The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.

Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

Bridget Nichols shows how important the bodily dimension of the liturgy is, especially because it is steadily associated with mental and cognitive activities. In this context, she pays particular attention to the role of the senses, which impacts greatly how not only big celebrations and ceremonies but also small gestures are experienced.

This chapter surveys three broad categories of sexual violence – a term I use to designate rape, threatened assault, and kidnapping – portrayed in travel writing produced in Eurasia between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. These three categories of violence are differentiated by their perpetrators: foreign strangers; men upon whom women depend to facilitate their travel, particularly at sea; and trusted travel companions. The first scenario promulgates the popular myth that ‘real rape’ entails violence from a stranger and occurs only when women venture outside the household’s safe confines. Authors often use this scenario in overtly racist or xenophobic ways. The second situation centres on predation by male workers who provide necessary transportation or hospitality to traveling women, while the third sheds light on the intimate treachery of male travel partners. All three categories of violation hinge on the issue of trust in different ways. But medieval travel texts do more than share cautionary tales about the dangers of women’s travel in a patriarchal world. They also feature affirming and emancipatory strategies of resisting rape deployed by women traveling far from home.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

This chapter critically engages Assata: An Autobiography by former Black Liberation Army operative and political exile Assata Shakur. The argument examines how Shakur develops psychologically and politically as both a Black revolutionary and a Black revolutionary woman. The chapter offers close readings of the political messages shared throughout Assata then contextualizes Shakur’s frameworks by turning to her experiences as a runaway teen in the Village in New York City. Her story – from childhood until her time being held as a political prisoner – compels attention to how blackness and gender collide and at times collapse. This chapter illustrates how her political communiqué “To My People,” broadcast by Shakur while incarcerated, was informed by the lessons on Black gender and sexual vulnerability she learned from Miss Shirley, a transgender woman who was her surrogate caregiver during her time living in the Village.

This chapter argues that Michael Field was not just a pseudonym but also an imaginative construct that enabled Bradley and Cooper’s poetic output. It is productive to compare the Michael Field persona to poetry: both are creative genres with specific formal properties and communicative modes. Bradley and Cooper revised inherited literary forms in their reimagined verse dramas, sonnets, masques, and Elizabethan-style songs. Similarly, Bradley and Cooper remake inherited identity categories and reform subjectivity in creating a masculine singular avatar. Playing with form is a way for Bradley and Cooper to express what they think and feel, as well as who they are. This chapter addresses why Bradley and Cooper created an alternate artistic identity, how their pseudonyms evolved to become Michael Field, and the ways in which understanding Bradley and Cooper’s carefully constructed poetic persona can help scholars and readers understand their ideas about gender, sex, art, identity, and autonomy.

For nearly a century, seasonal, often female, manual labor remained fundamental to making peat available for industrial enterprises and electric power plants. Focusing on the trajectories of peat workers, this chapter discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. Examining the overlapping temporalities, modes of production, and agencies (human and nonhuman) in the making of peat fuel, this chapter foregrounds the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy as focal points of the intertwined exploitation of humans and nature upon which it relied.

While the joint diaries are the primary source for Michael Field, had they never existed scholarship would still be better served by Bradley and Cooper’s letters than by most other women writers. This chapter explores the family letters as the only contemporary account of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship in the 1880s: Michael Field’s most successful decade. Reading these letters in the context of women’s production of intimacy through correspondence, the chapter considers the tensions in the Cooper household, and the ways in which Bradley and Cooper use their letters performatively to assert a claim for the primacy of their intimate partnership – and the writerly activities entwined in it – as a marriage, over Cooper’s responsibilities as a dutiful, unmarried daughter. This positions the letters as an early experiment with crafting identity as man and wife in practices that would evolve into more complex and audacious revisionings of self in Michael Field.