Sporting Women and Machonas: negotiating gender through sports in Argentina, 1900–1946

This article shows how sports contributed to create new experiences and expressions of gender in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century. The sportswoman embodied a new model of femininity, a novel type of modern, healthy and active womanhood that defied traditional constructions of gender. Sports affected women's experience of gender, providing a site for the development of an emotional and spiritual well-being by fostering personal and psychological qualities like self-esteem, self-satisfaction and self-determination. Participation in sports also helped to redefine how women related to their environment by widening their social circles and relationships. These changes triggered a number of fears and anxieties about sport's potential for gender dis-order. In particular, the figure of the machona, a masculinized, unattractive, and mannish woman, became a symbol of this dis-order. The use of humor, parody, and theatrical displays of gender became ways through which these fears were both expressed and negotiated.     

The development of a new labour framework during the Second Republic in Spain: the Central Service for job placement and defence against unemployment

The Great Depression affected the Spanish economy, sharply increasing the number of unemployed workers, known as the ‘sin trabajo’. In an effort to address problems with the labour market, the Central Office for Job Placement and Defence against Unemployment was established in 1931 for the purpose, in Niceto Alcalá-Zamora’s words, of heading off ‘regrettable passions and misadventures of a social or political nature’. The ‘reformist challenge’ to the traditional social order would commence that same year, when the PSOE’s Largo Caballero became head of the Ministry of Labour. The staff of the Central Office for Job Placement were aware of proposals by Keynes and other economists regarding this issue, so it can be said that in addition to responding to the urgent social pressure of the moment, the employment policies implemented also sought added legitimacy in the context of theoretical trends that enjoyed consensus at that time.     

Privacy as Autonomy vs. Privacy as Familial Attachment: A Conceptual Approach to Right to Privacy Cases

This article explains why the Supreme Court's privacy jurisprudence has become deeply problematic for addressing emerging reproductive and sexual choice issues, focusing on abortion funding, minors seeking abortions, adults engaging in consenting homosexual sex, and pregnant women accused of abusing their fetuses. The article makes two arguments. First, it contends that what is private about the rights asserted in cases like Eisenstadt v. Baird and Roe v. Wade has never been fully articulated nor defended, leaving these central decisions conceptually unpersuasive. Second, the article shows that "privacy" is used in two very different senses in Supreme Court constitutional right-to-privacy decisions: one rooted in respect for marriage and the family, the other in notions of personal autonomy. Although both senses deserve to be protected, the court has tended to prefer the familial sense of privacy to the autonomy one, with serious consequences for privacy concerns that are not connected to family relationships or that are perceived as undercutting "family values."     

The ambiguous Heritage of Mitteleuropa: the Resurfacing of Mitteleuropa as a Counter-image to the EU in Austrian Populism

The analysis in this article addresses the resurfacing of Mitteleuropain the populist discourse or, more precisely, the use of Mitteleuropa-ideas in the political strategies of the Austrian FPÖ (Austria's right-wing `Freedom Party'). The plans of the future European assessment spread by the European right-wing populism have an ambiguous character, which partly reproduces the ambiguity of the traditional definitions ofMitteleuropa in the debate at the beginning of the twentieth century. The article shows that the FPÖ's use of the concept ofMitteleuropa must be analysed with regard to the problem of the Austrian identity, because the ambiguous status of an ‘Austrian identity between Mitteleuropa and German re-union’ is the most important condition underpinning the emergence of the FPÖ. Secondly, the choice of a particular idea ofMitteleuropa - the Mitteleuropadefined by principles of exclusion, by a strong German culture and identity (Kulturnation), and strict reference to a Volksgemeinschaft with a territory and a culture that are juxtaposed to a cosmopolitan and liberal idea of Mitteleuropa- reveals the FPÖ's historical legacy and its opposition towards democracy and the representative institutions. Finally, the question is raised as to whether Haider should be considered not only an Austrian phenomenon, but an Austrian reaction to political and economic transformations, which evoke other protest movements in Europe. On the one hand, Haider is an Austrian phenomenon. On the other hand, he represents an Austrian reaction to political and economic transformations. In this sense, Haider's populism can be compared to France's Le Pen or Belgium's Vlaams Blokif we look at the form of popular legitimacy that they invoke, the request for a re-territorialisation of politics and for the defence of a national / European identity, and the opposition to constitutional patriotism and to all forms of ``thin'' European identities.