The Europeanization of social movements in the Czech Republic: The EU and local women’s groups

The goal of this paper is to analyze the impact the EU has had on Czech women’s groups since the 1990s. Drawing on both Europeanization and social movement theories, the first section defines the theoretical framework of the paper. The second section is focused on the impact of changes in the funding of women’s groups which, since the end of the 1990s, have relied more than before on European funding. The third section analyzes the shift in the political context and the domestic political opportunity structure in the Czech Republic that has occurred in connection with the accession process. The fourth section analyzes transnational cooperation for which new opportunities have appeared with the EU’s eastward expansion. The paper concludes by summarizing its main findings.     

Resisting Homosexual Law Reform in Britain in the 1950s: the Passions of Earl Winterton*

The Sixth Earl Winterton was an eccentric who is too easily dismissed as a homophobe and bigoted critic of the reforms proposed in the Wolfenden Report. But his outbursts in the Parliament against homosexuality point to his personal concerns for British masculinity and to an alternative understanding of masculinity that has received scant attention in the assessment of gay law reforms initiated by Wolfenden. Sociologists insist that the main function of homophobia is the maintenance of heterosexuality and patriarchal homo‐society. In this article I examine Winterton's arguments in their historical context, not to understand “homosexualism” which affronted him, but for what they say between the lines about British manliness, identity, intimacy and friendship. Winterton's is one version of a masculine self that experienced being cut adrift and betrayed by the cultural and political shifts which the Wolfenden Report both signified and embodied. I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships. That history is very, very important (Michel Foucault, 1982). 1     

Cultural Conservation Meets Douyin

We arrived very late to the city shimmering with neon lights. The road was narrow, long and winding, but the driver knew it like the back of his hand. We entered huge gates decorated with flags and the guesthouse owner decked out in traditional attire welcomed us by serving up a late night dinner. Tasty. The place we arrived at was Danba, or Rongzhag, a county of the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. Zhonglu is one of the area's oldest and best pre-served villages. In Tibetan, the name means "the promised land."     

Imperial Families: women writing home in Georgian Britain

This article critically engages with the concept of home to question what home meant and how it was constructed in eighteenth-century Britain. It particularly focuses on elite imperial families for whom ideas of home were significant, yet fragile as family members became dispersed across ever-greater distances. It uses letters as its source base to examine how families managed to construct a sense of home and belonging despite different locations and underlines the important role that women played in organizing and completing the work of home building. In doing so this article challenges understandings of homes as stable entities and highlights how elite imperial families worked to constantly negotiate and construct them.     

Feeling Things: From Visual to Material Jurisprudence

Law and Critique - In this article I analyse the extent to which there has been a shift in the cultural turn in legal scholarship and specifically from visual to what I call material jurisprudence,...     

Sex Crimes in the Fifties

Sex Crimes in the Fifties. By Lisa Featherstone and Amanda Kaladelfos (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016), pp.xii + 243, AU$59.99 (pb).