Male Citizenship Research Articles

Tackling the construction of a conservative femininity in ‘An ideal girl’ by Soumya Menon

The current research work is titled “Tackling the construction of a conservative femininity in ‘An Ideal Girl” by Soumya Menon”. The main purpose of this is to describe how the author Soumya Menon in ‘An Ideal Girl’ responds against the dominant nationalist discourse proposed by Hindutva, during the Indian post-independence, presenting counter-current femininities about what the concept of an ideal girl should be. There is still a conservative discourse subordinating women, proving a step backward regarding gender equality. Under the doctrine of Hindutva, during the post-independence period, the government started to install a series of educational charts called “An Ideal Boy” in schools. They are a series of posters illustrating the good behavior of an ideal boy, raising awareness of male citizenship. At the same time, the charts show female characters in the background serving the ideal boy and doing the house chores. The article focuses on one of the fourteen graphic narratives published in the Indian anthology of comics entitled Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! (2015) edited by Priya Kuriyan et al., entitled ‘An Ideal Girl’, by Soumya Menon, a feminist author fostering an alternative construction of gender, out of the Indian canon imposed by the ideology of Hindutva. Drawing on the ideal girl's preset notion, the illustrator depicts a deconstruction of the concept of femininity represented in the “An Ideal Boy” posters settled in state schools during de post-independence, and reaching the present day.

Masculinizing national service: the cultural reproduction of masculinities and militarization of male citizenship in Singapore

ABSTRACTAs a conscription-based military, the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) fulfils an important role in transforming Singaporean boys from various classes and ethnic backgrounds into adult men. At a time when there is interest in the production and performativity of military masculinities in countries that have abandoned conscription, this article examines how, as a rite of passage into manhood, compulsory enlistment in the SAF reproduces hegemonic masculinities denoting ruggedness, perseverance, leadership, muscular manliness and self-discipline. Whilst the SAF can be represented as a site for hegemonic masculinities in the authoritarian Southeast Asian city-state, this work articulates a framework for theorizing how military masculinities are responsible for gendering male citizenship in Singapore. It also suggests that military masculinities can be conceptualized as cultural capital that allows Singaporean males to construct masculinity and assert a male identity in various social settings whilst gaining access to elite networks of power.

<em>Kurios, Kuria</em> and the Status of Athenian Women

A term that has not been studied for the question of Athenian female citizenship is the adjective kurios. Rather than focus on the substantivized and technical use of the term as a female's guardian, this article explores the wider applications of the word kurios, particularly as an expression of power over property, the continuation of the oikos, and its connotations for citizenship. Women are in fact called kuriai over property in forensic speeches (D. 27.53, D. 45.74, [D.] 50.60, Is. 10.23, Is. 6.30). Examining these passages, I argue that women's power over property has legal connotations and is further proof of a female citizenship that shared facets with male citizenship.

Kurios, Kuria and the Status of Athenian Women

A term that has not been studied for the question of Athenian female citizenship is the adjective kurios. Rather than focus on the substantivized and technical use of the term as a female's guardian, this article explores the wider applications of the word kurios, particularly as an expression of power over property, the continuation of the oikos, and its connotations for citizenship. Women are in fact called kuriai over property in forensic speeches (D. 27.53, D. 45.74, [D.] 50.60, Is. 10.23, Is. 6.30). Examining these passages, I argue that women's power over property has legal connotations and is further proof of a female citizenship that shared facets with male citizenship.

Gendervooroordelen en de Romeinse census

Abstract Gender biases and the census of the Roman citizensThe Roman census figures are a fundamental source of demographic information for the classical world. Since the nineteenth century historical demographers have used these figures to calculate the number of Roman citizens. The resulting population figures, however, vary considerably between different interpretations. This article aims to show that the numerical differences can be associated with different views on Roman citizenship. A gender bias played a role, in particular a one-sided emphasis on male citizenship which has kept attention away from women as independent citizens in the census figures. This bias, which is already visible in Roman sources, was strengthened in the nineteenth century. Roman citizenship terminology was used to describe the contemporary liberal citizenship ideal with its emphasis on the male citizen-soldier as the head of his family. This liberal citizenship ideal in return influenced nineteenth-century interpretations of Roman citizenship which are still central to our understanding of the Roman census figures today.

Landowners and Slaveowners

Landowners and Slaveowners Alfred L. Brophy (bio) Christopher Michael Curtis. Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ix + 255 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $91.00 (cloth); $28.99 (paper); $73.00 (e-book). Christopher Michael Curtis’ Jefferson’s Freedholders is on a topic that at first seems rather narrow: changes in property law in Virginia from the Revolution through the Civil War. Yet it has big implications for how we think about legal and constitutional change, the market revolution, support for slavery, and the relationship between those topics. The arc of Curtis’ narrative begins with real property as the focus of republican ideas at the time of Jefferson and ends with slavery as the focus of the Commonwealth at the time of the Civil War. This book, thus, deals with changes in property law and political ideology. The starting point of Curtis’ story is a republican ideology that privileged widely dispersed holdings in real property. This political ideology correlated with a shift in how Virginians held their real property around the time of the Revolution. The shift was from holding real property under a feudal tenure to holding it as “allodial” property—that is, as property held directly by its owners from the government rather than as feudal property held under a lord. The feudal property regime might have involved some on-going payment obligations known as quit-rents. Such obligations implied dependence. Although other historians rarely pay attention to this shift, it is important to Curtis’ framing: “Grounding republican citizenship in the allodial freehold expressed a belief that the absolute ownership of a tangible piece of property would reconcile the indulgent characteristics of economic individualism with a vested social attachment to a particular local community and, accordingly, foster civic virtue through self-interest” (p. 8). Thomas Jefferson wrote about the importance of the change from the feudal basis for property-holding before the Revolution to allodial property-holding after it, hence the title of the book. Those appeals to republican values of property ownership continued for decades. In the 1840s, for instance, Charles Faulkner envisioned a republican world of property owners free from debts on their slaves. Yet, despite the continuity of some rhetoric, there were changes afoot. Jefferson’s Freeholders traces the constitutional changes in Virginia in the [End Page 237] nineteenth century that eliminated the real-property ownership requirement for voting in favor of allowing adult white males who had real property worth $25 (including an interest in someone else’s real property, as through a mortgage) to vote. This is critical in Curtis’ mind. “This fundamental reconception of the freehold thus facilitated significant reforms to the franchise and, by extension, recast fundamental beliefs about citizenship and self-government in Virginia’s republic” (p. 116). One of the key markers of the change from the Revolutionary-era to the Civil War was the 1849 Virginia Code, which effectively abolished the distinction between real and personal property by removing the requirement of ownership of real property for office-holding and made office-holding subject to election rather than to appointment. This sealed the shifting basis of political power from real estate to white male citizens and also marked the shift from property to democracy, as we used to call it. The changes in Virginia law recognized that people other than owners of real property should have a hand in government. Virginians shifted their political theory from Revolution through Civil War, from a government based on land ownership to a government based on free white male citizenship, at the same time protecting personal property—mainly enslaved humans. Jefferson’s Freeholders also traces other changes in law, such as protections for real property and enslaved human property from creditors, as well as in a lot of other highly technical areas. For instance, there is an extended discussion of the litigation around the question of whether a man who has a beneficial interest in real property (that is, is the beneficiary of a trust that owns real property) is qualified to serve as a grand juror. At that point, Virginia limited grand jury service to owners of real property...

Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics

Preface 1. Black Masculinity as Sexual Politics 2. Controlling Masculine Hierarchies 3. Penetrating Matters in Black Male Domination 4. Black Masculinity and Ideologies of Inferiority 5. Black Male Citizenship Trouble 6. Black Male Homosexual Gender Trouble 7. Feminizing and Hypermasculizing Black Male Socialization: Rehabilitating Black Masculine Heterosexuality 8. Expectations for Black Male Futures

Masculinity and National Language

The notion of a unified Japanese national language was an androcentric language ideology created during the period of Japanese nation-state building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its association with masculinity, however, was accomplished without being explicitly stated, rendering the national language an unmarked, hegemonic ideology for the entire nation. The implicit masculinization of the national language was constructed in the gendered dispositions between language ideologies. Language ideologies in the period were gendered on three levels, “national language” vs. “feminine speech,” “schoolboy speech” vs. “schoolgirl speech,” and “masculine features” vs. “feminine features,” constructing the strong ties among masculinity, national language, and specific linguistic features. The masculine, unmarked status of the “national language” was negatively created by its asymmetrical relationship with ideologies concerning feminine, marked, and marginalized speech styles or linguistics forms. The asymmetrical disposition of gendered language ideologies formed iconic representations of female and male citizens. Standardization often involves both the construction and marginalization of feminine language varieties, which symbolically invent female citizens as the Inside Other, enabling a highly integrated construction of male citizenship.

Expanding the Subject: Violence, Care, and (In)Active Male Citizenship

We explore the implications of an employment-oriented vision of active citizenship for the gendered dimensions of welfare regimes, observing how this vision distracts attention from male violence against women and male neglect of childrearing which precipitate entrance onto welfare for many lone-mothers. We therefore question policy logics which presume that welfare dependency by lone-mothers reflects primarily a deficient work ethic. In place of this presumption, we argue for reconceptualizing active citizenship around norms that demand men to act differently, without recourse to individualized, patriarchal, racialized, and classist discourses that currently inform much fatherhood and family values rhetoric.

Nation and Gender in Contemporary Europe by Vera Tolz , Stephanie Booth (review)

192 SEER, 86, I, 2008 Tolz, Vera and Booth, Stephanie (eds). Nation and Gender in Contemporary Europe.Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2005. viii + 190 pp. Notes. Appendix. Index. ?55.00. This book consists of an introduction and chapters on 'Political Aspects: East andWest' and on 'ImageManipulation: Media, Advertisements and Cinema', conclusions and a speech delivered by Ch?rie Booth QC on British human rights legislation on immigration, gender and identity.The writers are from theUK, Switzerland, Poland and Russia. The analysed countries are France, theCzech Republic, Switzerland, Romania, Soviet and post-Soviet Societies, Poland and Northern Ireland. Here I focus on the chapters that deal with citizenship and nationality. There are, additionally, three interesting articles on media and cinema in Poland and Northern Ireland. In the introduction Vera Tolz and Stephenie Booth suggest that the significance of connections of nationalism with the formation of democratic states is often ignored. Gender is usually taken for granted, even though it is centrally implicated in political systems.A comparative approach isdeployed in order to demonstrate that democracy and nationalism are linked in gen dered ways. The positions ofwomen and men diverge historically, politically and culturally. Both civic and ethnic visions are encompassed in national communities. The main focuses include ways inwhich gender is incorporated in the creation of nation states and the political processes. SylviaWalby notes that the formation of nations isbased on gender relations.Walby emphasizes that women are active participants in national struggles ? not merely objects. She also notes that gender is implicated in various locations including the global arena. Gender and citizenship have acquired particular inflections in France in the context ofwider debates about the political agenda, as Gill Allwood argues. She discusses the concept of parity that refers to the equal presence of women and men in state institutions. In this context gender is represented as a binary that cannot or should not be overcome. There have been concerns in France that sexual difference is difficult tomaintain in the public sphere, and the entry into that sphere dilutes such differences. This notion of citizen ship eludes gender, and it is considered problematic for this reason. Addition ally, diversity among women is not easy to take into account in this model. For example it isdifficultformigrant women to be integrated into society. Stephanie Booth presents a comparative analysis of Britain and theCzech Republic and examines differentways of including women. Whilst Britain provides an example of state-framed nationalism, the Czech Republic is characterized by a counter-state nation building project. In thiscontext Czech women opted for a strategy that emphasized gender as a tool for emancipa tion. Women were seen as potential saviours of the nation and feminism had littleplace in this formation. British feminists have discussed differences between women and men, but have also considered differences among women, such as social class, ethnicity and sexuality. In the Czech Republic the interests of the state were emphasized, whilst in Britain gender roles were considered to be socially ascribed rather than natural. REVIEWS I93 Swiss patterns are analysed by Regula Ludi, who notes that Switzerland has a strong image as a particularly democratic country whilst at the same time the integration ofwomen into the polity has been thin.Military service is one arena where differences are produced and the protection of women is considered important ? the purpose ofwelfare provision is to protect them rather than to promote their independence. Ludi suggests that events during the Second World War produced a particular kind of trauma, as men had not been able to protect women who suffered from the violence of thewar and were subjected to rape. Although institutionalized gender differences no longer prevail, in the cultural sphere the legacy of themasculine construction of the state is still associated with male citizenship. In Romania the nation has many pasts, as Christina Chiva demonstrates. The tension has been that the idea of a 'Romanian' is linked to nationality and to ethnicity rather than to a more inclusive conceptualization of citizen ship that could facilitate the inclusion ofwomen and minority ethnic groups. Women's campaigning for universal suffrage was not successful and was accomplished by the Communist regime only after the Second World...

Not a Soldier, Not a Slacker: Conscientious Objectors and Male Citizenship in the United States during the Second World War

This essay argues that the 1940 Selective Service Act introduced new tensions between pacifism and male citizenship in the United States. Even as the draft required tens of millions of American men to answer Uncle Sam's call and promoted a new norm of male military obligation, it also specified the acceptable grounds for conscientious objection and created bureaucratic mechanisms for distinguishing between sincere objectors and ‘slackers’. Using Selective Service and organisational records, letters, diaries, interviews and the media, I suggest that male citizenship has been defined not only by idealised and gendered duties, but also by the difficulties and exceptions involved in their practical realisation.

The Nation According to Lavisse

Ernest Lavisse's Histoire de France: Cours élémentaire (1884) was one of the most widely used history textbooks among French school children during the Third Republic. Le Petit Lavisse is replete with gender lessons that encourage French schoolboys to reflect on their identity and invigorate them with national pride following defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. In this essay, we examine representations of masculinityand male citizenship in Lavisse's manual to illustrate how male ‘codes of honor’ (Nye, 1993) and a male ‘sex in mourning’ (Corbin, 1992) function in this republican project of nation rebuilding. In contrast to previous scholarship, we illustrate how Lavisse situates both his male and female heroes in these nineteenth-century discourses on honour, masculinity and citizenship. In sum, we expose the inherently male-centred nature of the pedagogy of the Third Republic prescribed by Lavisse and others.

What’s a Patriotic Man to Do?

Patriotism is an ideology, like masculinity, that posits specific behaviors and beliefs as best for a nation and an individual. This article examines three forms of masculine patriotism promoted in the crisis of the post–World War I Red Scare—the antiradical heroism of Ole Hanson, the postwar militarism of the American Legion, and the laborer wistfully proposed by manufacturing organizations. These models drew from the wartime emphasis on male soldiers as national redeemers but re-created the ideals of male citizenship to fit the domestic crisis of the Red Scare. Those who defined themselves as patriots praised forms of masculine patriotism that exalted loyalty to family, loyalty to war veterans, and loyalty to employer as the traits of an ideal male citizen. This gendered form of male citizenship excluded women, but because of its racial, ethnic, class, and ideological content, also excluded large numbers of American men from claims to good citizenship.

The blood of our sons: men, women, and the renegotiation of British citizenship during the Great War

Introduction PART I: PROPAGANDA AND THE PUBLIC MIND The Rape of Belgium and Wartime Imagination The Making of Tommy Atkins: Masculinity, Propaganda and the Triumph of Family Values Redrawing the Boundaries of the Private Sphere: Patriotic Motherhood and the Raising of Kitchener's Armies PART II: SHAMING RITUALS AND SEXUAL IDENTITY The Order of the White Feather Conscription, Conscience, and the Travails of Male Citizenship 'Reinventing Womanhood: Sufragettes and the Great War for Citizenship PART III: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF LAW The Power of Sacrifice: 'Physical Force' and Women's Work Votes for Whom?: The Ideological Origins of the Representation of the People Bill

"Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality Require Discrimination": Citizenship, Dependency, and Conscription in the South, 1917-1919

WORLD WAR I COMPLETED THE INTEGRATION OF THE SOUTH INTO THE American nation state. The United States, led by the first southern-born president since the Civil War, embarked upon a military undertaking of unprecedented magnitude that required the mobilization of the manpower and resources of the country as a whole. This imperative was most clearly expressed in the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, which called for the first nationwide conscription in American history. The inclusion of southern men in the draft represented the final validation of their national citizenship, over half a century after secession. During the war, however, the relationship between southerners and the nation state, newly consummated through conscription, was complicated by another, equally demanding relationship, one predicated on citizenship as well but also rooted in the political economy of family and region: the relationship between male draft registrants and their female and minor dependents.(1) Over the course of the nineteenth century, the support of dependents had gradually become attribute of male citizenship under the conditions of ascendant industrial capitalism and wage labor system. As men gained economic independence and social respect by earning a living wage in shops and factories located away from their homes, the labor of women, unpaid and performed in increasingly differentiated domestic sphere, was devalued and rendered them dependent on male providers. By the Progressive Era, these antithetical conceptions of male citizenship and female dependency were firmly entrenched in political culture and public policy.(2) In creating the Selective Service System--whose emphasis on national efficiency, bureaucratic rationality, and the equal obligations of citizenship made it a quintessential Progressive institution--Congress recognized the economic ties and social conceptions of dependency within families and sought to place the burden of military service on men who could most easily bear it; that is, on those who had the fewest domestic commitments. The Selective Service Act thus allowed for the deferment of men who supplied their families' livelihood, by far the most common cause of draft deferment. Determining the appropriate draft classification of men who claimed to support dependents required that the federal government promulgate for the first time a formal definition of dependency as a basis for the administration of public policy. The definition developed by draft officials bears out the contention of Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon that in the discourse on social welfare in the United States, dependency is an ideological term whose uses serve to enshrine certain interpretations of social life as authoritative and to delegitimate and obscure others.(3) In keeping with the long-standing gendered dimension of citizenship, draft officials drew prescriptive, ideological distinctions between the roles of men and women within families, distinctions that cast men as wage earners and providers and assigned women to a separate domestic sphere. When they adjudicated dependency claims, the local draft boards who had original jurisdiction in these cases interpreted draft regulations issued from Washington in the light of their own beliefs about proper gender identities and relationships, formative beliefs that military mobilization, the expansion of the wartime state, and the conception of equal citizenship inherent in conscription otherwise might have undermined. At the same time, the official definition of dependency had clear class-based and racial inflections: in the context of the political and racial economy of the South (where the majority of black draft registrants lived), the prevailing ideology of dependency and domesticity applied mainly to white, middle-class women. By contrast, many poor white and especially black women, for reasons of economic necessity, worked outside the home. Because they contributed to family income and daily breached the boundary of the domestic sphere, in the minds of draft officials these women could hardly be claimed as dependents by their registrant husbands, fathers, or sons. …

Constructing the Woman Citizen and Struggling for the Vote in California, 1896-1911

California women waged two state campaigns for suffrage, one that failed in 1896 and a successful one in 1911. Women activists struggled in these campaigns to win the vote and to create an identity for women as citizens. As historian Jane Rendall states, Citizenship is a question not only of rights and duties but also of identity. This paper uses the two suffrage campaigns as arenas to examine how California women developed that identity.l In their fight for the vote, women activists were influenced by Progressive Era understandings of male citizenship and women's citizenship status. Americans used a contradictory blend of republican, liberal, and ascriptive traditions to define citizenship. Citizens in the United States were defined as white men whose work made them independent individuals and hence prepared to participate in democratic civic life. Male citizens spoke for all the dependents of their household who could not speak for themselves, namely, women and minor children. Women's work of moral guardianship preserved Ameri-

LAMENTING THE LOSS OF A WOMAN‐CENTERED POLITY: MERCY WARREN'S CRITIQUE OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

Mercy Otis Warren was the only known female anti‐federalist writer of the founding era in American politics; and, according to Herbert Storing, she was the most philosophically sophisticated of all the anti‐federalist writers. While much work has been done to highlight her anti‐federalism, her theory of gender remains to be uncovered. In this article I argue that Warren's vision of woman citizenship was that of the married republican mother, which she believed would be threatened by the Constitution. I argue that Warren opposed the Federalist Constitution because it destroyed the preconditions for a female‐centered polity that she imagined republicanism ideally to be. Warren's feminist critique of the Constitution was not mentioned directly in her anti‐federalist pamphlet. This is not surprising because, according to contemporary moral standards, women were not supposed to engage in political discussions, much less those that appeared to show self‐interest. Part of her philosophical sophistication was necessary, I argue, to hide her concern for gender relations. By focusing on the foundational level of federalism as a degradation of virtue and male citizenship, Warren was able to criticize Federalism without mentioning its degradation of female citizenship. Yet in her private correspondence it is clear she believed that the political contributions of women would be severely limited by Federalist politics.

Women's History as French History

Review Essays Women's History as French History Michèle Riot-Sarcey. La Démocratie à l'épreuve des femmes: Trois figures critiques du pouvoir 1830-1848. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. ISBN 2-22606791 -4 (pb). De la Liberté des femmes. "Lettres des dames" au Globe (1831-32). Textes recueillis et présentés par Michèle Riot-Sarcey. Paris: côté-femmes, 1992. ISBN 2-907883-50-X. Une Correspondence Saint-Simonienne. Angélique Arnaud et Caroline Simon (1833-1838). Textes recueillis et présentés par Bernadette Louis. Avant propos de Monique Rouillé. Paris: côté-femmes, 1990. ISBN 2-90788318 -6. Clarisse Vigoureux. Parole de Providence. Préface de Jean-Claude Dubos. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993. ISBN 2-87673-169-X. Karen Offen Michèle Riot-Sarcey's "The Women's ChaUenge to Democracy: Three Figures Criticizing Power 1830-1848" is a tour-de-force; it exemplifies women's history as French history. By combining meticulous detective work in primary published and archival sources with careful attention to chronology, events, and issues of cause and effect, the author chaUenges recent accounts of nineteenth-century French political history by leading male historians including François Furet and Pierre Rosenvallon. Focusing on the intersecting Uves and ideas of three individual women—Jeanne Deroin, Eugénie Niboyet, and Désirée Gay—Riot-Sarcey succeeds brilliantly in placing the "Woman Question," and women as significant players in it, at the very center of the debate over democracy and dtizensJup in France at two key points: during the early years of the July Monarchy and again during the Revolution of 1848. The author, now maître des conférences at the University of Paris VLÕ Õ , argues that historians have not properly addressed the "construction" of women's exclusion from democratic dtizenship in France. She critiques the "history of mentaUties" approach pioneered by the "Annales" school as one that masks the power relations of the sexes. Riot-Sarcey is spedficaUy interested in how "mentaUties" and "representations" are created, in relation to particular contexts, events and with regard to the realities specific women are experiencing, and their diverse responses to situations that confront them. She argues convincingly that notions of representation © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. ι (Spring) 148 Journal of Women's History Spring as such can be subverted by incorporating the biograprdes and observations of individual women. The book is structured in three parts. The first part deals with the period 1831-34, "The Time of Possibilities, the Time of Liberty." Here the author focuses on the debate about dtizenship and primary education following the July Revolution of 1830, which brought a new monarchy and a new set of male political figures to power. Riot-Sarcey convincingly argues that this period was a founding moment in French democracy, one that definitively marked citizenship as a male preserve. All three women whom Riot-Sarcey has chosen to examine were involved with the Saint-Simonian movement, but she argues that to see them only within this context is to miss much about their contribution to the debate about liberty and equality. Their aspirations to liberty were thrashed out within the pages of the Saint-Simonian women's publication , L'Apostolat des femmes, and they aspired convincingly to become what we have come to call the subjects of their own lives, not merely embodiments of "La Femme." The important issue in 1833 was the national law on public instruction , enaded July 28, which mandated the establishment of a network of publicly funded primary schools for boys throughout France. This act generally gets one or two celebratory Unes in most treatments of French history, and only more rarely a note that mentions the omission of schools for girls. What is lacking from these accounts is the fact that the debate on this measure made explicit the links between pubUc education and male citizenship (which had already been forged in 1791). The debate, to which Riot-Sarcey's three women contributed significantly, was not merely "discourse" but embodied a set of power relations that resulted (once again; we know that this had also happened in 1792) in the deUberate exdusion of women from citizenship...