Valerie Mainz – författare

These essays draw on new research into Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual life, exploring how a gender identity could come to be negotiated over time. Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. Not surprisingly, such sensational material has attracted the attention of enthusiasts, scholars and literateurs to 'the strange case of the chevalier d'Eon'. He has also attracted the attention of psychologists and sexologists, and for most of the last century his gender transformation has been viewed through a Freudian lens. His cross-dressing, it was usually assumed, must have a psychosexual explanation. The essays in this collection contribute to d'Eon's rehabilitation as a figure worthy of scholarly attention and display a variety of disciplinary approaches.Drawing on new research into d'Eon's life, this volume offers original and nuanced readings of how a gender identity could come to be negotiated over time.

This book examines a range of visual images of military recruitment to explore changing notions of glory, or of gloire, during the French Revolution. This military song, later adopted as the national anthem, represents a deceptively unifying moment of collective engagement in the making of the modern French nation.

This title was first published in 2000. "Work and the Image", published in two volumes, addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. Volume I includes interdisciplinary case studies which plot the changing definitions of work as labour, craft, social relations and a source of historical identity, while analyzing the role of visual representation in their formation and transformation. The diverse essays cover such topics as anti-slavery movements and enunciation of workers' rights, revolutionary politics, relations of class and gender, industrial masculinities and women's rural sociality, unemployment and subjectivity, Stalinist aesthetics and nationalist identities.

This title was first published in 2000. "Work and the Image", published in two volumes, addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. Volume I includes interdisciplinary case studies which plot the changing definitions of work as labour, craft, social relations and a source of historical identity, while analyzing the role of visual representation in their formation and transformation. The diverse essays cover such topics as anti-slavery movements and enunciation of workers' rights, revolutionary politics, relations of class and gender, industrial masculinities and women's rural sociality, unemployment and subjectivity, Stalinist aesthetics and nationalist identities.

This title was first published in 2000. Published in two volumes, "Work and the Image" addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. With a shared focus on the 20th century, the era of modernity and its postmodern aftermath, the essays in this volume examine the diverse ways in which the social relations of work in industrial societies from both capitalist and socialist regimes were publicly and privately mediated by changing forms of visual representation. The authors discuss traditional analyses of the image of the worker in the light of contemporary critical theories that address the question of the subjectivity of the worker in relation to class, gender, nationhood and the concept of modernity.

This title was first published in 2000. Published in two volumes, "Work and the Image" addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. With a shared focus on the 20th century, the era of modernity and its postmodern aftermath, the essays in this volume examine the diverse ways in which the social relations of work in industrial societies from both capitalist and socialist regimes were publicly and privately mediated by changing forms of visual representation. The authors discuss traditional analyses of the image of the worker in the light of contemporary critical theories that address the question of the subjectivity of the worker in relation to class, gender, nationhood and the concept of modernity.

This book examines a range of visual images of military recruitment to explore changing notions of glory, or of gloire, during the French Revolution. This military song, later adopted as the national anthem, represents a deceptively unifying moment of collective engagement in the making of the modern French nation.