Masculinities and emotional expression in UK servicemen: ‘Big boys don’t cry’?

Dominant discourses of military servicemen position them as more prone to psychological damage than the general population, but as reluctant to seek psychological assistance, because of the military culture of ‘toughness’, a military masculinity, that values stoicism, emotional control and invulnerability and implicitly excludes ‘feminine’ characteristics like emotionality. This is seen as a barrier to military personnel seeking help, by implicitly discouraging emotional disclosure and expression. This article presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews with six male military and ex-military personnel, focused on their experience and understandings of emotion, emotional expression and ‘mental health’ in the military. The dominant construction of military masculinity certainly renders some forms of emotion inexpressible within certain contexts. However, we argue that the construct is more complex than a simple exclusion of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘emotional’. We explore how the highly masculine notions of military solidarity and ‘brotherhood’ create a ‘safe’ masculine space within which men could share their emotional experiences, but also highlight how this space for emotional expression is relatively constrained. We argue that these notions of solidarity and brotherhood open a space for emotional connection and expression that must be respected and worked with creatively, in therapeutic and other interventions.     

Women and Mental Health A Feminist Review

This article contextualizes some of the more specifically focused articles in this Special Issue of ‘Women and Mental Health’ by reviewing general historical and political currents structuring contemporary discussions around questions of models, treatment and provision for women within British mental health services. We highlight some particularities of the current British context (in relation to other national scenes) in terms of the forms and expressions of feminist activity around mental or emotional distress. While not absolute mirrors of each other, resonances between general trends in feminist debates and organizational forms within feminist mental health work give rise to a wide spectrum of sites of intervention. We discuss some of the conditions that gave rise to these forms of (visible) feminist intervention within mental health service provision, focusing particularly on women's counselling and therapy services, and we offer an analysis of the range and conceptual tensions within which such interventions may be situated, including contested perspectives on power and empowerment. We also consider ways in which women's political activity around mental health issues is likely not to be noticed as such, given women's prototypical positions as patients and practitioners. We end by identifying what we see as current challenges for feminist activism around distress and its links with the conditions of women's lives and oppression more generally, not only as instances of more general tensions and challenges within contemporary feminisms, but also as offering an arena of opportunity for broader alliance and coalition-building.     

非战争军事行动与“一带一路”利益维护

"一带一路"是中国政府根据目前及未来国际和地区形势提出的重大政治、外交、经济发展思路,也是保障实现"中国梦"的重大实践。随着"一带一路"沿线建设的大力推进,中国在其沿线利益的规模和范围也得到空前拓展。这些利益通常表现为中国公民的人身和财产安全,中国企业分支或政府派驻机构的安全,交通运输线及交通运输工具的安全等。如何有效的维护这些利益则是一个迫切需要解决的问题,当危险来临时非战争军事行动则是维护这些利益的一个最有效途径,研究这一问题与"一带一路"之间的关系具有非常现实的意义。     

queer sex in the metropolis? place,subjectivity and the Second World War

The strong links between cities and queer culture and its expression have occupied numerous scholars, including Henning Bech and Matt Houlbrook. Indeed, London has been viewed as a focal point of British queer urban culture for over 200 years and, as this article demonstrates, the advent of the Second World War did not preclude this centrality but ensured that the city became a focal point for service personnel on leave. Yet, the emphasis placed on the metropolises in analysing space and queer expression has rendered invisible the use of more transient spaces outside of the city. This article seeks to examine these ‘alternative’ or opportunistic sites of expression, using oral testimony from queer men who served with the British Armed Forces during the Second World War. The memories of these servicemen and the significance they place on space/locations demonstrate the need to engage with subjective sites or ‘geographies’ of queerness both inside and outside of the city between 1939 and 1945.     

Gender,Nationalism and Colonial Policy: prostitution in the Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948

The aim of this article is to discuss the way prostitution was perceived during the British rule in Palestine (1918–48), analyzing the differing perspectives of the British colonial authorities and the Jewish national community. The major concerns of the civil and military colonial authorities were focused on issues of ‘social hygiene’ and the trafficking in women and children. This often involved the transfer of both legislation and discourse from the metropolis. The Jewish community, on the other hand, was concerned mainly with the evolving national project. Prostitution was seen as a ‘mixing ground’ of Jewish women and British and Arab men, thus threatening the boundaries of the national collective. Whilst the article is attentive to the importance of studying prostitution in its historical specificity, it also considers the many ways in which this case study illuminates the complex series of relationships between both colonialism and prostitution, and gender and nationalism. Women were important to the imagining of the nation not only for their symbolic power—as ‘mothers of the nation’, for example; the construction of nationalist discourses also involved focusing on ‘negative’ gendered phenomena, such as prostitution. In these ways, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the multiple significance of gendered categories in the process of nation-building.     

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract

Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.     

En-Gendering the Sublime: Aesthetics and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

In this essay I expand on the analysis of the en-gendered sublime, an aesthetic concept of political consequence used in the eighteenth century. In a discussion of the initial phase of modern aesthetics I will present Immanuel Kant's opinions on the sublime's ennobling effect as having solely male connotations. This, I argue, became an important part of the construction of a new notion of citizenship on the basis of nationality and as an exclusively male domain. Furthermore, I will claim that conceptions of the “bad” sublime, as expressed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke, made up another side of this ennobling sublimity coin, which was the politically provocative defined in female terms. Aesthetics has obviously walked hand-in-hand with politics ever since Plato's Republic, and the concept of the sublime only make up a small part of this complex union—but undeniably a rather interesting one.     

Women voters and the rhetoric of patriotism in the British general election of 1918 ⊃1⊃

The analysis of the public political rhetoric of the British general election of 1918 can offer important indications of the construction of gender roles in the immediate post-war context. The partial enfranchisement of women presented a challenge for all political parties, which needed to secure the votes of nearly 8.5 million women voters. The article explores the electoral rhetoric of 1918 in two constituencies in Plymouth, and argues that a gendered language of patriotism was employed particularly successfully by the Coalition Conservatives in opposition to potentially fracturing languages of class and gender. No attempt was made to develop a new feminine politics around consumer and food supply issues; rather, Women's experience of the War was constructed in terms of their relationships to men, and women voters were urged to cast their votes largely as proxies for their absent husbands, brothers or sons     

‘Dangerously Small Things’: Response to Iris van der Tuin

This essay responds to Iris van der Tuin’s, ‘Microaggressions as New Political Material for Feminist Scholars and Activists: Perspectives from Continental Philosophy, the New Materialisms, and Popular Culture’, by situating her interrogation as a performative intervention on the psychologisation of microaggression research. Her intervention thus expands the potential for feminist critical practice, and opens up the discourse to emergent political materials. In this vein, I offer two additional, but ‘small’, materials. First, because language plays a role in the exclusionary cuts through which all entities emerge, I encourage material feminism not to abandon linguistic entities as political materials. Second, by interrupting the false choice between individual and collective political action, I suggest a re-scaling of feminist political action for our neoliberal times.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Rodney Hilton and the Peasant Road to 'Capitalism' in England

Arguing that Rodney was an original thinker among British Marxists, this article examines his historiographical approach to the English medieval peasantry, and in particular his contribution to the transition debate. As a consequence of their focus either on landlord enclosure or on the role of merchant capital, Marxists such as Dobb and Tawney maintained that the prosperous peasants who emerged towards the end of the fifteenth century bacame the capitalist farmers of the sixteenth. Opposed to both class and market determinism, however, Hilton insisted that the distinctiveness of the medieval peasantry lay in the possession of its own means of subsistence and access to community property. From the latter stemmed peasant resistant against feudal lords, based on peasants' self-perception as free producers with ancient rights, because of which landlords had to use military and political power to extract surplus labour. For Hilton, the agrarian conflict that culminated in the 1381 rebellion was a struggle between seigneurial power and peasant market power.     

青年流动人口教育健康效应及群体差异研究

在“健康中国”战略背景下,如何更充分地发挥青年流动人口的健康人力资本效用,值得关注。本研究基于2014年流动人口动态监测调查社会融合专题调查数据,采用Logistic回归和OLS回归方法,就受教育程度对青年流动人口不同健康指标的影响进行了分析。研究表明：青年流动人口受教育程度由初中向高中提升能够促进正向健康自评,但高等教育加剧了健康随时间推移而变差的感知;女性、农业户籍、80后青年流动人口的健康状况更明显地受到受教育程度的影响。研究建议：通过缩小城乡教育质量差距、加强多元化心理健康支持、提高流动人口社会融合水平等举措,提升青年流动人口的人力资本质量,促进青年流动人口全面发展。     

Charles Stelzle: Apostle to labor

The great British miners' strike of 1984–1985 began 30 years ago. This personal reflection centres on the debate over trade union strategy during the strike. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) had long been an important influence in the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, but the strike also coincided with and exacerbated divisions within the CP and the wider left about how to respond to the ‘New Right’ Thatcher Conservative Government. This article focuses on the distinctive Eurocommunist analysis of the journal Marxism Today. The political atmosphere of the time is recalled, and then the Gramscian industrial relations strategy of winning the political argument through a ‘broad democratic alliance’ is reconstructed. Arguably, this ‘social movement’ approach could have produced a better outcome to the strike, while it provides lasting lessons about the limitations of a narrowly economistic view of trade union power.     

resistance at the limits: feminist activism and conscientious objection in Israel

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.     

Gender,money and professional identity: medical social work and the coming of the British National Health Service

The arrival of the British National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 heralded significant changes for all health workers, but the establishment of a ‘free’ health service was especially meaningful for the hospital almoners—or medical social workers, as they were starting to be known—who had previously been responsible for the assessment and collection of patient payments. It was on this basis they had gained a foothold in the hospital, capitalising on gendered assumptions of financial understanding and behaviour. Yet what might have caused an identity crisis was embraced. This was a dual strategy of both repositioning the profession in alignment with the planned NHS and of asserting an enhanced professional status by distancing themselves from the handling of payment. It was an episode in the history of this distinctly female profession that speaks to women’s historic relationship with money.     

‘Trouble at the gates’: Italian base workers and foreign relations at Camp Darby, 1968-1971

ABSTRACT

From 1968 to 1971, close to a thousand Italian civilian employees at the United States (U.S.) military base, Camp Darby, located in Tuscany faced a series of recurrent layoffs from the U.S. Department of Defence. In a determined effort to protect their jobs, the base workers launched a series of disruptive and persistent forms of protest and civil disobedience that played on the instability of the Italian government and threatened to unsettle the relations between Italy and the United States. Drawing on original archival material from both countries, including large numbers of Italian-language sources, this article provides the first detailed examination of the labor dispute at Camp Darby. I will argue that the base workers secured the intervention of politicians, diplomats, and the Prime Minister in the resolution of the labor dispute by asserting the political significance of their cause both domestically and internationally. The result, I argue, was foreign relations shaped by the agency and often, individual agenda of the non-American workforce at Camp Darby. The dispute points to the complex encounters at play on U.S. military bases abroad as American foreign relations are faced with the convergence of radical labor traditions with Italian domestic politics, and U.S. labor expectations.     

Constructing the self in mental health practice: identity,individualism and the feminization of deficiency

The discursive production of the ‘self’ in the context of mental health care has potential implications for how the subjects of intervention come to understand and experience themselves. Eating disorders provide an illustrative example of the ways in which conceptualizations of the self that structure mental health practices can be gendered, because they are mainly diagnosed in women and dominant explanations of their origins are feminized. This discourse analytic study examines the gendered nature of mental health workers' constructions of the eating-disordered self through the psychological construct of ‘identity’, examining the dominant discourses implicated in the feminization of deficient identity, and addressing the implications of this construction for mental health practice.     

中国特色社会主义新时代背景下的产业工人队伍建设改革

党的十九大报告指出,中国特色社会主义进入了新时代。工人阶级作为新时代中国特色社会主义建设的主体力量,承担着新的历史使命。从坚持全面深化改革、新时代中国特色社会主义的经济建设、政治建设、文化建设、社会建设、领导力量等方面看,新时期产业工人队伍建设改革都具有十分重要的意义,是新时代中国特色社会主义基本方略中的一项重大举措,要在习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想的指导下扎实推进。