The Violent Maintenance of the Portuguese Colonial Identity and the Search for a Postcolonial one: literary images of Portugal as a colonial and postcolonial nation

Through the examination of Camões's Os Lusíadas , Sena's Os Grão-Capitães and Saramago's A Jangada de Pedra , this article explores violence as a means of shaping Portuguese identity in different historical contexts, and how these works portray the continued recourse to violence as Portugal moves from colonizing to postcolonial nation.

It's good to be queen: classically eusocial colony structure and low worker fitness in an obligately eusocial sweat bee.

Lasioglossum malachurum, a bee species common across much of Europe, is obligately eusocial across its range but exhibits clear geographic variation in demography and social behaviour. This variation suggests that social interactions between queens and workers, opportunities for worker oviposition, and patterns of relatedness among nest mates may vary considerably, both within and among regions. In this study, we used three microsatellite loci with 12–18 alleles each to examine the sociogenetic structure of colonies from a population at Agios Nikolaos Monemvasias in southern Greece. These analyses reveal that the majority of colonies exhibit classical eusocial colony structure in which a single queen mated to a single male monopolizes oviposition. Nevertheless, we also detect low rates of multiqueen nest founding, occasional caste switching by worker-destined females, and worker oviposition of both gyne and male-producing eggs in the final brood. Previous evidence that the majority of workers show some ovarian development and a minority (17%) have at least one large oocyte contrasts with the observation that only 2–3% of gynes and males (the so-called reproductive brood) are produced by workers. An evaluation of the parameters of Hamilton's Rule suggests that queens benefit greatly from the help provided by workers but that workers achieve greater fitness by provisioning and laying their own eggs rather than by tending to the queen's eggs. This conflict of interest between the queen and her workers suggests that the discrepancy between potential and achieved worker oviposition is due to queen interference. Comparison of relatedness and maternity patterns in the Agios Nikolaos Monemvasias population with those from a northern population near Tübingen, Germany, points to a north–south cline of increasingly effective queen control of worker behaviour.

“Shall we playe the good girles”: Playing Girls, Performing Girlhood on Early Modern Stages

This essay investigates the extent to which girlhood functions as a queer category in two theatrical representations of schoolgirls in early seventeenth-century England. It focuses on the depictions of schoolgirls in the anonymous The Wit of a Woman (1604), written for the all-male stage of the professional theatre, and in Robert White’s masque, Cupid’s Banishment (1617), performed by the young Ladies of Deptford Hall before Queen Anna of Denmark, to examine the intersections of age, gender, sexuality and education in early modern concepts of girlhood. Situating these plays within wider debates about female education and the history of the contested role of performance in the schooling of early modern girls, it argues that they deploy the category of girlhood to demonstrate the subversive potential of educating girls. Yet, this essay proposes, these plays simultaneously reveal the potential agency of young women who manipulate girlhood to claim their distinct sexual, aged and gendered states as girls. It argues that early modern girlhood is a state that might be performed by young women to disrupt normative expectations of feminine behaviour and desire. Placing dramatic representations of schoolgirls and the experiences of schoolgirls on the early modern stage side by side, this essay demonstrates that the schoolroom and performance are sites in which this transgressive potential is realised.