscience as Found in the Shifting Norms and Values of Etiquette Manuals

AbstractIn this article we address Emile Durkheim's theory that norms and values become more generalized and abstract in a society as it becomes more complex and differentiated. To test Durkheim's theory we examine etiquette manuals—the common texts that define normative manners and morals in American society. We perform a deductive content analysis on past and present etiquette manuals to understand what changes have occurred regarding shifting behavioral norms and values over time. Our findings suggest that a change has occurred in the presentation and language of contemporary etiquette manuals, reflecting a greater change in the normative order. We find—as Durkheim would expect—that three main shifts have occurred: a shift from specific to general expectations for behavior in social settings, a shift from demanding to more suggestive rules of behavior in social situations, and a weakening in the severity of sanctions for breaches of etiquette.

The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America Ann MarieKordas. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013.

Politics of Childhood in Cold War America Ann Marie Kordas. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013.In Politics of Childhood in Cold War America, Ann Marie Kordas argues that childhood was a unique prominent political vehicle during America's contest with its communist rivals. Divided into five chapters focused on parenting practices, educational reform, children's consumer culture, gender roles, and juvenile delinquency, Politics of Childhood distils the predominant ideologies of the time from an impressive range of texts, including child-rearing and educational works, etiquette manuals, magazine and newspaper articles, government studies, essays written by children for school assignments, and-most prominently-educational films. It is unfortunate that the book could not supplement this fascinating material with illustrations, but the variety of texts addressed speaks to Kordas's extensive knowledge of the era.In the first chapter, Father No Longer Knows Best: Parenting and Parent-Child Relationships, she focuses on the shift in parenting ideals that took place after World War II: whereas previous decades had stressed a need for inner-directed citizens, self-regulating individuals designed to meet the requirements of a production-oriented (18), postwar American society was other-directed and therefore feared conflict, worshipped conformity, and discouraged citizens from doing anything to differentiate themselves from other members of the group (27). Chapter Two, Lessons for Liberty: Schooling, reveals how educational reforms responded directly to perceived Soviet threats. Kordas shows, for example, an increased emphasis on science, a subject at which Americans would need to be adept in order to remain competitive. Educational materials also took on a propagandistic tone, emphasizing the superiority of American values and the pitfalls of communism. As the author points out, it was in 1954, after all, that the Pledge of Allegiance became a mandated classroom ritual.Chapter Three, All American: Child CitizenSoldier, ventures outside of the classroom to examine the consumer culture of children. From spy kits to chemistry sets, the message sent to children, particularly boys, was that they needed to be properly trained for inevitable conflict. Children could also serve their country by preparing to take on families of their own. Chapter Four, The Dating Game: Gender Roles, shows how children's culture stressed the inculcation of traditional gender norms. …

Beautiful Babies

Baby shows and baby contests in the late nineteenth century United States, beginning as a form of entertainment at agricultural fairs, were co-opted in the early twentieth century as a public relations vehicle for the eugenics movement. This article connects this history of display of the infant body with white Protestant practices of bodily display in infant baptism as represented etiquette manuals, women's magazines, and works of art. The author argues that infants became unwitting participants in practices of display that marked them as members of affluent white society.

O discurso do consumo consciente e a produção dos sujeitos contemporâneos do consumo

Discute-se, neste artigo, a constituição dos consumidores conscientes a partir do exame de enunciados que põem em circulação verdades relativas a um modo supostamente mais adequado de ser sujeito consumidor. Foram selecionadas as edições de um "Manual de Etiqueta" da revista Planeta sustentável, publicado entre 2007 e 2012, pela Editora Abril e distribuído na forma de encarte promocional. Realizou-se uma análise inspirada na teorização foucaultiana, com base na noção de discurso articulada aos conceitos de governo e poder. Os resultados indicaram que o discurso do consumo consciente se ocupa apenas com o controle de atos de compra segundo padrões desejáveis de consumo por indivíduo. O que faz dele muito mais um recurso de controle das condutas dos sujeitos de modo a manter em funcionamento o sistema econômico em vigor do que uma tomada de posição crítica ao modelo de consumo que tem causado prejuízos ao meio ambiente e à sociedade em geral.