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This innovative collection offers a reappraisal of gender as a category of analysis in modern Welsh history. Beginning with sex work in the eighteenth century and concluding with women’s late twentieth-century anti-nuclear activism, the contributors show how gender has been constructed, represented, performed and experienced by men and women at different times and places throughout Wales’s modern past. Using a variety of approaches, the collection interrogates gender as a concept that encompasses both femininity and masculinity, provides fresh perspectives on familiar themes, and demonstrates the value of gender analysis for our understanding of the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Wales. Chapters by leading historians and early career academics each set an agenda for exploring the intersection of gender with nationality, race, class, age and sexuality.

University of Wales Press

Gender Studies in Wales

Gender in Modern Welsh History: Perspectives on Masculinity and Femininity in Wales from 1750 to 2000

John Perrott Jenkins

The book subjects male characters in six south Wales novels written between 1936 and 2014 to detailed, gendered reading. It argues that the novels critique the form of masculine hegemony propagated by structural patriarchy serving the material demands of industrial capitalism. Each depicts characters confined to a limited repertoire of culturally endorsed behaviourial norms – such as displays of power, decisiveness and self-control – which prohibit the expression and cultivation of the subjective self. Within the social organisation of industrial capitalism, the working-class characters are, in practice, reduced to dispensable functionaries at work while, in theory, they are accorded the status of patriarchally-sanctioned principals at home. Ideologically subservient and ‘feminised’ in one context, they are ideologically dominant and ‘masculinised’ in another. As they negotiate, resist or strive to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of such gendered practices, recurring patterns of exclusion, inadequacy and mental instability are made evident in their representation.

Representing the Male: Masculinity, Genre and Social Context in Six South Wales Novels

Manon Ceridwen James

Women, Identity and Religion in Wales is the first comprehensive study of its kind from a present-day perspective. It brings significant and original insights to an understanding of Welsh identity and religion, as well as exploring the distinctive pressures that women in Wales face in their everyday lives. The author provides a qualitatively rich account of the religious and sociological context and interweaves her own experience with that of a number of Welsh women writers, including Menna Elfyn, Jasmine Donahaye and Mererid Hopwood, to offer an in-depth understanding of the dynamic interplay between Welsh female identity and religion. At the heart of the book are conversations with thirteen other women whose lives and experiences reveal how women facing misogyny, repression and stigmatisation are able to respond with resilience and humour. The author concludes that Welsh women have an empowering stereotype, the Strong Woman, and are constructing new identities for themselves beyond the pressures to be respectable and submissive.

Women, Identity and Religion in Wales: Theology, Poetry, Story

This book assesses how policies developed by the National Assembly for Wales are affecting gender inequalities and investigates whether they are having an impact on social justice for women in Wales. In 1999 the first elections to devolved governments took place in Scotland and Wales. In Wales this resulted in 40 per cent of Assembly Members being women. In 2003 this proportion increased to 50 per cent which makes the National Assembly for Wales ‘the first legislative body with equal numbers of men and women in the world’ (“The Guardian”, 3/5/03). This new gender balance of political representatives is a significant change in the gendering of political institutions and this, together with the creation of a new tier of government, has the potential to create new opportunities for the development of social policies which address gender and other social inequalities. Focusing on distinct policy domains, this book explores gender politics in a devolved Wales. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of social policy, exploring the way it has developed since devolution and the extent to which considerations of gender and social justice for women are central to this development. The empirical chapters which form the core of the book are situated theoretically and politically by the first chapter which discusses how gender and social justice can be theorised and explores devolution and its relation to gender politics in Wales.

Gender and Social Justice in Wales

This book provides varied perspectives on queer history, culture, politics and life in Wales. It addresses the queering of the Welsh language in examples from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, acquainting readers with such figures as Felicia Hemans, George Powell, and Edward Thomas; and it explores forms of lesbian belonging, the possibilities of transgender Wales, the communities of queer Welsh television and film, and the many places of the queer Welsh ‘home’. This book for the first time brings together work by a wide variety of authors working in varied areas of queer Welsh culture; its chapters mark the beginning of what will be an ongoing discussion of sexual and national life in Wales with essays that launch an important discussion of queer life and suggesting that perhaps Wales has always been a bit of a queer place to live.

Queer Wales: The History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales

The last two decades have seen big changes within a small nation; the distinctiveness of Wales, in terms of its political life and culture, has grown considerably in that time. This edited collection by a range of eminent Welsh writers, emerging academics and creative artists examines what is distinctive about Wales and Welshness in an interdisciplinary yet comprehensive manner. The core concepts of gender, class and identity are explored throughout the book, which presents twelve chapters in three distinct yet overlapping thematic sections: Wales, Welshness, Language and Identity, Education; Labour Markets and Gender in Wales; and Welsh Public Life, Social Policy, Class and Inequality. The chapters explore the role of men and women in Wales and of Wales itself as a nation, an economy, and a centre of partially devolved governance, raising questions related to equality, policy and progression. The collection also features photographs, graphic art and poetic verse that both represent and extend the central arguments of the book.

Our Changing Land: Revisiting Gender, Class and Identity in Contemporary Wales

Alice Entwistle

Poetry, Geography, Gender examines how questions of place, identity and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales' best known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood and Sheenagh Pugh. Merging traditional literary criticism with cultural-political and geographical analysis, Alice Entwistle shows how writers' different senses of relationship with Wales, its languages, history and imaginative, as well as political, geography feeds the form as well as the content of their poetry. Her innovative critical study thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first century Wales.

Poetry, Geography, Gender: Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales

Margiad wrote about the elderly, about love between women, about elusive, enigmatic characters. She is renowned for her ability to depict place, yet she also makes place reflective of the emotional and spiritual lives of her characters and her own concerns as an artist. Evans was a border writer, concerned with cultural complexity and conflict characteristic of borderlands, but also filled with passion for the landscape of the borders and the many meanings, local and figurative; she effortlessly invests in the places she loved. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumour that lead to her early death, on the evening of her forty-ninth birthday, in 1958. Evans wrote A Ray of Darkness, an acclaimed autobiography about her experience of epilepsy, and as a result Margiad Evans is being 'rediscovered' by the medical community as it becomes more interested in patient experiences. This collection of essays assesses Evans's extraordinary literary legacy, from her use of folktale and the gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

Rediscovering Margiad Evans: Marginality, Gender and Illness

The study of borders has recently undergone significant transitions, reflecting the transformation of the world political map as well as the changes in the ways boundaries themselves function. In Gendering Border Studies sixteen established scholars from a variety of disciplines examine how the issue of gender and borders has been approached in their field and describe what they expect from future research. This book will be of interest to scholars of border studies, gender studies, social anthropology, international politics, comparative literature, and Welsh studies.

Gendering Border Studies

Jane Aaron

Winner of the Roland Mathias Award 2009. This book argues that the way in which people came to perceive and to represent themselves as Welsh was profoundly affected by the gender ideologies prevalent during the Romantic and Victorian periods. Nineteenth-Century Women s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity introduces readers to a hundred Welsh women authors at work during the years 1780-1900, some writing in Welsh and some in English. In so doing, it rescues many of these authors from critical neglect and oblivion. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, Welsh women writers in both languages were numerous and enjoyed a degree of influence on Welsh culture easily commensurate with that of women writers today. By covering the nineteenth century chronologically, this book traces the coming into being of the Welsh nation as its women in particular saw it, and as they helped to create it.