Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

Medieval English law set the killing of a husband by his wife apart from most other homicides, because it was perceived as particularly serious and disruptive of the social order. Husband-killers were burned, not hanged, as a spectacular demonstration of condemnation and concern for this social problem. As this chapter shows, however, husband-killing also presented legal problems. There was a doctrinal puzzle in terms of the unclear extent to which this offence should be assimilated to treason, as opposed to homicide: the later distinction between ‘high treason’ against the king, crown or government, and ‘petty treason’ against a domestic superior did not come into being as neatly as sometimes assumed. There were also struggles on a procedural level, as attempts were made to fit husband-killing into common law modes of prosecution, prompting some creative strategies on the part of those seeking to secure a conviction.

Chapter 5 traces the history of a number of existing UN mechanisms which represent the interests of particular vulnerable groups in the international system (persons with disabilities, women, and children). The aim of this analysis is to see what types of normative discourses have found traction and led to the development of institutions to represent these vulnerable groups, in order to ascertain the type of normative arguments that would gain support in arguing for international institutions to represent future generations. An important lesson from the case studies is that a normative discourse in which development concerns feature prominently, has been a common thread running through the history of these UN mechanisms. The chapter analyses the differences and similarities between arguments which justify the institutions which have been put in place to represent these vulnerable groups, with arguments used to justify institutions to represent future generations.

This chapter discusses the recent scholarly interest in the history of masculinity in Western society, particularly in early modern Europe, and places the evidence from the Selbstzeugnisse in this context. The texts the men left perform a model of masculinity that emphasizes the men’s power over the market, but also draws on other models of masculinity available in this culture, particularly “patriarchal manhood,” which endows men who successfully found and manage a nuclear household with honorable manhood.

Angela Davis, George Jackson, and other prominent Black intellectuals and radicals shaped abolition in different ways. The evolution and popularization of abolition promoted by Angela Davis was influenced by her own traumatic incarceration. Jon Jackson, the younger brother of George Jackson, had worked with Angela Davis to support the incarcerated men through the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Without her permission, in August 1970, Jonathan Jackson took guns belonging to Angela Davis to wage a raid at Marin County Courthouse in order to take hostages that could be exchanged to free Black prisoners. Prison guards shot and killed Jon Jackson, two Black prisoners, and a white judge in a stationary van. Davis fled the state, fearing reprisal from reactionaries, and was arrested by the FBI in October. During her incarceration, George Jackson was also killed by prison guard(s) in August 1971. Acquitted of all charges in 1972, Angela Davis advocated for abolition and over decades aligned abolition with advocacy academics; her work also increasingly focused on gender leadership of women and feminism, as noted in Women, Race and Class.

Realist narrative genres, such as memoir and autobiography, are the most prevalent women’s prison writing. Contemporary readers rely on these narrative elements in order to believe stories. However, when the writer disassociates during a traumatic event and does not remember details that would ground their telling in recognizable details, their narratives cannot reliably reference them. As incarcerated women authors grapple with what they’ve suffered and what they’ve done, their narratives inevitably intersect with social realities that form the background violence that created the conditions for the discrete, traumatic events of harmdoing. While carceral culture essentializes people into stagnant categories of worth – good/flawed, criminal/victim, innocent/guilty – incarcerated women’s stories show how facile these conceptions are, how much harm they cause, and that incarceration does nothing to address these issues and often actively prohibits healing.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

This chapter complements Chapter 6’s investigation into recreational music-making, with an examination of amateur symphony orchestras – a significant nationwide phenomenon from the 1890s – which were predicated on having adequate numbers of string players. It begins by surveying organizational structures, showing that while orchestras initially operated as subscription clubs for men, they soon admitted women string players, some of whom were highly accomplished. Women’s presence often transformed standards, particularly where a conductor had experience of training strings. The chapter also examines one woman’s contributions to a regional amateur-orchestra circuit, as well as the popularity of all-women string orchestras. It then engages concepts of musical community, asking what amateur string players valued about their orchestral activities and highlighting the social cohesion and team spirit forged by playing alongside others with shared musical interests to prepare works for performances. It also argues that amateur orchestras produced thousands of string players whose knowledge of symphonic music led them to support orchestral concerts throughout their lives. (161)

Thucydides identified the period of the Peloponnesian War as one in which a concern with divine engagement in the affairs of mortals was particularly intense. This chapter explores a variety of evidence for this heightened concern and asks what forms it took. On the one hand, we find extravagant investment in religious festivities and display. Faced with the uncertainty of war, states and individuals lean into these elements of cultic life and seek thereby to create or claim the sort of prosperity and ease of engagement with the gods chiefly possible in times of peace. On the other hand, we find dissenting voices and worries about the neat picture of prosperity and cohesion such festivities promote. The heightened stakes of the War, where divine favour or displeasure could bring victory or destruction, provide a particular impetus for divergent voices and divergent attitudes to how engagement with the gods should be approached and represented. The chapter explores these dynamics at three levels from the macro to the micro. First, it tackles interstate discourse and competition. Second, it examines the internal dynamics within a single city-state: Athens. Third and finally, it zooms in further to discuss a single cult: the Eleusinian Mysteries.

This chapter considers how gender as a social framework has shaped and informed stand-up comedy, with a particular focus on the UK. Gender identities entail certain cultural expectations, especially when these identities interact with race, class, and sexuality. The chapter explores how gender impacts on all stand-up performers, addressing the unavoidable nature of gender stereotypes as well as historical and contemporary debates about feminism, femininity, and the role of women within the comedy industry. In addition to considering how gender is represented in stand-up material, the chapter examines how wider power structures influence the business of comedy, specifically problems faced by women stand-ups in terms of their access to comedy venues and their treatment by audiences. This chapter tracks the evolution of comedy’s relationship to gender from music hall to working men’s clubs through to the ‘alternative’ comedy boom of the 1980s and stand-up on television.

This chapter offers the first comprehensive account of the tangential maritime figure of the sailor’s daughter. Though neglected in the scholarship, her life was shaped in material and emotional ways by the intermittent presence of a seafaring father and the complex gender dynamics that attended the composition of the maritime family. With reference to a unique and overlooked corpus of memoirs by working-class women raised in seafaring families within the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the chapter returns to myth of the ‘sailor in the family’, presented in Chapter 1, but this time from the sidelong perspective of the daughter. The analysis shows how these memoirs disrupt the paradigmatic model of the dutiful sailor’s daughter in narratives that set out the compromises, strange intimacies, and frustrations of childhoods shaped by the maritime world. While the sailor-fathers described in the memoirs belong to the late nineteenth century, the book concludes by arguing that it is the writerly daughter’s insurgent account that carries new perspectives on maritime relations into the twentieth century.