Search results for ""Author Michelle Chase""

A handful of celebrated photographs show armed, fatigues-clad female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success only now receives comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a ""revolution within the revolution,"" Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process.Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

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As the Cuban Revolution reaches its sixtieth anniversary, contributors to this special issue explore the impact of the revolution through the lens of sexuality and gender, providing a social and cultural history that illuminates the Cuban-influenced global New Left. Moving beyond assumptions about the revolutionary left's hypermasculinity and homophobia, the issue takes a nuanced approach to the Cuban Revolution's impact on gender and sexuality. Contributors study Cuban internationalist campaigns, the relationship between cultural diplomacy and mass media, and visual images of revolution and solidarity. They follow the emergence and negotiation of new gender ideals through the transgendering of Che's “New Man,” the Cuban travels of Angela Davis, calls for sexual revolution in the Dutch Atlantic, and gender representations during the 1964 “Campaign of Terror” in Chile. In doing so, the authors provide fresh insight into Cuba’s transnational legacy on politics and culture during the Cold War and beyond. Contributors. Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Marcelo Casals, Michelle Chase, Aviva Chomsky, Isabella Cosse, Ximena Espeche, Robert Franco, Paula Halperin, Lani Hanna, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Melina Pappademos, Jennifer L. Lambe, Diosnara Ortega González, Gregory Randall, Margaret Randall, Chelsea Schields, Sarah Seidman, Emily Snyder, Heidi Tinsman, Ailynn Torres Santana

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