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This chapter shows how Muslim American women constructed normal, different, and fusion identities with reference to sexual and gendered behavior. Muslim women forged public and private gendered and sexual discourses and identities within the social spaces of campus culture where their sexual conduct often fits neither mainstream nor Muslim sexual discourses regarding male-female interactions, friendship, romance, dating, courtship, and sex.

This chapter explores the role of women in collaboration: whether collaboration is a more congenial mode of production for women, how widespread the female commitment really is, and if it is preferable as a phenomenon in cultural and historic context. This chapter explicitly argues that variations in men and women collaborative engagement are the result of social rather than biological forces. In terms of their social structure in history, women, minorities and economically oppressed groups have been disciplined to be accommodating in more interdependent modes of work and were limited from higher education and public institutions. Although changes and variations in gender roles are well recorded by anthropologists and historians, there is still a tendency in society to view male/female differences as universal. Many scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists recognize the complex nature of gender-linked practices and behaviour, providing information about the differences, complementarity, and shared humanity across the sexes.

What are the things that daughters would most like to know about relationships, intimacy, and sexuality from their mothers and adult female figures? What is the social landscape regarding sexuality and what mixed messages do daughters have to navigate? Who do they turn to when they have questions about sex and intimacy? This chapter explores all of these questions. My research suggests a mismatch with mothers’ perceptions of easy and open communication about sexual health and sexuality with their daughters and what daughters express. Although many mothers saw themselves as more open and receptive to talking about sexual health (and health in general) compared to their own mothers, daughters did not believe they could get accurate, nonjudgmental information from their mothers. Many daughters talked to other women and female peers about sexuality and sexual health. For daughters who do not have other adults to turn to for information about sexual health, it is not clear where or how they will obtain knowledge about sexual health, STDs, and HIV-prevention information. I argue that mothers are using outdated “gendered” scripts that exclusively focus on daughters’ virginity. Daughters expressed the desire for information and skill-building around communication. Their responses to a scenario posed to daughters, I argue, reveal the ways in which gendered behavior shapes and constrains their expectations about male and female relationships and illuminates the micro-dynamics of gender.

While Edendale’s arts community focused on sustaining independent artistic expression, the involvement of the federal government politicized art-making dramatically and narrowed the range of acceptable art. Although the Federal Art Project set out to support creative aesthetic explorations, it pushed for artists to create art in a manner that would speak in a language which was directed to the people and comprehensible to them. This coercion on the part of the federal government restrained the experimentation of the artists of Edendale. The earlier questions on the modes of expression and unique artistic vision were drowned out by the demands of the subject matter. The project directors instead pushed artists to create work and art that the public wanted. This chapter discusses the federal government’s move to limit the intimate expression of artists, particularly the local government’s control of the intimate sexual lives of the city’s residents. It discusses the emergence of a new political culture that framed homosexuality and homosexual desires as a dangerous and disturbing essence or identity. The new political culture also marked sexual deviance and gendered behavior as synonymous with the threats of moralistic fervor and Communism. It resulted in legal sanctions, arrests, imprisonments, and institutionalization—all designed to transform the meaning of homosexual desires and activity.

This chapter explores compañeros' experiences of stigmatization related to their nonconforming gender behavior. Collectively, the life stories show that childhood is the period in which most stigmatization is experienced—and perhaps causes the most lasting consequences. At this time in life, family and school are the most salient sources of stigma, as they are the main socializing agents. Some of these compañeros internalized such stigma, but most of them have been able to overcome the internalization in the course of their lives. Yet, they speak of depression, failed suicide attempts, and dislocation as consequences of the stigma they endured. The experienced stigma and its consequences are particularly severe for those activists who identify as drag queens, transexual, or transgender. Since they were children, their actions were perceived by others as flagrant transgressions of gender norms.

This chapter explores how Christian athletes negotiate evangelical marriage practices while still maintaining athletic careers and how they use their experiences as athletes to reflect on, reinterpret, and ultimately expand orthodoxy regarding marriage roles. Women and men in sports ministry have a variety of resources at their disposal for understanding their gender roles. Since the 1970s, these resources have expanded to include “servant-leadership,” “mutual submission,” and “teammates.” In putting these ideas into practice, both women and men have achieved more leeway in their gendered behavior and relationships. However, this wiggle room continues to be constrained by the vestiges of previous generations’ ideas of marriage roles. Since for women, the gendered expectations of “evangelical” and “athlete” do not match up, they have used tools from both of these realms to understand themselves and their relationships.

This chapter focuses on the sensationalism of true crime and the effect of modernity to gendered norms in post-1905 Russia. The increasing intertextuality of true crime helped shape the evolving discourse of murder. The mass media reporting from the scene of the crime created a “pathological public sphere.” Also a natural topic for the cinema, true crime turned the courtroom into a camera-ready social theater. Meanwhile, the empire's most talked about murders raised questions about normative gendered behaviors. Modernity had ushered in new forms of social relations between sexes, and it was identified positively in the West with a rational, bourgeois masculinity capable of breaking with the past's inhibiting structures. This effect on gendered norms had political implications to the extent that it reflected first a repudiation of patriarchy, and second, it did not suggest that bourgeois liberalism provided a preferable alternative.

This chapter presents two cases of female sodomitical relationships to highlight how the “unnatural” female sodomy—though underreported and frequently dismissed by colonial authorities—was not entirely ignored by colonial society. The defendants in the two cases were denounced, investigated, and tried based on neighborhood and familial suspicions and gossips. Evidence for the allegations was completely circumstantial and broken into two categories: unnatural gender inversions and general moral turpitude. In addition, the two cases presented “penetrational ambiguities.” These factors led the magistrates to prove the defendants’ unnatural acts by examining their gendered behaviors as well as moral depravity.

This chapter examines Jewish refugees' responses to life in Portugal. Portugal offered adult refugees the space and time to look back with sadness. Adults felt intense dismay as they lingered between a destroyed past and an uncertain future. Many mourned their loss of home and homeland, amounting to a loss of self. Moreover, ordeals under fascism, harrowing escapes, and the escalating desperation of family and friends left behind haunted them. In contrast, while their elders had lost their past and present, as well as the futures they had counted on, young people often experienced excitement and adventure, and looked forward to the future. Women and men also reacted differently to their losses and helplessness, even if gendered behavior flattened a bit.

In comedias, the other characters’ acceptance of the cross-dresser as a member of the opposite sex is still typically dismissed as a mere theatrical device to advance the storyline. Yet, in the mindset of early modern Spanish people, sexual distinction was not solely defined on a biological basis. It was defined by personality traits, behaviors, and sartorial conventions. To distinguish between male and female in everyday life, people relied heavily on socially contrived signifiers, such as clothing, gender roles, and engendered spaces. In Ángela de Azevedo’s El muerto disimulado [The Feign Death], the characters’ inability to determine correctly the sex of the cross-dresser is a manifestation of an attentional set that assigns sex according to gendered behaviors.

The fourth chapter presents the harsh realities that young Black men face in the gendered social hierarchy that presents a very limited set of, often problematic, solutions as models. Situated within a society that advances violent expressions of masculine behaviour, the stories of Black male youths explore the consequences of when Black males reject these notions of masculinity.

This chapter focuses on the history of the sentimental novel and its fascination with family, courtship, seduction, and marriage. It begins by citing two works that were influential in the formation of American-themed fiction: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). It then examines how Robinson Crusoe inspired dozens of imitators, the so-called Robinsonades, including Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767). It also considers the importance of European novels such as the Crusoe-inspired fiction for early depictions of the Americas and for how they influenced the taste of colonial readers. In addition, the chapter looks at William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), widely recognized as the first American novel, and its influence on the stylistic and thematic concerns of subsequent sentimental and seduction fiction through its four interpolated stories of seduction. Finally, it discusses two interconnected lines of cultural critique regarding the metanarrative of the American sentimental novel, one relating to gendered behavior and the other national identity.