Whores, men, and other misfits: undoing 'feminization' in the armed forces in the DRC.

The global attention focused on sexual violence in the DRC has not only contributed to an image of the Congolese army as a vestige of pre-modern barbarism, populated by rapists, and bearing no resemblance to the world of modern armies; it has also shaped gender and defence reform initiatives. These initiatives have become synonymous with combating sexual violence, reflecting an assumption that the gendered dynamics of the army are already known. Crucial questions such as the 'feminization' of the armed forces are consequently neglected. Based on in-depth interviews with soldiers in the Congolese armed forces, this article analyses the discursive strategies male soldiers employ in relation to the feminization of the army. In the light of the need to reform the military and military masculinities, the article discusses how globalized discourses and practices render the Congolese military a highly globalized sphere. It also highlights the particular and local ways in which military identities are produced through gender, and concludes that a simple inclusion of women in the armed forces in order to render men less violent might not have the pacifying effect intended.

"To control their destiny": the politics of home and the feminisation of schooling in colonial Natal, 1885-1910.

This article examines the contradictions that African girls' schooling presented for colonial governance in Natal, through the case study of Inanda Seminary, the region's first and largest all-female school for Africans. While patriarchal colonial law circumscribed the educational options of girls whose fathers opposed their schooling, the head of Natal's nascent educational bureaucracy argued that African girls' education in Western domesticity would be essential in creating different sorts of families with different sorts of needs. In monogamous families, Native Schools Inspector Robert Plant argued, husbands and sons would be taught to 'want' enough to impel them to labour for wages - but they would also be sufficiently satisfied by their domestic comforts to avoid political unrest. Thus, even as colonial educational officials clamped down on African boys' curricula - attempting to restrict their schooling to the barest preparation for unskilled wage labour - they allowed missionaries autonomy to educate young women whose fathers did not challenge their school attendance. This was because young women's role in the social reproduction of new sorts of families made their education ultimately appear to be a benefit to colonial governance. As young men pursued wage labour, young women began to comprise the majority of African students, laying the groundwork for the feminisation of schooling in modern southern Africa.

"This base stallion trade": he-whores and male sexuality on the early modern stage.

Recent scholarship on early modern male sexuality has stressed the threat that sexual relations with women were believed to pose to manhood. Focusing on such plays as Middleton's Your Five Gallants (c. 1608), Fletcher and Massinger's The Custom of The Country (c.1620), and Davenant's The Just Italian (1630), this paper analyzes representations of male prostitutes for women to argue that cultural attitudes toward male sexual performance were more complex and self-contradictory than generally acknowledged. The patriarchal codes that warned against effeminating sexual desire and advocated parsimonious seminal "spending" are undermined by their own inherent corollary: the most masculine man is one who can demonstrate unlimited seminal capacity. Furthermore, it has been posited that the early modern period marked the beginning of a shift from "reproductive" to "performative" constructions of manhood, in which the manhood-affirming aspects of male sexuality gradually became unmoored from their traditional association with bloodlines and attached instead to penetrative sexual conquest. The class implications of this shift inform patriarchal anxieties about the superior sexual stamina of servant-class men and their bodily "service" to elite women. Representing a fantasy of empowering male sexuality that relies on detaching virile performance from effeminating desire­a physiologically absurd notion­and on providing sexual "service" while leaving intact both class and gender hierarchies, a successful he-whore like Middleton's Tailby or Davenant's Sciolto playfully challenges the dictates of patriarchal masculinity by fulfilling them in absurd and unorthodox ways. Ultimately, he illuminates just how untenable those dictates might be.

War's long shadow: masculinity, medicine, and the gendered politics of trauma, 1914-1939.

War is an inherently traumatizing experience, and during the First World War more than 15,000 Canadian soldiers were diagnosed with some form of war-related psychological wounds. Many more went unrecognized. Yet the very act of seeking an escape from the battlefield or applying for a postwar pension for psychological traumas transgressed masculine norms that required men to be aggressive, self-reliant, and un-emotional. Using newly available archival records, contemporary medical periodicals, doctors' notes, and patient interview transcripts, this paper examines two crises that arose from this conflict between idealized masculinity and the emotional reality of war trauma. The first came on the battlefield in 1916 when, in some cases, almost half the soldiers evacuated from the front were said to be suffering from emotional breakdowns. The second came later, during the Great Depression, when a significant number of veterans began to seek compensation for their psychological injuries. In both crises, doctors working in the service of the state constructed trauma as evidence of deviance, in order to parry a larger challenge to masculine ideals. In creating this link between war trauma and deviance, they reinforced a residual conception of welfare that used tests of morals and means to determine who was deserving or undeserving of state assistance. At a time when the Canadian welfare state was being transformed in response to the needs of veterans and their families, doctors' denial that "real men" could legitimately exhibit psychosomatic symptoms in combat meant that thousands of legitimately traumatized veterans were left uncompensated by the state and were constructed as inferior, feminized men.

Cubans abroad: a gendered case study on international migrations.

Cubans who have migrated since the 1990s after living for two decades or more in their country of origin left with an embedded gender ideology that they acquired in a society where gender relations were undergoing radical transformations. As a result, Cuban feminization of migrations has its peculiarities. In this context, there are three issues to consider: explaining how gender relations attained in Cuba, as part of the overall attitudes gained since childhood, influenced Cuban migrants who have left the island permanently since 1990, introduced uniqueness in their migration processes, and made up a different feminization of migration; identifying the features of Cuban social structure that shaped the gender ideology of Cuban migrants; and producing new knowledge about Cuban international migration processes by using a gender perspective and by analyzing the gender relations prevailing in the years before the crisis of the 1990s, as well as since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first part of this article focuses on gender distinctiveness of recent Cuban migrants, and the second summarizes some traits of the Cuban social structure­mainly referred to female employment­that could explain the gender training of the migrants.

Gender and eloquence in Ercole de' Roberti's "Portia and Brutus".

A commonplace of modern feminist scholarship holds that fifteenth-century Italian humanists regarded the figure of the articulate women with hostility and suspicion. This position is insufficiently nuanced: while it may have been true to some extent in republican contexts, it was emphatically not the case in the secular princely courts, where women's capacity for eloquence was frequently a subject of praise. Humanistic attitudes toward female eloquence are examined here with special reference to Ercole de' Roberti's representation of the classical heroine Portia in oratorical guise in his Portia and Brutus, painted at the court of Ferrara in the late 1480s or early '90s. The article contextualizes Roberti's painting with regard to its classical literary sources, to contemporary practices of female oratory, and to the cultural and social self-positioning of the work's probable patron, Duchess Eleonora d'Aragona.