Lower-class Men Research Articles

Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell

Reviewed by: Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell Stephanie K. Lawton (bio) Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era. By Sarah J. Purcell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 321. $95.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $26.99 ebook) Historians of Civil War memory have eagerly anticipated Purcell's project, and it does not disappoint. Americans in the nineteenth century took death seriously and produced an astonishing amount of material about public funerals. Purcell is up to this challenge and incorporates a remarkable number of primary sources, including over three hundred newspapers, surveying the funeral rites and memorial politics for nine prominent Americans, ranging from well-known individuals like Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, and Frederick Douglass, to nearly forgotten people like Elmer Ellsworth, George Peabody, and Winnie Davis. Purcell states that although public funerals have long been cast as rites of "unity and consensus," they are in fact contested sites of memory creation as participants "advocate for alternative visions of the past" and project "conflicting ideas about the nation onto famous figures whom they mourned" (pp. 5–6). Through such debates about the past, "Public funerals … helped define American national identities" as post-bellum Americans worked to "'reconstitute' the … nation in ways compatible with rival political interests" (pp. 3–4). But rather than a singular memorial tradition, Purcell shows that multiple, often conflicting, strands were combined in the same commemorative events. [End Page 84] Each chapter contains real gems. Purcell's discussion of how Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" oration was a rebuttal of the eulogies for Henry Clay in July 1852 is eyeopening. The diplomatic wrangling between the British and American governments over who would transport George Peabody's remains back to the U.S. in the wake of the CSS Alabama dispute shows that the political significance of memory is often international in scope. Purcell's attention to the racial lines of division in these ceremonies is superb, but there could be more attention to the less obvious ways gender and class were used to exclude or marginalize lower-class men, immigrants, and women. For example, while white women joined crowds welcoming Henry Clay's body to their cities and female family members sometimes appeared in the processions, women did not march, deliver the eulogies, or sit on the civic committees that planned these events. Only in the South after the Civil War did ladies' memorial associations start to take a role in hosting mourning rites, but they still did not participate in all aspects of public mourning equally with men. Even lower-class white men, such as firemen in New York City, usually walked near the end of funeral processions, not in the chief places of honor, which highlights the fractures of class and whiteness that became more prominent as America entered its Gilded Age. Spectacle of Grief opens promising avenues for future exploration, especially the possibility of further integrating disability studies into Civil War memory. Throughout the book, undertakers tried to prevent corpses from decaying while on public view while eulogists praised their past physical attributes and ignored often lengthy and disabling illnesses. These attempts to hide mortality, even after death, invites collaboration with disability scholars who have argued that illness and disability have never been welcome in the American community. Scholars of Civil War memory or of death and funeral traditions will find this a valuable addition to their bibliographies. History [End Page 85] instructors who teach about any of the book's nine central subjects would benefit from this additional context, and the chapters on Henry Clay and Frederick Douglass/Winnie Davis would work well as a set to assign to upper-division history classes talking about U.S. slavery, race, gender, and politics. Stephanie K. Lawton STEPHANIE K. LAWTON is an assistant professor of history at the University of the Cumberlands. Her research focuses on Greco-Roman influences on presidential funerals in the nineteenth-century United States. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society

Dissenting poses

In the spring of 2014, an unprecedented wave of police raids swept over every lower-class (sha‘abi) neighborhood across Morocco. Dubbed “Operation Tcharmil,” the raids targeted young, lower-class men that matched viral online images in which track-suit-wearing teens boastfully displayed status objects and white weapons. Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of the “affective turn,” in this article I unpack the structural and historical factors that shaped both popular reactions and policing actions toward the sudden, online visibility of a politically and economically disenfranchised group. I situate this episode within current debates about the entanglement of neoliberal disciplinary regimes and the reproduction of particular social orders, and argue that attention to such outbursts can help us revitalize and rethink existing notions of class.

Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks

Conscript Nation makes an important contribution to the literature on Bolivia and to our understanding of the armed forces' place in Latin American society. Scholars have frequently positioned Bolivia's military as a pivotal player throughout the nation's history, but its internal functioning, its transformations over time, and the importance of conscription as a form of facilitating national integration have been grossly understudied. These omissions have been detrimental to Bolivianists' understanding of the military's role in politics, state making, and nation building. Elizabeth Shesko's study provides several correctives to prevailing misconceptions about the military during the twentieth century and explores how conscription created a form of national belonging for the nation's Indigenous majority that relied on assimilationist ideas and coercion while also providing a space in which conscripted soldiers could and did contest the boundaries imposed on the citizenship offered to them.The book is a national study of military conscription and citizenship from the aftermath of the 1899 civil war to the 1964 coup. Shesko interrogates the disjuncture between the nature, structure, and actions of the military establishment, as well as the experiences, interests, and participation of conscripted soldiers. In so doing, she explores the complexities of state formation in a context of relative state weakness. While “the Bolivian state lacked the coercive power to impose” national identity on subaltern men through force, men from the lower classes increasingly saw military service as a mode of social advancement, a way to access patronage networks, earn masculine credentials in their home communities, and make claims on the state (p. 4).Many of the central questions in Bolivian historiography—state formation, Indigenous identity, revolutionary nationalism, dictatorship—are tangled up with the military. Heretofore Bolivianists, lacking a deep empirical study of the military's role in shaping the political system and the nation, have been left only with politicized narratives created in the aftermath of pivotal historical moments. While such narrations merit analysis in their own right, they have proven a poor substitute for empirical evidence. Shesko does this crucial work based on new sources from the Historical Archive of the Estado Mayor: internal military records, including testimony from military proceedings on mutinies, abuse of authority, and desertion. This allows her to narrate conscript experiences as well as the vicissitudes of military leadership's decision-making, providing the raw material for her important intervention into the literature on state making. This study sets a new empirical foundation for understanding nation and state making in Bolivia.Conscript Nation's contributions are numerous; I will highlight three. First, the book provides an essential corrective to Chaco War history. In analyzing the war, scholars have largely relied on ex post facto narratives of the conflict produced by reformist actors—political treatises preoccupied with the political imperatives of the moment. As Shesko argues, reliance on these documents, and the absence of hard statistical data, has skewed scholars' understanding of the composition of the armies raised, the experience at the front, and how the conflict affected nation building and state formation. Pointing out how postwar political treatises “implied that rural indigenous men had made for poor defenders of Bolivia's territory,” Shesko demonstrates how these narratives justified postwar assimilationist policies aimed at “improving” Bolivia's Indigenous population (p. 90). These narratives—in their multiple iterations—tended to depict Indigenous soldiers as victims while “implicitly blaming them for Bolivia's loss” (p. 91). Shesko instead foregrounds how Indigenous soldiers employed the dominant narratives of race and class as a form of resistance against state coercion and used their position as soldiers and veterans to make claims on the state.Second, Shesko puts a finer point on the meanings of the Chaco War for the political class that emerged from it. Bolivianist historians have often referred to the “generation of the Chaco” as crucial to the development of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement and ultimately the political orientation of the 1952 revolution, but the politicization of this generation has been underanalyzed. While framing the Chaco conflict as a formative experience for a generation of middle-class men, Shesko analyzes how they in turn framed the war as an imperialist manipulation by Standard Oil. This narrative allowed military leaders to pass the buck but also shaped subsequent histories of the conflict.Last, Conscript Nation's broadest intervention regards Indigenous citizenship. Military service did not immediately make conscripts full citizens; to the contrary, the disjuncture between citizenship and obligatory military service remains stark throughout the book. But the military institution offered a space from which lower-class men challenged, resisted, and made claims on the state. Joining historians who have contended that spaces of state power are also sites of contention, Shesko illustrates how an oppressive institution that sought to homogenize, assimilate, and integrate Bolivia's Indigenous men was also a site of negotiation, in which conscripted men shaped the military establishment.

‘My Gunners will burn your houses, my soldiers will pillage them’: what French people were singing about when they sang about Napoleon

Abstract Fifty years after his death, almost the only song that French people still sung about Napoleon retold his conquest of the city of Mantua in 1797. ‘Le bombardement de Mantoue’ is an example of a popular European folk genre, the siege song. Siege songs use the metaphor of a violent wooer and a reluctant maiden to narrate the capture of cities. They circulated, in print and orally, from the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, updated for all conflicts by the substitution of the name of the besieger and the city. While often factually inaccurate, such songs are evidence of historical consciousness, and they could be used to express an identification with a national or political cause. They also anchored an early modern concept of war in popular culture, in which victory was measured in territory acquired, and in which a rampaging soldiery was pitted against a civilian and female population. Sieges envisaged as a violent courtship relocated military events into the language of interpersonal relationships, and thus they became relevant in many day-to-day contexts. Siege songs are akin to pastourelles, the most popular of all song genres, but whereas in the pastourelle a knight or lord pursues a shepherdess, in ‘Le bombardement de Mantoue’ socially superior women are violated by lower class men. This fantasy of social, as well as sexual, conquest helps explain the continuing popularity of this song.

Sex- specific clustering of metabolic syndrome components and incidence of cardiovascular disease: A latent class analysis in a population-based cohort study.

The prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) is rapidly increasing in the world; also, the importance of management of MetS to decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been recognized worldwide. This study aimed to explore the clusters of participants based on MetS components and its association with CVD outcomes. We included 2598 middle-aged participants (1545 women and 1053 men), 45-65 years old, at baseline and without prior CVD history. Participants were followed up for 10years. We conducted a latent class analysis based on MetS components. Subsequently, the relationship between latent classes and the incidence of CVD was investigated using Cox regression models adjusted for the main confounders. During the study period, 393 (186 women and 207 men) new cases of CVD were identified among participants. In both genders, four distinct latent classes were identified: (1) Mets class (its prevalence rate in men: 19.6%, women: 27.7%), (2) Hypertension class (men: 12.1%, women: 13.7%), (3) Dyslipidemia class (men: 31.7%, women: 30.7%), (4) Low risk class (men: 39.3%, women: 30.5%). Compared with low-risk class, in both genders, Mets and hypertension classes were significant predictors of incident CVD. However, dyslipidemia class was a significant predictor just in women. We found four subclasses in both genders indicating the same patterns of MetS latent classes in men and women. However, the relationship between subclasses of MetS and incident CVD varied by gender. These results suggest that the etiology of MetS involve more than one pathway and giving equal weight to each component or using the same cut-off values in both genders need to be reconsidered.

Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions: Gender, Class, and Cabs in Hyderabad, India

Abstract A robust body of literature documents how women manage their self-presentation and perceptions of sexual risk when navigating city spaces. Yet we know less about how these strategies and tactics interact with existing class relations in society. This study investigates how, in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad in India, upwardly mobile women who commute via ride-share apps and lower-class men employed as drivers navigate the temporarily shared space of the car ride within the broader context of growing public anxiety around women’s safety in the city. Drawing on interview data and participant observation, I show two empirical patterns: 1) women commuters and men cabdrivers each view the other through the lens of suspicion as relatively more powerful than themselves; and 2) while women construct men drivers as sexually rapacious and dangerous, men understand the upwardly mobile woman commuter as entitled and abusive of her class power. I argue that competing understandings of risk exacerbate social distance and reproduce class and gender hierarchies between men drivers and women commuters. I suggest that the desire for safety vocalized by women passengers, while understandable, seems to rest on a set of processes that further pathologize and “otherize” the lower-class male subject.

The Sociolectal and Stylistic Variability of Rhythm in Stockholm.

The question of "staccato" rhythm in Stockholm's multiethnolect is investigated by comparing nPVIV measurements of the speech of 36 adult male speakers. The men, ages 24-43, come from a stratified sample of social classes and racial groups. Three contextual styles were recorded and analyzed: informal, formal, and very formal. The distribution of nPVIV values in informal speech across class and racial group indicates that speech rhythm splits three ways: low-alternation "staccato" rhythm among the racialized lower-class men, high-alternation rhythm among the white lower-class men, and an intermediate level of rhythm among higher-class men, regardless of racialized category. The "staccato" low-alternation feature is also less stylistically sensitive than the high-alternation feature, implying that the latter is a more established feature than the former. Further, the "staccato" feature is more stylistically sensitive among younger speakers than older speakers, implying an ongoing change from indicator to marker status. For all speakers, age has a stable main effect, which means that younger speakers, independent of racial group and class, have lower alternation than older speakers. Implied here is that low-alternation is a change from below that originates within the racialized working class. While it may be incrementally transmitting into the wider speech community, the white working class is the most resistant to its incursion.

Stress Proliferation? Precarity and Work–Family Conflict at the Intersection of Gender and Household Income

We theorize a stress proliferation process whereby the stress of job precarity translates into the stress of work-to-family conflict (WFC). We test whether this process differs by gender and household income. Using four cross-sectional waves of the General Social Survey ( N = 2,340), we find a positive association between job insecurity and WFC for women but not men. Examined by household income levels, the association is found only for respondents in the lowest income tercile. Furthermore, gender intersects with household income to shape the stress proliferation process. While the insecurity–WFC relationship holds for women across all household income levels, for men this relationship shifts from positive for men in the lowest income tercile to negative for men in the highest income tercile. Our findings suggest that entrenched gendered expectations around work and family may lead women (regardless of household income) and lower-class men to be most vulnerable to stress proliferation.

Estratificação horizontal da educação superior no Brasil: desigualdades de classe, gênero e raça em um contexto de expansão educacional

O acesso ao ensino superior é fundamental para diminuir as desvantagens de pessoas com origens nos grupos menos privilegiados, na medida em que aumenta as chances de mobilidade social ascendente. A literatura sobre estratificação educacional nos ensina que tanto o acesso aos diferentes tipos de modalidade ofertada (bacharelados, licenciaturas, cursos tecnológicos) quanto quais cursos são escolhidos (medicina, administração ou pedagogia) influenciam as chances de alcançar os melhores empregos. Tendo em vista que os diferentes diplomas universitários não são iguais em termos das vantagens que trazem para os diplomados, e que há diferenças de acesso entre os cursos universitários em termos de classe, gênero e raça, o perfil de acesso a esses cursos deve ser analisado. Neste artigo, avaliamos de forma inédita e desagregada o padrão de expansão do ensino superior brasileiro e como se configuram as oportunidades no sistema. Mobilizando dados do Inep, nossos resultados apontam que pessoas com origem nos estratos mais altos (pais com ensino superior) tinham probabilidade significativamente maior de entrar nos cursos de maior prestígio (medicina, odontologia, engenharias etc.) e em instituições públicas do que pessoas com origem nas classes mais baixas. Também encontramos forte estratificação por gênero tendo em vista que homens têm maior probabilidade de entrar em cursos das ciências exatas e mulheres em cursos relacionados ao ensino e aos cuidados. A estratificação por gênero, no entanto, combina-se de forma não linear com a estratificação por classe de origem, na medida em que há cursos típicos de homens de classe alta, mulheres de classe alta, homens de classe baixa e mulheres de classe baixa.

Representation and resistance in Restoration Scotland: the political thought of James Stewart of Goodtrees (1635–1713)

SUMMARY This article presents a Scottish case study of early modern ideas on parliamentary representation and popular political participation. By scrutinizing the context and content of a treatise published in 1669 by the lawyer James Stewart of Goodtrees, the article seeks to demonstrate that views had shifted on the nature of the Scottish Parliament. In addition, it is argued that the promulgation of Scotland's covenants – that is, the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) – unwittingly created space for the development of popular political engagement. However, the implications of this were not fully realized until a group of middling and lower class men rose in arms to uphold the Covenants after their rescission in law by parliamentary statute in 1661.

Entitlement in Higher Education: Evaluating the Measurement Invariance Properties of the Academic Entitlement Questionnaire

Self-report instruments are commonly used in the educational and behavioral sciences. The purpose of this study was to investigate the measurement invariance properties of the Academic Entitlement Questionnaire (AEQ) developed by Kopp, Zinn, Finney, and Jurich, across gender and college rank (i.e., lower classmen, upper classmen, and graduate students). Partial metric and scalar invariance was established for the AEQ across gender. In relation to college rank, partial metric invariance was met, but scalar invariance did not hold. The results of the study may benefit educational researchers who are interested in using the AEQ or examining attributes that may be associated with academic entitlement.

Action-Oriented Responses to Sexual Harassment in Egypt

Action-Oriented Responses to Sexual Harassment in Egypt

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle Thunder: Reinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle ThunderReinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital Angela M. Zombek (bio) Castle Thunder’s inmates were a hard lot. In 1863, members of a special congressional investigative committee derided them as “desperate and abandoned characters,” mainly murderers, thieves, deserters, substitutes, forgers, and “all manner of villains.” Commandant George Alexander’s harshness inspired the Confederate Congress to investigate the legality of his favored punishments, which included whipping, bucking and gagging, and solitary confinement. Ultimately, the committee, and Alexander’s subordinates—like warden Baldwin T. Allen, who testified on his behalf—condoned his conduct, and emphasized the necessity of rigid rules, since anything less would hinder officers’ ability to control the motley crew of inmates.1 Scholars’ focus on military prisons has painstakingly chronicled inmates’ suffering and intentional maltreatment.2 But Castle Thunder had a broader function: the Confederate government consolidated power through establishment and control of military prisons. National control over prisons was radical, especially since antebellum southern civilians remained skeptical of state-controlled [End Page 221] penitentiaries and Americans generally believed that the national government should be restrained in criminal matters. But Confederate political and military officials eschewed antebellum disdain for institutions of confinement. They instead believed that military prisons should punish enemies, suppress dissent, and promote Confederate ideology.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Castle Thunder Prison, Petersburg (Richmond), April 1865, photograph by Andrew J. Russell. (Library of Congress.) Confederate military officials used Castle Thunder to create a gendered definition [End Page 222] of nationalism, exalted its commanders as prime examples of southern manhood, and castigated white male and female inmates as deviants whose recalcitrant gendered behavior threatened the cause. Prison officials exercised paternalism by using imprisonment to supervise civilians who betrayed the cause. Meanwhile, journalists crafted messages about prison officers and inmates that showed the southern public how to behave. Confederate officials like Castle Thunder commandant George Alexander and Richmond’s Provost Marshal John Winder used the prison to imbue gendered behavior with meaning, and the Richmond press helped southern civilians envision how proper southern men and women should support the national project.4 Click for larger view View full resolution General John N. Winder, C.S.A, before 1861. (Library of Congress.) Castle Thunder’s history points to how the Civil War disrupted gender norms [End Page 223] and exacerbated social anxieties, which Winder and Alexander corrected and controlled through imprisonment. They used the prison to guard white women in the absence of men, reprimand women who exhibited masculine behavior, and judge how men should balance their duties as heads of household with their obligations to defend the state. Castle Thunder provided a concrete reminder that southern nationalism required proper male and female behavior and that defiance warranted imprisonment.5 The Confederacy’s gendered version of nationalism remained engrained in southerners after war’s end. In postwar Richmond, Union victors maintained the prison for several months to bring order to the city, but southern inmates petitioned for release based on gender expectations that the vanquished Confederates promoted throughout the war. Many Castle Thunder inmates illuminate a paradox in gender dynamics that disturbed the southern social order, as many white and lower-class women assumed traditionally male roles, and imprisonment either emasculated men, or restrained hypermasculine enemies. White southerners had long prided themselves on maintaining a stable gender consensus in their slaveholding society. Under this construct, patriarchal white male heads of household wielded authority over dependents—wives, children, and slaves—and patriarchal power guided social, political, and economic relationships beyond the home. War, however, inspired Confederate officials to scrutinize the behavior of a wide range of “suspicious” characters of both genders, ultimately revealing that the South’s longstanding gender conventions did not command the loyalty necessary to sustain the war effort. Lower-class men and, perhaps more importantly, women who defied gender conventions rejected antebellum norms and took advantage of war’s chaos to create new opportunities. Conservative officials, like Winder and Alexander, made themselves the arbiters of female virtue and male honor to a degree unheard of in the antebellum period and used Castle Thunder to force compliance with Confederate nationalism, which depended on perpetuating the familiar, patriarchal social...

Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty

Research on the mechanisms that reproduce social class advantages in the United States focuses primarily on formal schooling and pays less attention to social class discrimination in labor markets. We conducted a résumé audit study to examine the effect of social class signals on entry into large U.S. law firms. We sent applications from fictitious students at selective but non-elite law schools to 316 law firm offices in 14 cities, randomly assigning signals of social class background and gender to otherwise identical résumés. Higher-class male applicants received significantly more callbacks than did higher-class women, lower-class women, and lower-class men. A survey experiment and interviews with lawyers at large firms suggest that, relative to lower-class applicants, higher-class candidates are seen as better fits with the elite culture and clientele of large law firms. But, although higher-class men receive a corresponding overall boost in evaluations, higher-class women do not, because they face a competing, negative stereotype that portrays them as less committed to full-time, intensive careers. This commitment penalty faced by higher-class women offsets class-based advantages these applicants may receive in evaluations. Consequently, signals of higher-class origin provide an advantage for men but not for women in this elite labor market.

Loyalist Tattoos and Tattooed Generals in the Song Dynasty

According to Yue Fei’s biography, when the legendary general was slandered and interrogated for treason, he tore the shirt off his body, exposing four characters tattooed on his back: “Exhaust one’s loyalty in service of the state.” This study looks at two components of the Yue Fei story—patriotic tattoos, and tattooed generals—and examines their meaning in the broader stretch of Song dynasty history. Yue Fei was not the Song dynasty’s only tattooed general who came to a tragic end. The Northern Song’s Di Qing was a tattooed soldier whose military merit allowed him to rise to the highest levels of power in the empire. Di Qing’s story makes it clear that tattooed generals were objects of suspicion and ridicule at court due to their military tattoos, a trait that linked them to the criminals and lower class men that manned the Song armies. Though military tattoos sometimes had a loyalist ring to them, they were carried out on a mass scale, and were a characteristic of coercion rather than fervent loyalism. This study shows that underneath the nationalist historical narrative of the Song dynasty, of which Yue Fei is a famous example, there lies a different story of social conflict within the Song state. Rather than a story of Chinese fighting non-Chinese and of traitorous and cowardly officials struggling with loyal patriots, this study offers a narrative of a social conflict between high-born clear-skinned officials and low-born tattooed military men.

Factors Most Likely to Contribute to Positive Course Evaluations

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which students differentially rated ten factors likely to affect their ratings on overall course evaluations. Students (N = 148) in several sections of an undergraduate educational psychology course indicated their preferences among several designated factors. We found remarkable similarity in the ratings across a variety of subgroups (i.e., high vs. low grades, high vs. low test scores, upper vs. lower classmen, and gender). Good grade emerged as the most highly rated factor for every subgroup, whereas high course standards fell among the less-favored factors.

Taming Tiger Dads

How do non-Western men interact with and understand the form of Western masculinity associated with global dominance? Is their experience of Western hegemonic masculinity’s denigration of their national/ethnic masculinity similar to what occurs among subordinated nonwhite and lower-class men in Western countries? We take up this subject in our study of the South Korean Father School movement, which trains Korean men to become more involved and loving family men. Our analysis of the discursive practices of Father School organizational leadership and participants discovers the relational construction of a problematic “Korean” masculinity and a remedial “New Man” masculinity associated with white American men. We draw on Chen (1999) to suggest the Father School men’s movement is an attempt to elevate Korean masculinity on the world stage by “bargaining” with Western hegemonic masculinity.

Classing Sex Offenders: How Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys Differentiate Men Accused of Sexual Assault

As public awareness of and concern about sexual victimization has increased in recent decades, stigmatization of sex offenders has also increased considerably. Contemporary sex offender policies transform discrete criminal behaviors into lifelong social identities. Although there is much debate about the efficacy and constitutionality of such policies, we know little about how the category of “sex offender” is constituted in the first place. In this article, I reveal how prosecutors and defense attorneys construct sex offenders, not as monsterous or racialized as is commonly thought, but as “lower class” men. This analysis is based on 30 in-depth interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in Michigan. These legal actors wield disproportionate power in defining the boundaries of criminal behaviors and individuals. That they associate sexual criminality with lower class men demonstrates yet another way that class-based inequalities are reproduced in the legal field.

Involuntary Bachelorhood in Rural China

Despite the universality of marriage in Chinese society, involuntary bachelorhood exists, and is becoming an increasingly critical issue. While many studies have addressed the problem from the standpoint of demographic imbalance, we argue that the issue should be understood as a manifestation of the gendered features of the marriage system which work against low-class men. This understanding relates involuntary bachelorhood to the combined effects of spouse selection and marriage practices. To elaborate our argument, the present study explores nuptiality plights of involuntary bachelors. In particular, it examines their marginalisation in the marriage market, defiant choices in the face of market exclusion, and instability of marital relationships.

Composing Gender and Class: Paraguayan Letter Writers during the Chaco War, 1932–1935

This article studies the important role of Paraguayan women during the Chaco War (1923–1935). It studies the relationship between “Godmothers of War” and their “Godsons” during the war, outlining how urban elite Paraguayan women corresponded with rural lower-class men in the name of patriotism.