Reconsidering Gender, Violence, and the State

In bringing together a geographically and temporally broad range of interdisciplinary historical scholarship, this issue of Radical History Review offers an expansive examination of gender, violence, and the state. Through analyses of New York penitentiaries, anarchists in early twentieth-century Japan, and militarism in the 1990s, contributors reconsider how historical conceptions of masculinity and femininity inform the persistence of and punishments for gendered violence. The contributors to a section on violence and activism challenge the efficacy of state solutions to gendered violence in a contemporary U.S. context, highlighting alternatives posited by radical feminist and queer activists. In five case studies drawn from South Africa, India, Ireland, East Asia, and Nigeria, contributors analyze the archive's role in shaping current attitudes toward gender, violence, and the state, as well as its lasting imprint on future quests for restitution or reconciliation. This issue also features a visual essay on the "false positives" killings in Colombia and an exploration of Zanale Muholi’s postapartheid activist photography.

Contributors: Lisa Arellano, Erica L. Ball, Josh Cerretti, Jonathan Culleton, Amanda Frisken, Raphael Ginsberg, Deana Heath, Efeoghene Igor, Catherine Jacquet, Jessie Kindig, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Jen Manion, Xhercis Méndez, Luis Morán, Claudia Salamanca, Tomoko Seto, Carla Tsampiras, Jennifer Yeager

Lisa Arellano is Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Colby College and the author of Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community and Nation.

Erica L. Ball is Professor of American Studies and Chair of African American Studies at Occidental College and the author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class.

Amanda Frisken is Associate Professor of American Studies at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury, and the author of Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America.