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Body Politics II: Sexuality and Violence Policy

Amy G. Mazur

in Theorizing Feminist Policy

In the first section, the analysis defines the general feminist aims and parameters of the second type of Body Politics Policy: Sexuality and Violence Policy. It then discusses the range and timing ... More

In the first section, the analysis defines the general feminist aims and parameters of the second type of Body Politics Policy: Sexuality and Violence Policy. It then discusses the range and timing of policies found in the 13 countries and closes with a discussion of the criteria for selecting the four policy cases covered in the chapter. Sexuality and violence policies aim to help women in situations of domestic violence and in their sexual activities, unwanted or wanted. In the second section, the results of the analysis of the policy case literature on the dynamics of feminist policy formation is presented for the following four cases: The 1992 Zero Tolerance Campaign in Edinburgh; Public Funding of Women's Shelters in Sweden, 1978–95; Spanish Sexual Harassment Reform in 1989; and French Sexual Harassment Reform in 1922. The analysis concludes that the most important factors in determining feminist policy success in this particular sub‐sector of feminist policy may be cultural attitudes about sexual relations, local political dynamics, and the type of legal system.Less

Consent to Sexual Relations

Alan Wertheimer

in The Ethics of Consent: Theory and Practice

This chapter focuses on the question of when a person's consent to sexual relations is morally transformative. For example, if one consents while intoxicated or after one has been deceived, is it ... More

This chapter focuses on the question of when a person's consent to sexual relations is morally transformative. For example, if one consents while intoxicated or after one has been deceived, is it permissible for the other party to proceed? It develops a general account of the criteria of moral transformative consent (CMT), a set of criteria that itself can take two forms: the criteria of morally transformative consent for the law (CMTL) and the criteria of morally transformative consent for morality (CMTM). Both versions of CMT are moral criteria, but the criteria that indicate when consent should—as a moral matter—be regarded as legally permissible are not identical to the criteria that indicate when a person's consent renders another's action morally permissible.Less

Sexology

Wenqing Kang

in Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900-1950

This chapter looks at the content of various Western sexological writings about homosexuality. The dissemination of this new knowledge across China meant that attention shifted toward sexual ... More

This chapter looks at the content of various Western sexological writings about homosexuality. The dissemination of this new knowledge across China meant that attention shifted toward sexual relations between men who shared the same social status. Also, the chapter looks into how the motivations of those who introduced “sexuality” as a term may have linked the term with the political and social contexts of colonial modernity. “Homosexuality” could refer to same-sex sex(uality) or same-sex love at the same time. This term was seen in manuals for sexual education, journals, and urban tabloid newspapers. Male same-sex relations were the subject of several heated debates in educational books and journals that expressed interest toward Western sexological ideas. This chapter first discusses the debate between Hu Qiuyuan and Yang Youtian, the questions brought about by the new homosexuality concept, and Pan Guangdan's 1946 sexological treaties.Less

The Right of Intimate Association

Jeffrey M. Shaman

in Equality and Liberty in the Golden Age of State Constitutional Law

This chapter discusses laws regulating sexual relations between consenting adults (married or not) and laws regulating gay and lesbian sexual relations. At one time, all of the states adopted ... More

This chapter discusses laws regulating sexual relations between consenting adults (married or not) and laws regulating gay and lesbian sexual relations. At one time, all of the states adopted criminal laws forbidding sodomy and many states also criminally prohibited fornication and adultery. In modern times, state courts began to rule that these criminal laws were unconstitutional. These decisions were part of a growing recognition that an individual's sex life was a private matter that simply was no business of the government. In 1992, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that a statute making it a crime to engage in sexual relations with a person of the same sex violated the rights of individual liberty and equal treatment guaranteed by the state constitution. Several other state courts rendered similar decisions, eventually leading the United States Supreme Court to follow suit and overrule its previous decision to the contrary.Less

New Laws For A New Age

Jonathan Burnside

in God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible

This chapter looks at how the biblical laws of marriage, divorce, and sexual relations were interpreted during the Second Temple (or intertestamental) period, with reference to the writers of the ... More

This chapter looks at how the biblical laws of marriage, divorce, and sexual relations were interpreted during the Second Temple (or intertestamental) period, with reference to the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the followers of Jesus. It shows that there is considerable fluidity between literary genres that are nowadays regarded as distinct and that the early chapters of Genesis were often crucial to legal interpretation. Despite fundamental differences between the Qumran community and the New Testament writers, the laws of marriage, divorce, and remarriage were important to both groups as a means of championing a particular attitude towards Moses, the purposes of God, and the eschaton (the end of the present age). The chapter argues that interpretations of biblical law (including on the question of divorce and remarriage) helped to define the identity of both religious groups, particularly in relation to their opponents.Less

The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789–1815

Michael David Sibalis

in Homosexuality in Modern France

This chapter examines the history of the regulation of male homosexuality in France during the period from 1789 to 1815. Consensual sexual relations between adults of the same sex has been legal in ... More

This chapter examines the history of the regulation of male homosexuality in France during the period from 1789 to 1815. Consensual sexual relations between adults of the same sex has been legal in France for two centuries and this is usually attributed to the influence of Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès as second consul and then arch chancellor under Napoleon Bonaparte's government. However, Napoleon's government never showed itself particularly tolerant of homosexual activity and it was determined to enforce the highest moral standards in France. Though the law no longer penalized “crimes against nature”, the government never hesitated to take repressive action against pederasts and sodomites.Less

The Spirit of the Countryside: Mang Ke's Wild Things and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Years

in From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China

Twentieth-century Chinese fiction has tackled the long discourse of the countryside that brought to the fore conflicts between revolution and modernity. One writer who explored the countryside or ... More

Twentieth-century Chinese fiction has tackled the long discourse of the countryside that brought to the fore conflicts between revolution and modernity. One writer who explored the countryside or village life through memories was Shen Congwen, who is often associated with the term “nativism” (xiangtu) in modern Chinese literature. This chapter analyzes two Chinese novels that are set during the Cultural Revolution: Wild Things (1994) by Mang Ke and The Golden Years (1991) by Wang Xiaobo. Both narratives tackle spiritual aspects of the countryside as it was imagined under revolutionary culture. Wild Things disallows the countryside as a site of intellectual rejuvenation and anti-civilization symbolism, while The Golden Years establishes—but never directly represents—revolutionary time as an abstract notion and offers an idiosyncratic depiction of sexual relations. The essentially temporal vision in The Golden Years complements the spatial orientation in Wild Things.Less

The Sex Market and Its Implications for Family Formation

Youm Yoosik and Paik Anthony

in The Sexual Organization of the City

This chapter investigates the variety and social consequences of sexual-matching strategies employed by men and women in their interactions with sex markets. This issue—how men and women participate ... More

This chapter investigates the variety and social consequences of sexual-matching strategies employed by men and women in their interactions with sex markets. This issue—how men and women participate in sex markets—has theoretical and empirical import. One feature of sex markets is their tendency to be either transactional or relational. The chapter takes the perspective of the individual and focuses on individual decision making. Like sex markets, individuals can have either transactional or relational strategies. However, the chapter argues that individuals frequently deploy a hybrid strategy of maintaining concurrent sexual relations, a topic that has received scant attention in sociological research. Moreover, the distribution of these different sex-market strategies among everyday Americans has important implications for several outcomes, including out-of-wedlock fertility, sexually transmitted infections, and, marriage.Less

Conclusion

Ulinka Rublack

in The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany

The study has shown how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century elites in the southwest Germany used the law to enforce their notions of moral and sexual order, and how this affected ordinary women. Trial ... More

The study has shown how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century elites in the southwest Germany used the law to enforce their notions of moral and sexual order, and how this affected ordinary women. Trial records have illuminated the family histories, material conditions, life experiences, and social practices of women who are not often written about: the thieves and maidservants, day-labourers, artisan wives, and single mothers of early modern Germany. Court records thus point to a seventeenth-century tightening of patriarchal values through the enforced prosecution of illegitimate sexual relations, bastard-bearing, and infanticide. This was linked to efforts to naturalize maternal love and praise chastity and marriage as women's sole avenues towards respectability.Less

Private Sex

Mark D. West

in Lovesick Japan: Sex * Marriage * Romance * Law

This chapter considers the assumptions of the Japanese judiciary regarding consensual sex, assumptions the Japanese judiciary reveal as they carefully investigate very personal, private matters. It ... More

This chapter considers the assumptions of the Japanese judiciary regarding consensual sex, assumptions the Japanese judiciary reveal as they carefully investigate very personal, private matters. It first examines what courts label as “common sense” notions of appropriate sexual practices, which often are conservative and almost always involve a substitution of the parties' view of appropriateness with that of the court. It then turns to the kinds of people who are appropriate sexual partners. In some cases, judges find certain partners to be wholly inappropriate; in other cases, judges protect fragile females, but they make surprising concessions to would-be suitors if those men display the requisite emotions. Finally, the chapter looks at normal, assumed birth control practices, focusing on the widespread use of abortion. In these cases, judges do not moralize; they seem completely oblivious to the underlying ideas their stories reveal. In all of these cases, judges conduct thorough investigations of sexual practices, emotions, and relationships, and they often seem less than thrilled with their findings.Less

New Women, New Men?

Carrie Hamilton

in Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory

This chapter presents a kitchen conversation in Havana in late 2006, excerpted from the author's research diary. It does not necessarily present any truths about gender and sexual relations in early ... More

This chapter presents a kitchen conversation in Havana in late 2006, excerpted from the author's research diary. It does not necessarily present any truths about gender and sexual relations in early twenty-first-century Cuba. It is the author's memory—recorded the day after the events—and reflects her impressions and interests as much as the views of the Cuban women involved. These women were, to some extent, performing for the author, the only foreigner in the room. Her presence as a non-Cuban allowed four women who may not have under other circumstances perceived themselves as a collective to position themselves as “Cuban women” in order to impress upon the author something about another collective entity, “Cuban men.”Less

Conversion, Sex, and Segregation

David Nirenberg

in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today

This chapter looks at how the 1391 massacres/mass conversions of 1391 affected the ways diverse communities of Christians, Muslims, and Jews imagined themselves in terms of each other through ... More

This chapter looks at how the 1391 massacres/mass conversions of 1391 affected the ways diverse communities of Christians, Muslims, and Jews imagined themselves in terms of each other through interfaith sexual relations, outlining the common logics and enduring metaphors of sex that medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities used to help define/identify themselves as a collective and heighten the barriers of honor (with which that collective surrounded itself), and discussing the various ways the 1391 conversions of Jewish communities affected Christian anxieties about sexual boundaries. Conversions provoked a Christian “identity crisis” that sharply constricted available space for religious diversity in the Peninsula. It was a very different crisis from the later ones that would transform Iberia into a land of inquisitors and pure-blood statutes, with Christians in the years immediately after 1391 concerned not that religious identity was unchanging but rather the opposite--that the disappearance of the Jews and the emergence of the conversos would undermine the distinctive value/meaning of Christian identity. Correspondingly, their attention was not focused on the religious practices of the converts or on establishing differences between Old Christian and New, but on reinforcing what they took to be the more fundamental Christian/Jewish sexual boundaries.Less

An Intimate History of Early America’s Maritime Empire

Brian Rouleau

in With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire

This chapter explores the intimate realm of the U.S. maritime empire and argues that sex and ideas about sexuality were crucial to mediating relations between seamen and the societies overseas ... More

This chapter explores the intimate realm of the U.S. maritime empire and argues that sex and ideas about sexuality were crucial to mediating relations between seamen and the societies overseas through which they moved. Sailors became conversant in the sexual mores of a wide array of peoples, but the state and other authorities, in the form of consuls and Christian evangelists, scrutinized those sexual relations and attempted to exercise power by limiting “acceptable” forms of intimacy in their dominions. Moreover, the planetary forum in which sailors read the bodies and behavior of women suggests that rationalizations about inequality between the sexes had a transnational foundation in the nineteenth century. Within the seafaring community, in the nation's largest seaport cities, and traveling through print culture that often originated in those very cities, detail and debate emerged about American womanhood in a global context.Less

Figuring Sex Between Men

Hammond Paul

in Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester

This chapter addresses the question of how sex between men was figured rhetorically, drawing attention to two distinctive features of those literary texts which represent such desires—both those ... More

This chapter addresses the question of how sex between men was figured rhetorically, drawing attention to two distinctive features of those literary texts which represent such desires—both those which are hostile and those which are celebratory. The first feature is the careful use of definition and indefinition. Writers wishing to voice love between men often develop strategies which allow such desire to be identified, while also inviting readers to construe it as something other than sexual—as masculine friendship, as religious devotion. By contrast, writers condemning such desires as diabolical sodomy may insist upon punitive definitions, turning the complexities of real human beings into caricatures, into monsters. Central to the argument in this chapter is the idea of paradiastole, the rhetorical trope which redefines something in other terms, a manoeuvre familiar from lawyers’ arguments which seek to maximize or minimize a crime by careful redescription. Within the texts discussed, paradiastole both creates space for the homoerotic imagination to play in relative safety by permitting multiple readings, and, in bigoted texts, brands homosexual desires with the stigma of legal and religious anathema.Less