This interdisciplinary volume discusses the division of the early modern material world into the important legal, economic, and personal categories of mobile and immobile property, possession, and the rights to usufruct. The chapters describe and compare different modes of acquisition and intergenerational transfer via law and custom. The varying perspectives, including cultural history, legal history, social and economic history, philosophy, and law, allow for a more nuanced understanding of the links between the movability of an object and the gender of the person who owned, possessed, or used it. Case studies and examples come from a wide geographical range, including Norway, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Tyrol, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Romania, and the European colonies in Brazil and Jamaica. By covering both urban and rural areas and exploring all social groups, from ruling elites to the lower strata of society, the chapters offer fresh insight into the division of mobile and immobile property that socially and economically posed disadvantages for women. By exploring a broad scope of topics, including landownership, marriage contracts, slaveholding, and the dowry, this book is an essential resource for both researchers and students of women’s history, social and economic history, and material culture.
Moving beyond traditional notions of gender as a static concept wherein human beings are passively molded into gender-appropriate behavior, 23 scholars instead view it as a negotiated, contested, and interactive process. In showing some of the ways gender is made visible, they explore avenues such as the gender of things that surround us; subtle and invisible processes of inclusion and exclusion from valuation; fusing form and content, practice and product; and how the material culture of gender produces gendered beings.
Material culture, the substance of much archaeological research, has only recently been studied as evidence of gender relations. Case studies, drawn from many different periods and areas, develop concepts and theories as diverse as the social context of production and artefact use to the construction of food as a gendered social medium. The international contributors critique traditional approaches and consider feminist and non-heterosexual gender perspectives.
Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.
Gender Law and Policy provides the theoretical frameworks, legal cases, and policy background necessary for analyzing a broad range of gender issues in the law. It is an ideal text for undergraduate courses in Women’s Studies, Political Science, and other fields focusing on gender law and policy, including Women and the Law and Gender Law and Policy. This text features lucid introductions in each chapter that illuminate the issues significant to each topic, alternative theoretical perspectives that facilitate open-minded problem solving, and incisive commentary by leading scholars and policymakers. Timely coverage of foundational and cutting-edge issues includes constitutional law, employment law, Title IX and education (including sports), family law, sexual harassment, sexual violence, pornography, prostitution, global trafficking, LGBT issues, and women’s sexual and reproductive health. Features of the Third Edition: Organized in five chapters focusing on different theoretical frameworks to enable student to grasp different conceptualizations of equality and justice. New introductory chapter with a broad overview of the theoretical frameworks, as well as the adjacent critical theories with the most relevance to the study of gender and law—intersectionality, queer theory, and masculinities studies. Includes more than 200 “Putting Theory into Practice” Problems, most based on real-life, unresolved problems, to keep a consistent, stimulating focus on the relationship between theory and practice. Features boxed definitions of terms and explanations of the legal process that are important for understanding the cases and a glossary where students can look up unfamiliar terms and concepts. Provides timelines and charts for graphic enhancement of important information. Offers clear introductions to each chapter, subject matter, and lead case, along with reading questions, so that students can focus on the implications of the law rather than figure out the content of the law. Tailors cases to undergraduate use, almost entirely omitting procedural issues, but preserving detailed facts necessary for analysis. New or enhanced coverage of the #MeToo movement, reproductive rights, campus sexual assault, LGBTQ issues, sex and technology, and intimate partner violence. Professors and students will benefit from: Adaptation of the best-selling law school gender and law textbook for undergraduate use for courses in gender, law, and policy. Interspersed theoretical and practice materials: excerpted legal cases, statutes, and law review articles form an ongoing dialogue within the book to stimulate thought and discussion. Complete, up-to-date coverage of conventional “women and the law” issues, including constitutional law, employment law, affirmative action, sexual harassment, reproductive rights, domestic violence, Title IX, and poverty and race, along with analysis of cutting edge issues relating to LGBTQ and nonbinary individuals.
"In his interdisciplinary review of material culture, Ian Woodward goes beyond synthesis to offer a theoretically innovative reconstruction of the field. It is filled with gems of conceptual insight and empirical discovery. A wonderful book." - Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University "A well-grounded and accessible survey of the burgeoning field of material culture studies for students in sociology and consumption studies. While situating the field within the history of intellectual thought in the broader social sciences, it offers detailed and accessible case studies. These are supplemented by very useful directions for further in-depth reading, making it an excellent undergraduate course companion." - Victor Buchli, University College London Why are i-pods and mobile phones fashion accessories? Why do people spend thousands remodelling their perfectly functional kitchen? Why do people crave shoes or handbags? Is our desire for objects unhealthy, or irrational? Objects have an inescapable hold over us, not just in consumer culture but increasingly in the disciplines that study social relations too. This book offers a systematic overview of the diverse ways of studying the material as culture. Surveying the field of material culture studies through an examination and synthesis of classical and contemporary scholarship on objects, commodities, consumption, and symbolization, this book: introduces the key concepts and approaches in the study of objects and their meanings presents the full sweep of core theory - from Marxist and critical approaches to structuralism and semiotics shows how and why people use objects to perform identity, achieve social status, and narrativize life experiences analyzes everyday domains in which objects are important shows why studying material culture is necessary for understanding the social. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, consumer behaviour studies, design and fashion studies.
