ABSTRACT

Engendering Transnational Transgressions reclaims the transgressive side of feminist history, challenging hegemonic norms and the power of patriarchies. Through the lenses of intersectionality, gender analysis, and transnational feminist theory, it addresses the political in public and intimate spaces.

The book begins by highlighting the transgressive nature of feminist historiography. It then divides into two parts—Part I, Intimate Transgressions: Marriage and Sexuality, examines marriage and divorce as viewed through a transnational lens, and Part II, Global Transgressions: Networking for Justice and Peace, considers political and social violence as well as struggles for relief, redemption, and change by transnational networks of women. Chapters are archivally grounded and take a critical approach that underscores the local in the global and the significance of intersectional factors within the intimate. They bring into conversation literatures too often separated: history of feminisms and anti-war, anti-imperial/anti-fascist, and related movements, on the one hand, and studies of gender crossings, marriage reconstitution, and affect and subjectivities, on the other. In so doing, the book encourages the reader to rethink standard interpretations of rights, equality, and recognition.

This is the ideal volume for students and scholars of Women’s and Gender History and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as International, Transnational, and Global History, History of Social Movements, and related specialized topics.

chapter 2|16 pages

Matronage

A useful concept for understanding the involvement of women in the public sphere in ancient societies

part I|116 pages

Intimate transgressions

chapter 3|16 pages

Challenging gender, historicizing gossip

Reflections on the life of Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir

chapter 4|17 pages

The transgressive agency of the cross-dressing soldier

The case of Anna Henryka Pustowójtówna (1838–1881), feminized masculinity, and insurgent Poland

chapter 5|18 pages

Transnational interventions into the intimate

Circling around Pandita Ramabai and The Little Wives of India 1

chapter 6|14 pages

Divorce and legal separation in Australia c. 1900

A tale of two transgressive great-great-grandmothers

chapter 7|17 pages

Challenging Indigenous marriage from within

Memories of the Tiwi’s Martina and the figure of Malinche

chapter 8|18 pages

Transnational struggles for racial justice

Indigenous Australian women’s marriages to American servicemen during the Second World War 1

chapter 9|14 pages

Women’s movements in 1970s Japan

Transgression and rejection

part II|141 pages

Global transgressions

chapter 10|19 pages

Challenging the national political order with transnational languages

British women at the fourth International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Amsterdam, 1908

chapter 11|17 pages

Petitioning for independence

Syrian and Lebanese women’s transnational anti-colonialism, 1919–1938

chapter 12|19 pages

Naming rape

Historicizing women’s human rights activism and agency in the Italo-Ethiopian war

chapter 13|17 pages

Anti-Fascist feminismo

Suffrage, sovereignty, and popular-front Pan-American feminism in Panama

chapter 14|16 pages

Transgressive transnationalism

The anti-colonial strategies in the Women’s International Democratic Federation

chapter 15|16 pages

Borderless for peace

How transnational connections shaped Women Strike for Peace

chapter 16|17 pages

The interpreter class

Women in conflict engage the international human rights community

chapter 17|18 pages

Transnational and transgenerational connections

Gendering US–Japan educational exchange