Historically, marketing has viewed women primarily as consumers and men as producers, a perspective deeply ingrained in societal gender constructs. Contemporary shifts in consumer culture, particularly the integration of physical and digital realms, have transformed the roles women play as both consumers and producers, challenging traditional gender-based market segmentation. Central to the discussion is the concept of gender as a cultural performance, with brands acting as signifiers aiding consumers in navigating their cultural landscapes. This navigation is influenced by a consumer’s gender identity and their desire for self-expression. Brands, therefore, are not just products but markers that consumers use to articulate and negotiate their identities within a gendered cultural context. Gender is presented as a spectrum, influencing how consumers relate to brands and how brands can segment their markets more effectively by gender identity rather than biological sex. Brands that understand and engage with the gendered performances of a consumer’s sense of self can create ‘safe spaces’ for consumers to express their identities, fostering deeper connections and brand loyalty.

“Ideals of Beauty” records the spread of idealist aesthetics from Kant, through European natural philosophy of the nineteenth century, to popular anthropology published in Victorian Britain and the American Civil War. Based on archival research, the chapter adduces a link between two influential, though largely forgotten, pieces of propaganda: Miscegenation, an invidious pamphlet that promoted interacial marriage in order to incite anti-abolitionist feelings; and Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman (1836) by the Scottish anatomist Alexander Walker. Translating high Kantian theory into a more quotidian, though no less potent, ideological idiom, Miscegenation and Beauty adapt anthropological classifications in order to circumscribe categories of race and gender: black, white, male, female, and mixed-race types epitomize species of physiological perfection in these texts.

This chapter focuses on the role of nationality laws in relation to marriage migration to South Korea (‘the Republic of Korea’ or ‘Korea’) and Taiwan (‘the Republic of China’) in manufacturing gendered nationality and statelessness. It illustrates how gender-based statelessness serves the interests of the ‘nation-state’ by excluding some female marriage migrants from membership of the nation. This is because nationality laws confer a status on those marriage migrants who advance the project of nation building by reversing falling birth rates. It argues that discriminatory nationality laws in Korea and Taiwan reflect traditional East Asian framings of nationality based on cultural and ethnic patriarchal lineage. The chapter demonstrates how laws and policies on nationality, in both Korea and Taiwan, both include and exclude the marriage migrant on the basis of gender, nationality, race, class, culture and ethnicity; it thereby exposes the causes of statelessness in the context of marriage migration. The chapter applies a construction of gender as based on power relations involving the state, social structures and individuals in the context of nationality laws in Korea and Taiwan.

This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

This chapter argues that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preoccupation with agony and martyrdom is best understood in the broader context of Victorian figurations of religious suffering as inherently feminine. The chapter outlines the multiple factors shaping Victorian interest in female martyrs, from new theories of sexology to anxieties over Roman Catholicism. It then examines texts by writers such as Sarah Stickney Ellis, John Mason Neale, and Charles Kingsley that contain representations of suffering as a Christian virtue to which women are innately disposed. Such texts ostensibly frame women’s martyrdom as a paradoxical means of power through self-disavowal while often containing voyeuristic descriptions of suffering female flesh. Next, the work of Christina Rossetti is introduced as a counterpoint that avoids lurid depictions of sexualized violence in favour of reflections on female subjectivity and salvation. The chapter ends by finding in Hopkins’s martyr texts a complex and nonreductive engagement in this wider discourse.

Dinah Craik’s 1851 novella The Half-Caste tells the story of how a half-Indian heiress, Zillah Le Poer, faces manipulative attempts by the greedy British side of her family to control her fortune which she thwarts by marrying her older Scottish guardian. This reading of Craik’s novel examines the production of race at a period when dominant British imperialism was believed to depend largely on hierarchies of race allegedly constructed by heredity. Walters argues that Craik describes how new racial identities can be produced by the ‘affective capacity of brown, Eurasian, female bodies to feel connection with – and dependence on white women’, with resulting implications for racial hierarchies and Empire itself. The chapter examines the idea of race in part as a function of feeling and reveals a ‘slippage between affective and racially scientific methods of assessing difference’.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

In order to situate the women who worked in royal and aristocratic households in their proper context, the first chapter explores household composition, demonstrating similarities of servant arrangements at all levels of elite society even though household size varied at different status gradations. Over time, households of every status level grew, offering further career opportunities, especially since elite households became more welcoming to women in the late fourteenth century, even though throughout the Middle Ages they remained almost exclusively male domains. This chapter argues that female servants gained their positions through kinship and patronage opportunities that favored their placement and promotion. In investigating the qualities that employers desired in their servants, I contend that they chose attendants who demonstrated useful skills, good character, and pleasing appearance. This chapter reveals that turnover occurred due to death, retirement, marriage (which did not necessitate retirement), dismissal, or transition to different households, and seems to have been a frequent aspect of life for a lady-in-waiting, yet I also assert that a minority of attendants served their ladies for long durations, at least a decade or more.

The many years of service evident in the careers of some ladies-in-waiting who received annuities for decades while continuing to complete responsibilities in the royal household demonstrates that the opportunities of court service were valued by many. Such service offered one of the only salaried professional positions available to women in later medieval England, and for many was a true career. Families sought to promote their daughters at court because female servants could seek to gain not only remuneration but also intangible patronage opportunities for themselves, their families, and their associates. Employment in elite households enhanced servants’ loyalty, built and deepened relationships, and also heightened the status of the royals and nobles who bestowed rewards. Including gender in the analysis helps us to recognize the porous boundary between domestic life and political life at the royal court, and, in an era when politics was all about access to the decision-making monarch, female courtiers enjoyed and benefitted from such informal routes to access. Although in service, and always answerable to the needs and commands of their queens and aristocratic employers, understanding the history of ladies-in-waiting underscores how they nevertheless found ways to exercise agency and access political power in medieval England.

This chapter examines the promotion of entrepreneurship and business startups in Oman and its rhetorical targeting of youth and women. Although innovation is part of the promotion agenda, entrepreneurship is often focused on encouraging citizens to create their own private sector job. The chapter focuses on the experiences of young people in internalising entrepreneurship promotion discourses and in starting personal businesses. It illustrates two key tensions – first, the tension between rentierism embedded within authoritarian governing structures, on the one hand, and the logic of neoliberal capitalism, on the other; and second, the tensions between rhetoric and realities of youth and female empowerment narratives. Entrepreneurship is expressed and promoted as an empowering activity, and at times is experienced as such, but can also be used to legitimise or reconstitute patriarchal and authoritarian structures to accommodate the market. The space of entrepreneurship promotion is both a key tactic of labour market bandaging, and a distinct illustration of rentier neoliberalism