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     

Ethnic relations in the People’s Republic of China: Images and social distance between Han Chinese and minority and foreign nationalities

Han people make up 93 percent of the Chinese population, but little is known in a systematic way about how they view Chinese minority nationalities or foreign peoples. This is a social scientific study of the images that Han Chinese have of nine Chinese ethnic groups and eight foreign nationalities, as well as the social distance they feel from those groups. Based on a survey of 169 Tianjin university students, it employs the Bogardus Social Distance Scale and an adjectival test. It finds that Han Chinese feel affinity for some groups, such as Overseas Chinese, Uygurs, and Americans, while they feel extreme distance from and repulsion toward others, such as Tibetans and Africans. Her book,China’s Only Child: The Family and the School, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press.     

Amor Matris 1: Language and Loss in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron

This article examines the South African novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin’s writings on economics. Though Millin has most commonly been treated as a theorist of race and miscegenation, her novels and nonfiction writings demonstrate an equally strong interest in how global economic institutions affect South African life. Eatough proposes that Millin’s fascination with such diverse economic practices as currency speculation, actuarial accounting, and stock broking stems from the way in which these practices dramatize a seemingly insuperable tension between Anglo professionalism and South African nationalism. As the article shows, Millin’s efforts to overcome Anglo-Afrikaner rivalry and fashion a unified white nationalism entailed a radical rethinking of what global professional networks were in their innermost essence. Central to this nationalist project, Eatough argues, was Millin’s tendency to regard such networks less as rooted national institutions than as distant speculative devices capable of inflating the value of South African nationality. Over the course of the article, Eatough investigates how Millin uses this definition to finesse complaints by (primarily Afrikaner) nationalists against British control of the professions by suggesting that such articulations of envy drive speculative enterprise—and, thus, provide a means for transforming national abjection into national value.     

苏联解体与文明进程——马克斯·韦伯“俄国革命论”的视点

自苏联在1991年末解体以来,学者们对这一历史事件的肇因进行了多种分析。这些分析中,意识形态层面的分析占据了显要的位置。然而,这些分析陷入了同义反复的逻辑错误。与此相对,各种基于事实的分析,往往停留在一种事后的描述上,未能提供有效的说明。那么,从社会科学的角度来看,苏联解体意味着什么?马克斯·韦伯在其俄国革命论中提供了一个卓越的视角。