Illicit Sex Research Articles

MEDIA WAVES AND MORAL PANICKING: THE CASE OF THE FIFA WORLD CUP 2010

1. Introduction In the run-up to the FIFA World in South Africa, human made headline news in 27 South African newspapers. This resulted in series of news waves pertaining to perceptions of forced prostitution and child to come during the World Cup. Evocative headlines capitalising on societal fears appeared in the local media. Out of 350 articles covering human in South African newspapers between 2006 and 2010, 82 (or 24 per cent) directly linked this sporting event with human trafficking. A sample of headlines included: Flesh trade fear for World Cup (Citizen 2006); casts shadow over (Sunday Independent 2007); may escalate ahead of World Cup--report (The Weekender 2008); Warning on child in (Cape Argus 2008); 2010 exploitation: Human traffickers ready for World Cup (Daily News 2009); red alert: Women, children under threat as World sees prostitution demand rocket (Daily News 2010). As with previous international sporting events, the threat of human quickly became part of public consciousness. Advocacy organisations, such as Molo Songololo, Justice Acts, Not for Sale, Doctors for Life, STOP (Stop Trafficking of People) (1) and politicians (2) publicly repeated inflated estimates of numbers of women and children who would be trafficked, brutalised and forced into life of sexual servitude in order to meet the demands of hordes of sexually deviant, inebriated football fans. It was erroneously portrayed that large sporting events--particularly football--attracted and facilitated the demand and supply of illicit sex. Based on the myth of 40 000 sex slaves who were imported from Eastern Europe into Germany, resultant media hype and moral panic, became part of the South African World discourse. We claim that media hypes based on constructed moral panics might be recycled in similar scenarios demonstrating the staying power of such media hypes and the utility of moral panics. As Vasterman (2005: 517) claims: [M]edia coverage can be self-fulfilling prophecy. A situation becomes real crisis because it is described as crisis; condition becomes an important social problem because it is described in terms of sudden deterioration of the situation. In this way media-hype can create new realities, independent from other non-mediated realities. 2. The dark side of sex, football and South Africa Up until 2008, South Africa was ranked as Tier 2 (Watch List) country for the fourth consecutive year by the United States (US) TIP Report for failing to with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking (UNHCR 2008). According to the report, the government failed to provide adequate data on (cases investigated and/or prosecuted), and deported and/or prosecute suspected victims without providing appropriate protective services (UNHCR 2008). Although South Africa was taken off the watch list in 2009, the report noted that it still did not comply with the minimum standards. This assessment remained the same in the report. To date, formulation and harmonisation of legislation in accordance with the prescripts of the Protocol have yet to be fulfilled. The TIP Report, identified South Africa as a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to in persons, specifically forced labour and forced commercial sexual exploitation (US Department of State 2010). An exploratory study by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) released in March on the dimensions of human in southern Africa supported the findings of previous studies that suggested South Africa is key destination and, to lesser extent, country of origin and transit for people trafficked to and from Africa, globally, and internally (HSRC 2010). …

Intimacy Under Surveillance: Illicit Sexuality, Moral Policing, and the State in Contemporary Malaysia

Abstract Malaysia’s Malay-Muslim majority adheres to heteronormative forms of sexuality that recognise marriage as the only means of securing access to lawful sexual intimacy. Islam, Malay customs (adat), and the Malaysian state impose strict sanctions on pre- and extramarital intimacy in its Syariah criminal laws. A Vice Prevention Unit responsible for moral policing is legally authorised to arrest couples who violate Islamic rules of behaviour, including sexual offences such as khalwat (illicit proximity)—a crime of passion punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. This article compares two khalwat trials in Kota Bharu and Kuala Lumpur’s Syariah court to illustrate what Peletz (2002) calls the judges’ “cultural logic of judicial reasoning”. In these trials, Syariah judges extend beyond a narrowed focus on gender to also consider cultural understandings of age, profession, family circumstances, and marital status, thus reproducing Malay adat understandings of intimacy, marriage, and personhood. In an effort to steer young couples away from forbidden sexual temptations, the Malaysian state liberalises access to marriage by recognising cross-border marriages contracted in Southern Thailand, offering financial incentives to young couples intending to marry and defending existing legal provisions allowing the marriage of minors. The Malaysian state’s mix of punitive, preventative, and pro-marriage policies, I suggest, are various ways of surveilling sexuality by bringing uncontrolled desires under the purview of matrimony, where it may find its lawful expression.

Mutiny in the House: Domestic Rebellion in Fausta Cialente’s Natalia

The cult of domesticity positions women into a state of subservience while reinforcing gendered roles. The ideology was propagated in post-Unification Italy by Catholic doctrine as well as Fascist propaganda and practices that consigned women to the roles of wives and mothers. The physical site of the cult of domesticity was the home where traditional values were honored and upheld. In Fausta Cialente’s novel Natalia—originally published in 1930 and censored by the Fascist regime, then reissued in 1982—the home becomes a site of rebellion and resistance, which challenges ideology that limits female autonomy. In Natalia, a verdant house in the country is the scene of illicit sexual activity between the female protagonist and a young woman, and an ancestral home becomes the threatening locus of the protagonist’s marriage, as well as the setting of her failed attempt at motherhood. Throughout the text, the explicit connection between physical space—the home—and female autonomy, acts as a critique of female oppression and pervasive societal expectations.

Sero-prevalence of Blood Borne Agents among Voluntary Blood Donors

Introduction: Blood transfusion is a significant life-saving intervention in the present era of patient management system. As the blood and blood products are a potential source of infections and the necessity of transfusion is increasing day by day, transfusion transmissible infections have become a major threat to the system of ensuring safe transfusion.
 Objectives: To find out the sero-prevalence of Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, HIV, Syphilis and Malaria parasite among the blood donors and to ascertain risk behaviour of the blood donors.
 Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on purposively selected 115 blood donors at Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) during the period of 1st September to 31st December 2011.
 Results: The study revealed among 115 blood donors 7.8% were HBsAg positive. More than half of the HBsAg positive cases 66.67% were from civilian. None of the respondents was found positive for anti-HCV, VDRL, Malaria and anti-HIV. All of the donors in this study were voluntary donors. The sample studied had a mean age of 28.03 ± 6.79 years and 90.5% of donors were belongs to age group 18-37 years and female was only 6.1%. Most of the donors (49.5%) were military personnel,86%above SSC educated and 22.6% had visited abroad. Regarding risk behaviour 38.3% had the history of undertaking dental procedure, 0.9% were found undertaking blood transfusion, 2.6% had the history of illicit sex and 29.6% had the history of suffering from jaundice and among them only 1.7% were found HBsAg positive.
 Conclusion: The study finding demands motivation against unnecessary blood transfusion. It also emphasize health education programme among peoples having risk behaviour.
 Journal of Armed Forces Medical College Bangladesh Vol.15 (1) 2019: 71-74

Hybrid Creatures in Context: Centaurs, Hobby-horses and Sexualised Women (Hamlet, King Lear, The Two

Shakespearean centaurs and centaur-like images have received scholarly attention with relation to Ovid as well as to early modern philosophy, regarding the human-animal divide. This paper argues for a nuanced re-reading of relevant textual cruces in Hamlet, King Lear and The Two Noble Kinsmen in the light of a specific fusion of popular and elite cultures in the man-horse hybrid, as represented by the (male/female) centaur and the early modern hobby-horse, emphasizing the stigmatisation (the “monstrosity”) of bestial passion and illicit sexuality, signified by the hybrid creature and its animal part. English emblem books and Edward Topsell’s 1607 volume on “four-footed beasts” present a complex background to the re-visitation of these well-known passages, and illuminate how Shakespeare used elements of both popular and elite cultures to suit his dramaturgical ends and to address different strata of the audience. The paper offers an overview of the complex iconographical and conceptual semantics of centaur-like creatures, as they existed in Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ imagination, suggesting a tentative summary of the cultural memory of the centaur in early modern England.

Staging Rachel: Rabbinic Midrash, Theatrical Mime, and Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity

AbstractLamentations Rabbah Proem 24, a late ancient rabbinic midrash, is in many ways a unique text within the entire rabbinic corpus. It presents an extraordinary array of characters (including Abraham, Moses, the Torah, and even the alphabet) who are called upon to placate God, but fail. As their quest proves inconclusive, the biblical Rachel jumps into the fray to tell her story: how out of sisterly compassion she allowed Leah to take her own place in the conjugal bed on “her” wedding night. Disclosing to her sister the secretive “signs” she had shared with Jacob, Rachel crawled under the nuptial bed to respond to Jacob whenever he spoke. This scandalous autobiography transforms an apparent instance of illicit sex, the ideal material for theatrical stage mimes, into an act of martyrdom and sublime compassion. This article argues that the performance culture of the late ancient Mediterranean world provides the key for assessing this text’s originality. We begin with an analysis of the text, drawing attention to its theatrical qualities and its relationships with contemporary visual imagery (mosaics) and texts from outside the rabbinic milieu (Christian Apocrypha). We then examine the casting of midrashic Rachel as a response to both the mimic adulteress and the Christian martyr. Finally, we consider rabbinic familiarity with mime, particularly with its usefulness as a social mediator and agent of collective catharsis. It is precisely these aspects of mimic performance, we argue, that Rachel’s vignette appropriates in this fascinating rabbinic text.

Proximity and the Pox: Pathologizing Infidelity in Marston’s Dutch Courtesan

Marston’s Dutch Courtesan links the dangers of sexually transmitted infection and false religious doctrine, both spread by the Family of Love. The play finds dark comedy in the syphilis epidemic that urban sexual promiscuity perpetuated and in ridiculous religious heterodoxy. Both seem to thrive on infidelity. By making the tavern-owning Mulligrubs, the sex worker Franceschina, and her bawd Mary Faugh members of the Family of Love, Marston makes the corporeal dangers of illicit sex during an epidemic even more dangerous when its companion is the contagion of Familism, threatening to spread as efficiently as the syphilis ravaging early modern London.

Sexual Behaviour and Domestic Violence among Teenage Girls in Yakurr Local Government Area, Cross River State, Nigeria

The study investigates the relationship between sexual behavior and domestic violence among teenage girls in Yakurr Local Government Area, Cross River State, Nigeria. The study used one research objective and hypothesis to guide the study. Literature was reviewed in accordance with the research variables. Population of the study was basically teenage girls, between ages 13-17 years from the study area. The research instrument used to elicit information from respondents was the questionnaire. The study adopted a survey research design while a sample of 215 respondents was randomly sampled from thirteen council wards that constitute Yakurr. Stratified and simple random sampling technique were adopted. The Pearson product moment correlation analysis was used to test research hypothesis. The results revealed that there is high rate of sexual immorality including premarital sex, illicit sex, rape and homosexuality among teenage girls, leading to high rate of teenage pregnancy, rampant school drop-out and restiveness. Based on these findings, it was recommended that social work intervention measures such as counseling, awareness creation, sensitization, behavioral change process and vigorous campaigns should be organized for teenage girls in the area, so that they would be aware of the dangers of immoral sexual behavior and to avoid the consequences that attend it. Besides, sex education should be vigorously embarked upon to effect behavior modification among the teen girls.

Challenges Experienced by HIV/AIDS-Positive Women in Marital Relationships; A qualitative study

Introduction: The prevalence of HIV/AIDS is alarmingly increasing. Considering the experiences of HIV/AIDS-positive patients, experiences of the women who took HIV/AIDS from their husbands –marital relationships- can be different. The purpose of this study was to describe the challenges of these women. Methods: This qualitative study was conducted using focus group discussions with 10 women who took HIV/AIDS from their husbands. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed by thematic analysis. Results: Data analysis showed that participants experienced a kind of compulsive social isolation. They could not interact with anyone except their parents. They suffered from social stigma because the disease is associated with the illicit sex label. From data analysis, three main themes of fear, marital despondency, and stigma emerged. Conclusion: The concerns and challenges of women who took HIV/AIDS from their marital relationships revealed that these women were exposed to the social strains because of having HIV / AIDS and stigma of illegitimate sexual relationships. In this regard, public awareness should be raised about this disadvantaged group of the community. To hit this target, individuals should be provided with the required information through schools as well as broadcasting and social media. Implementation of the counseling visits can create psychological and social support for these traumatized group and their families.

THE CATHOLIC CLERGY IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC AREA, 1763-1830: PATTERNS OF DEVIANCY

Abstract: In a very transnational fashion, priestly misbehavior is a constant feature in the primary sources dealing with the United States and British North America, including Québec, between 1763 and 1846. Rather than a catalogue of occurrences, this article briefly surveys the three main elements of such misbehavior, namely, illicit sex, immoderate drinking, and excessive avariciousness. It then suggests an interpretative grid where behavioral norms were interpreted differently whenever they were challenged by local conditions, leading to accusations of misbehavior whether these accusations reflected actual wrongdoings or not. Ethnic rivalries, different institutional traditions, conflicting political choices, and Protestant competition are the most likely candidates to populate such a large framework.

Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece

This article explores what Colin Burrow terms the “intimacy of violation”, focusing on the “adulterate bed” – a phrase used both by the rapist and his victim – in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece, which was first staged at the Red Bull Theatre in 1607 or 1608. While the term “adulterate” implies voluntary, extramarital intercourse, both adultery and rape imply illicit sex, with a polluting effect on the woman and, more widely, her family, in particular her husband. Here, the bed is the locus of rape. It collapses the violation of the bride’s body, of the marriage and of the domestic space associated with the marital bond, which is exposed to the voyeurism of witnesses – the spectators – even as, in a moment of cruel dramatic irony that echoes Shakespeare’s poem, Sextus tells Lucrece that she has nothing to fear since what happened shall remain a secret. Heywood reworks Livy and Ovid in a multi-directional process that incorporates references to Shakespeare as he adapts the story to the stage in a bold generic move that owes as much to his competence as a Latinist as to his awareness of his contemporaries’ works and his own craftsmanship as a dramatist.

Self-Narratives of Persistent Pimps and Those Anticipating Desistance: Emotions, Conventional Work, and Moral Profitability Calculus

ABSTRACTIdentity, values, and emotional processes underlying desistance and persistence in the illicit sex trade have received little empirical attention. An analysis of qualitative interviews of 49 active pimps or drivers managing sex workers showed that persisting pimps and those leading double lives assigned different meanings to their participation in legitimate employment. Persisters valued legitimate work as a strategy to evade arrest, whereas pimps with “double lives” emphasized legitimate work as providing long-term financial security and enhanced social identity. Analysis yielded contextualized understanding of their self-narratives (e.g.) that underlie reflections upon who they are and who they want to become, and the moral contemplations and emotional processes involved in stigma management.

Marital Sex in the Light of Genesis 2:21-25 as Lesson to Single Youths

This research reveals that non-marital sexual escapade which is frowned at by most religions of the world such as Judaism and Christianity, is as now practised and advocated by youths including Christians among them. Sexual relationship is morally and legally accepted within the circle of holy matrimony. Any other attempt of such practice outside marriage is not only an immoral act but a sacrilege. It is not a new trend that boyfriend and girlfriend relationship is now advocated by young people including Christians. As a result of this moral decadence, the following become the order of the day: illicit sex, abortion, prostitution, spiritual backwardness and other related vices. The researcher posits that acceptance of exegetical lessons from Gen 2:21-25 by Christians including youths can be part of solution to these enumerated problems. In this text, emphasis is placed on the reservation and restriction of sexual intercourse for married couples only. It is recommended that if unmarried Christians would maintain this belief there would be restoration of moral and healthy society for unstoppable development. This work employs Narrative method of biblical exegesis in order to attempt a thorough analysis of the text for better understanding and right application.

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature by Moshe Blidstein

Reviewed by: Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature by Moshe Blidstein Shira L. Lander Moshe Blidstein Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 Pp. 294. $100.00. Most treatments of early Christian notions of purity privilege a spiritualized version of the concept. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature challenges this over-generalization to demonstrate "that purity was open for negotiation" through methodically analyzing a vast corpus of securely-provenanced second- and third-century Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Christian texts, both canonical and non-canonical (5). Blidstein has written the most comprehensive treatment of Christian attitudes toward purity and defilement to date. Drawing on recent methodologies that understand defilement as "a biological reaction of disgust towards certain actions and substances" (7), the author employs a "heuristic consisting of 'battle' and 'truce'" to explain how early Christian purity discourse functioned (11). The truce perception portrayed purity and impurity as statuses in order to define "the borders of social groups, spaces, and times" (11). The more prevalent battle perception, by contrast, conceived of purity and impurity as competing moral forces, often aligned with other opposing pairs like "holiness and unholiness, saint and demon, righteousness and sin, flesh and spirit, out-group and in-group" (11). After providing a cursory overview of the historical context for purity discourses in the Greco-Roman East and Judaism in Part I, Blidstein devotes each chapter to various ritual practices which are grouped both chronologically and according to their continuity or discontinuity with prevailing Jewish and Greco-Roman concepts. Thus, diet and death constitute "Part II: Breaking with the Past," while baptism, eucharist, and sexual relations form "Part III: Roots of a New Paradigm: The First Two Centuries." "Part IV: New Configurations: Purity, Body, and Community in the Third Century" examines Christian traditions inconsistent with the trajectories delineated in previous chapters, Jewish-Christian communities, and Origen. In Part II, Blidstein argues that early Christian writers construed dietary- and death-related purity regulations as irrelevant, i.e., annulled by Jesus, in order "to differentiate Christian from Jewish" customs. By detaching the practices' ritual elements from their moral dimension, Christian eating customs, and to a lesser [End Page 133] extent burial rites, were constructed "as representing internal purity, powered by human agency and linked to questions of good and evil" (90). This battle perspective emerged as a chief weapon of anti-Jewish polemics. Other examples of the growing battle perspective appear in Part III. Blidstein demonstrates how baptism, construed as forgiveness of sins, "became a major site for addressing . . . the relationship between ritual and moral purity, between external action and the inner disposition" (131). Attitudes toward sexual purity, on the other hand, exhibit both battle and truce perspectives. Entailing both body and soul, sexual impurity extended beyond illicit sexual activity, as understood in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, to include "sexual contact as a whole, even inside 'legitimate' marriage . . . toward the de-legitimization of sexuality" (180). Thus, Blidstein concludes that the moral dimension of sexuality constituted a battle perspective, while the physical dimension constituted a truce perspective. Unlike the first two Christian centuries of baptismal and sexual discourse, in eucharistic theology, purity was understood as a prerequisite for participation rather than its result (148). Not until the third century is the eucharist understood as purificatory. Part IV examines baptism, sexual purity, and diet in what Blidstein terms "Jewish-Christian writings": Pseudo-Clementine literature, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Cologne Mani Codex, and the Protoevangelium of James. This section also contains an extensive discussion of menstrual impurity in the Pseudo-Clementines. As in some rabbinic circles, menstrual impurity and male genital emissions are connected to demons, menstrual blood and emissions are polluting, and washing rituals serve purificatory roles on both the moral and physical levels (190–91, 196). In the Didascalia Apostolorum, by contrast, menstruation does not require purification because the Holy Spirit has entered a woman's body during baptism and driven out her demons once and for all (195). Blidstein concludes that water purification, including baptism, exhibits continuity with Jewish notions of purification due to the broader context of demonology. Blidstein concludes...

Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais

Reviewed by: Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais Janice Niemann (bio) Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais; pp. 256. Reaction Books, 2018. $46.18 cloth. The victorian hothouse was a place of paradoxes. Jane Desmarais explores these paradoxes in Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, focusing on English Decadent writers, such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and French Realist artists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Claude Monet, and Émile Zola, at the fin de siècle. Monsters under Glass includes chapters on the history of the hothouse, hothouses in cities, flowers, scents, paradisiacal and torturous gardens, and other glass structures such as aquariums. Highlighting developments in hot-house technologies and historical perceptions of the hothouse, Desmarais positions this "alluring yet dangerous" (7) space as a literary metaphor that simultaneously calls to mind horticultural experimentation and invasion by foreign bodies, crowded urban settings and isolated life under glass, fruitful reproduction and illicit sex, death and decay and flourishing life. Desmarais weaves nineteenth-century anxieties about modernization, the role of women, colonial expansion, scientific hybridization, and fear of the other through her succinct analyses of late nineteenth-century prose, poetry, paintings, and illustrations. Following existing scholarship on the place of gardens in nineteenth-century literature, Desmarais aligns the Victorian hothouse with other semi-private garden spaces, such as the conservatory and the shrubbery, as a site of sexual transgression, of "amatory and often clandestine encounters" (128). While Desmarais's premise that the hothouse is a transgressive space is not, on its own, a revolutionary idea, Monsters under Glass provides a much-needed complement to existing scholarship on Victorian greenhouses and glasshouses. Isabel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds (2008) offers [End Page 160] an insightful history of the role of glass itself in the Victorian imagination and Victorian literature, and explores the role of the conservatory in literature, but does not go in depth into glass's specific use as a hothouse material. Amy King's Bloom (2003) proposes that metaphors of blooming flowers indicate a woman's marriageability in nineteenth-century novels, but she focuses on flowers generally and tends to emphasize the act and language of "blooming" more than the cultural histories and social implications of the flowers themselves within floral metaphors. Lindsay Wells's Victorian Studies article "Close Encounters of the Wardian Kind: Terrariums and Pollution in the Victorian Parlor" (2018) digs into the role that Wardian cases—small glass enclosures that create sustainable microclimates for growing plants, often foreign plants—play in nineteenth-century art history, but not that of larger glass structures. In studying the hothouse as a unique metaphor or trope, Desmarais's book fills a gap in this scholarship and adds to the fertile fields of garden studies, glass studies, and space studies in Victorian literature and culture. Particularly important to the field are her argument that late nineteenth-century artists, especially Félicien Rops and Beardsley, completely overturned the cultural connotations of the so-called language of flowers in their depictions of floral women and women as flowers, depicting, instead, women who are "active and sexual" and, fittingly for hothouse flowers, "modern hybrids" (160); her demonstration that the hothouse metaphor shifts in meaning alongside developing hothouse technologies, a change that speaks to late-century anxieties about modernization; and her proposal that hot-house metaphors always have nineteenth-century connotations. This last point makes Desmarais's book of interest to scholars outside the field of Victorian studies as well. Desmarais's prose is refreshingly accessible and engaging, she offers a succinct history of gardening, hothouses, and hothouse plants, and she is a strong close reader—highlights of her readings include her analyses of Manet's Music in the Tuileries, Arthur Symons's London Nights, and Octave Mirbeau's Le petit pavillon and Le jardin des supplices. While in a few places I would have liked to see more citations or more extended textual analysis (because these moments are some of the book's strongest), and some of the historical explanations focus more on...

When Art Devolves into Horniness and Pimping: Reflections upon Questionable Creativity in Ntozake Shange's "a photograph: lovers in motion"

CLA JOURNAL 9 When Art Devolves into Horniness and Pimping: Reflections upon Questionable Creativity in Ntozake Shange’s“a photograph: lovers in motion” Trudier Harris In 1981,Ntozake Shange published Three Pieces, a small volume of three plays thatincludes“spell#7,”“aphotograph:loversinmotion,”and“boogiewoogie landscapes.” Set in a well-appointed and meticulously decorated San Francisco apartment,“a photograph,” which might arguably be considered a plurality rather than a singularity, focuses on Sean David, an aspiring photographer, his friend Earl, and the three women in Sean’s life: an attorney (Nevada), a dancer (Michael), and a model (Claire). Declaring his desire to become the best photographer in the world, Sean might better be described as a hustler who uses all the women in his life sexually and abuses them emotionally and/or financially. An insatiable sex addict, Sean maintains that multiplicity in sexual relationships is the only way he can exist in the world. Having trained women to accept his view of the world or, having selected women who are too weak-willed to oppose his practices, Sean is unashamed and aggressively vocal in what he does. Although the characters talk about love, and though “lovers” is a part of the title of the play, there is very little love exhibited. Instead, sex reigns throughout. Given the fact that Michael, the dancer, equates the ability to be an artist with the ability to love, including loving one’s own work, the central prong of the conflict during the play is the inability to become true artists because of the lack of ability to love. What characters mouth in professing love is not matched in healthy ways by actions in the play, so love and art remain at opposite poles. What is apparent is that sex and art, or sex and declarations of art, seem to exist on the same plane. The play therefore becomes an interesting mixture of declarations in contrast to actions, professions of art instead of the achievement of art, sex in the place of love/art, class distinctions in education/lifestyle, and disturbing stereotypes that invariably raise questions about Shange’s overall objective in creating such characters. From the beginning of “a photograph” and Sean’s declaration of the status he hopes to achieve as a photographer, it is clear that, though he may take numerous photographs, he is missing some key ingredient in terms of what it takes to make a true commitment to artistic achievement. Sean’s vision of himself as an artist exists more in the realm of conversation, specifically conversation that relates to storytelling.Inotherwords,Seantalksagoodgame,andhetellsstoriesaboutartists, particularly Henry and Alexandre Dumas, whom he has taken as his inspiration (he even has Dumas novels in his apartment). He asserts that he is going to “be the 10 CLA JOURNAL Trudier Harris alexandre dumas of my time.”1 There is a great gap, however, between conversation and creation. Nonetheless, the Dumases do serve as Sean’s sexual inspiration and succeed in highlighting the dissonance between sex and love. Not only is Sean inspired by the Dumases because they are artists, but their personal sexual lives also interest him. He states that “alexandre dumas took to women/ adulation/ scandal & wine,” all of which seems to define him (68). Indeed, he uses the Dumas biographies of multiple relationships and illicit sex as inspiration for his own. Just as Dumas senior had many women around Paris and sired an illegitimate son, so, too, Sean believes that any woman in the San Francisco area that he wants should be available to him.2 He comments to Michael when she notes that other women have been having sex with him in his bed prior to her arrival there: “you know somebodies have been sleeping here/ & you know yr here now & that is all you need to know…” (68). Sean thus uses history as inspiration for sexual engagement as well as for emotional detachment. Although he has sex with all three of the women in the play, he has no lasting commitment to any one of them. Even at the end, when he professes to love Michael, there is little that has gone before that would inspire readers/viewers to believe his declaration...

Prejudice for Profit: Escaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture

Prejudice for ProfitEscaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture Kara M. French (bio) During the sweltering summer of 1834, a gang of working-class men—brickmakers, sailors, apprentices, and firemen—surrounded the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The crowd, acting on rumor that Sister Mary St. John Harrison "has been secreted or abducted" to Canada against her will, threatened to burn the convent to the ground unless she was released. When Harrison did not come forward, they set fire to the convent and school with "twelve nuns, and fifty-seven female scholars" inside. Newspapers from Maine to Maryland reported how the rioters stole the Mount Benedict ciborium, smashed the sisters' expensive musical instruments, and converted the personal library of Boston's Bishop Fenwick into fuel for a bonfire. As a final act of desecration, the mob "burst open the tomb, and ransacked the coffins" of dead nuns, searching for the bodies of Sister Harrison and the Ursulines' young Protestant pupils, rumored to have been murdered behind the convent walls.1 Tales of illicit sex and abused women rose from the ashes of the Charlestown riot. Just as the Charlestown rioters were being brought to [End Page 503] trial in 1835, ex-novice Rebecca Reed's autobiography, Six Months in a Convent, detailed a life of horrors. According to Reed, the sisters of Mount Benedict heaped slavish devotion on their Mother Superior and were subjected to bizarre and cruel penances. The convent was a place of unmentionable sexual deviance, where confession with the Bishop led to "various improper questions" regarding the novices' sexual habits and where Superior Mary St. George Moffat was inclined to "bestow presents and caress" the sisters who were her "great favorites."2 The burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts was and is a well-known tale, in its own time and in ours. For scholars of the early republic, the burning of the convent represents an object lesson in anti-Catholic prejudice, a perfect storm of religious intolerance, gender trouble, and class conflict. For citizens of the early republic, the event served to confirm their worst fears—either about the nefarious lives of nuns and priests or about the limits of religious toleration. For early republican publishers, it created an opportunity. With the riot at the Ursuline convent in 1834, the relationship between print and protest worked in reverse of what one might expect. Rather than the publication of an explosive text provoking an outbreak of violence, the burning of the convent was an occasion of violence that provoked an outbreak of print. The two anti-Catholic "escaped nun" narratives that became bestsellers in antebellum era, Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent and Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu, would not be published until more than a year after the convent lay in ashes. While the political, social, and gendered implications of the Charles-town riot have been explored, the way the burning of the convent was exploited by publishers for financial gain deserves closer examination. Though Reed's and Monk's narratives have the distinction of being the best-selling and most well-known "escaped nun" tales, the burning of the convent encouraged the flourishing of an anti-Catholic print genre that promised to expose the secret lives of nuns and priests. A feeding frenzy of anti-Catholic literature ensued at every level of the literary marketplace, from cheaply printed dime novels to ornate gift books. These "escaped nun" stories capitalized on the horror the perceived gender and sexual deviance of nuns provoked in the Protestant imagination. Antebellum publishers spent thousands manufacturing lithograph illustrations of novices cutting their hair to take the veil and mass-printed [End Page 504] stories that featured cross-dressing "female Jesuits" and Machiavellian lady superiors.3 Commercial print and the whims of the publishing marketplace not only drove a boom in anti-Catholic publishing but also sparked American Catholics to mount a vigorous defense in print. Given the ubiquity of print in the early republic, it is perhaps not surprising that a religious minority would develop their own print sphere. As the recent outpouring of scholarship on African American print culture has...

"One crowded hour of glorious life": Growing Up and Growing Old in The Awkward Age

"One crowded hour of glorious life":Growing Up and Growing Old in The Awkward Age Sarah Wadsworth (bio) On May 12, 1900, Henry James wrote to his brother William from his new home in Rye, Sussex, in response to news of William's poor health. After wishing him a prompt release from a "mysterious visitation" of "fever and bleeding" and "a quiet and propitious period" of convalescence, the novelist divulged his own mundane yet surprising news: "I have totally shaved off my beard, unable to bear longer the increased hoariness of its growth: it had suddenly begun these three months since, to come out quite white and made me feel, as well as look so old. Now, I feel forty and clean and light."1 The revelation is as remarkable for its symbolic value as for its informational pith. Having recently marked his fifty-sixth birthday, James was keenly, if not painfully, conscious that he had passed into the "elderly" stage of life: in words he had recently used to describe Mr. Longdon in The Awkward Age (1899), "he had … conclusively doubled the Cape of the years—he would never again see fifty-five." In positing fifty-five as "the Cape of the years," James establishes the upper reach of "that bleak headland" of middle age, just as in confiding to William that cleanshaven he "feel[s] forty," he implicitly locates its temporal baseline.2 Perhaps it is no coincidence that the dramatic alteration of James's appearance occurred amid a historical transformation no less striking. James, who had worn a beard since the Civil War, faced the turn of the twentieth century "clean and light," delighting in a paradoxical sense of freshness and youth that defied his own advancing age; meanwhile the historic turn of the twentieth century created an atmosphere of cultural newness and modernity even as the advancing years announced that the world was only getting older. [End Page 265] The dual meaning of "age" as a noun signifying both a historical epoch and the duration, to date, of an individual's life underscores an implicit resonance between time of life and historic time. In modern American fiction, this resonance is nowhere more conspicuous than in The Awkward Age. As Vivien Jones points out, the "awkwardness" to which the title alludes could refer to teenaged Nanda Brookenham, her middle-aged mother, or the elderly Mr. Longdon; it could refer equally to a "self-conscious age of transition" corresponding to the book's time of publication in the penultimate year of the nineteenth century.3 Pamela Thurschwell elaborates on the relationship between individual age and historical age in this novel, explaining that the title's double entendre invites inquiry into the construction of age as a signifier of personal identity: "The novel's titular pun equates the awkward, individual, in-between time of adolescence with the awkward, collective, in-between time of the fin de siècle."4 For Thurschwell, this duality "lead[s] us both towards the turn-of-the-century 'invention' of the modern adolescent, and towards James's exploration of the culturally constructed nature of age as an identity category."5 Thick with inuendo and misalliances and charged with an atmosphere of illicit sexuality and betrayal, The Awkward Age has been read primarily in terms of the compromised marriage plot precipitated by Nanda's coming of age. It is not solely a story of Nanda's transition to adulthood, however. It is, more generally, a novel about age, change, and the impact of ever-changing age on personal subjectivity and interpersonal relationships at any stage of life. The intersections of gender, generation, and the social and affective dimensions of growing up and growing old loom large in this novel as it sketches Mr. Longdon's connection to three generations of women, beginning with Lady Julia and (by way of her daughter, Mrs. Brook) concluding with her granddaughter Nanda. Although courtship and marriage structure the overall narrative arc, each scene of the novel invites us to think about how age and stage of life shape consciousness, experience, and social interaction. The novel explores age and aging persistently but often obliquely through an objective narrative mode in...

Muftis in the Matrix

Abstract English- and Arabic-language cyberfatwas on emergency contraception (EC) illuminate current debates around sexuality in the global Muslim community. In websites with fatwas about EC, there are significant differences in the way that English- and Arabic-language fatwa websites discuss this reproductive health technology. During the study period of 2016–17, English-language sites were more likely to rule that EC was not religiously acceptable, whereas no Arabic-language online fatwas declared the technology forbidden to Muslims. In contrast, Arabic questions to online fatwa sites were more concerned about whether EC would facilitate illicit sex and the health risks of contraceptives. Only English-language sites discussed the morality of pharmacists providing EC. These websites and fatwas reveal different visions of Muslims’ relationships with technology, science, and scientific experts. They also suggest the influence of non-Islamic religious constituencies on Muslim interpretations of reproductive health technologies.

What has the ‘first sexual revolution’ to do with kinship transition? ‘Kin marriages’ and illicit sexuality in nineteenth-century Alpine Switzerland

This paper questions the link between two major transformations observed in eighteenth century Europe: the reorganization of kinship structures and kinship solidarities on the one hand and the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the eighteenth century on the other, i.e. the spectacular rise of illegitimacy throughout Europe. Raising the question of this link has far-reaching theoretical implications, since the fundamental changes in kinship and sexuality have been treated so far as two independent phenomena in separate domains. The results presented in this paper refer to mountain villages of the Swiss Alps and base on genealogical data extracted from a large dynamic database called the Registre historique de la population du Valais. They suggest that the remarkable increase of close kin marriages was closely connected with changes in sexual habits and with the building of different sexual milieus. The ‘sexual revolution’ in the Entremont region was largely the issue of a few families and kin groups tending to build tightly knitted networks. In this perspective, the increase of kin marriages reflected the diversification of political and sexual milieus, characterized by different values, ideologies and attitudes. This profound diversification of life styles shows that social change did not affect local societies as a whole, but was supported by particular milieus made cohesive by privileged alliances within kin groups and by particular network patterns.