Matrimonial Research Articles

“I Love Romance!” Adolescent Girls Critique the Depiction of Love and Romance in The Hunger Games

In this qualitative study, nine adolescent girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen (M=12) reacted to how romance is depicted in The Hunger Games book and film series. Although some feminist researchers have been disappointed in the series ending, arguing that it reinforces post-feminist, repronormative and heteronormative ideas, most of the participants in this study felt that the inclusion of romance was appropriate for protagonist Katniss Everdeen, stating that this did not take away from what they saw as the “girl power” message of the series. Study participants believed that authors write heterosexual romance as a way of appealing to adolescent girl readers; several girls, however, expressed their desire to see this change. Furthermore, study participants provided alternative endings to the series that did not always include heterosexual romance or marriage for Katniss, thereby providing a nuanced critique of heteronormativity and gender roles in the series.

“I Was Always Trying to Figure It Out… on My Own Terms”: Structural Barriers, the Internet, and Sexual Identity Development among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer People of Different Generations

ABSTRACT Recognizing the historical grounding of sexual identity development, we examined the spontaneous narration of the internet’s significance among a diverse sample of three distinct birth cohorts of sexual minority adults (n = 36, ages 18–59) in the United States. Thematic analysis revealed two structural barriers and four roles of the internet in sexual identity development. Structural barriers were being in a heterosexual marriage (exclusive to members of the older cohort), and (2) growing up in a conservative family, religion, or community (which cut across cohorts). Roles of the internet included: learning about LGBQ+ identities and sex; watching pornography (which appeared only in narratives of the younger cohort); finding affirming community; and facilitating initial LGBQ+ romantic and sexual experiences (which appeared mostly in narratives of the younger cohort). Most participants who described the internet as playing a role in sexual identity development were members of the younger (ages 18–25) and middle (ages 34–41) cohorts. We discuss how the internet has assumed a unique role in history in the development of sexual minority people. Further, our findings highlight that sexual identity development occurs across the lifespan, and how that process and the roles of the internet vary by generation and structural realities.

Social norms and commuting-to-work time of straight and gay couples in Brazilian metropolitan areas

We investigate gender differences in the time spent commuting to work in a sample of 69,173 dual-earner couples living in the Brazilian metropolitan areas, part of which are composed of partners of the same sex. We compare straight couples with same-sex couples since they are not subject to the same societal rules on the division of household chores between couple members. We observe that women in straight marriages present lower commuting times than their husbands, than men married to another man, and women married to another woman. Since we control for several individual characteristics, including the share of each spouse on the couple's income, we conclude that social norms negatively affect the mobility of heterosexual women. The results suggest that the social roles attributed to the feminine gender in a marriage affect women's ability to move around in space and limit their geographical scope of job choices.

Decolonizing Purity Culture: Gendered Racism and White Idealization in Evangelical Christianity

Purity culture is a phenomenon promulgated by evangelical Christianity that teaches strict adherence to sexual abstinence prior to heterosexual marriage. Extant research illuminated the ways these teachings have harmed women by normalizing the oppression of their bodies, restricting sexual agency, teaching a shame response to pleasure, and perpetuating rape culture. Notably, these studies have centered white women’s experiences, and to date, there is a dearth of literature examining how these teachings uniquely impact Women of Color. There remains a paucity of research about the ways in which purity culture has perpetuated colonial and Eurocentric values that have systematically oppressed Women of Color. Framed by critical race feminism and intersectionality, we examined the lived experiences of nine Women of Color impacted by evangelical purity culture, revealing the nuanced ways in which gendered racism and white idealization influenced participants’ alliance to and embodiment of their intersecting racialized and gendered identities. With the insights gleaned from this study, we encourage readers to (a) raise their consciousness about the insidious mechanisms through which purity culture and the religious right operate and (b) actively dismantle forms of internalized oppression through radical acts of healing, and systematically through disrupting the perpetuation of purity culture rhetoric.

Going Steady; What Did It Look Like To Go From Single To Married in Renaissance Italy

My research focuses on what it looked like to find love in Renaissance Italy. This paper is chiefly concerned with the stages of courtship and engagement leading to marriage in early modern Italy for the purpose of understanding such an intimate, consequential, and complex experience that reveals the multitude and stratification of experiences within Italy. Currently missing from the scholarship is a synthesized presentation of the development from single-hood to courtship to marriage and married life, and sometimes annulment or divorce. I will draw on a variety of primary and secondary sources across the socio-economic spectrum to illustrate what ‘dating’, engagements, weddings, and married life looked like across Early Modern Italy. This paper presents a comprehensive and linear account of what an individual's experience was on the path to heterosexual marriage, beginning with how couples met each other and what the initial stage of flirting and courtship looked like. In order to best interpret the findings, I have used an interdisciplinary approach in order to better understand the complexities of the topic that are, like much of social history, often reluctant to reveal themselves to historians.

Queering Transgender and Translation

Queering Transgender and Translation

Doubt and Desire

Doubt and Desire

The gender politics of marriage in Ireland

It is rare that a book's dedication is quite so apposite to its theme as Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd's in their new history of marriage, which reads: ‘For Mary Cullen and Margaret MacCurtain who began it all.’ Indeed, they did, and this tour de force is a fitting testament to the significance of that women's history project started in the 1970s, which has ‘paved the way for all of us who engage with Irish gender history’ (p. xiii). Luddy and O'Dowd, both pioneers in the field in their own right, set themselves the not inconsiderable task of producing ‘an extended study of the history of heterosexual marriage on the island of Ireland from 1660–1925’ (p. 1). The result is a rich, colourful, at times playful, but also often depressing, five-hundred-and-fifty-page study of the most popular sexual bond between men and women in history — marriage. Indeed, that complex institution was obviously on the historical mind because Diane Urquhart's erudite study of Irish divorce from 1800 to 1997 and Sonja Tiernan's deftly navigated history of the marriage equality campaign in Ireland were also published in 2020.

Creating a Holistic Model of Heterosexual Marriage Wellbeing Mechanisms

The links between marital relationship well-being and multiple life outcomes, including health, finances, career, living conditions, and happiness, are repetitively endorsed in academic studies. These outcomes are far-reaching and broadly representative, so it is perhaps surprising that there are limited publicly available, evidence-based models of marital wellbeing mechanisms to aid couples in trouble or to educate families, professional helpers, or policy makers in their decision-making processes. The goal of this study was to isolate the generic properties of marital health and understand their operation - investigating the precedents, antecedents and maintenance of adult romantic relationship happiness, stability and general marital well-being, including how these constructs self-organise and co-relate, how outcomes emerge, and how we might therefore potentially alter these outcomes. Over the last 40 years thousands of studies have been carried out to determine the factors that contribute to marital satisfaction and endurance. Nonetheless, to this point in history little has been done to synthesise these multiple factors into an overarching model of marital wellbeing. For this study, pre-existing theories and research findings pertinent to marriage and relationships were sought out using a scoping review, collating more than 24,000 research articles. The multi-grounding process extricated categories from the scoping review for the model development. Prominent pertinent theories were discovered, and their premises were explored, compared, and inter-relationships were considered in the model development process. Given the prevalence and primacy of marriage partnerships across most societies and given the individual importance and the societal impact that these partnerships have, this model has significance for individuals, therapists, family therapy lecturers and researchers, policy makers and even societal and business leaders.

Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States by Kristy L. Slominski

Reviewed by: Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States by Kristy L. Slominski Courtney Ann Irby Kristy L. Slominski, Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) Motivated by a desire to complicate the standard narrative that positions sex versus religion, scholars in recent years have tried to illustrate that religious groups are not inherently sex negative. This binary thinking has been challenged by efforts to showcase the discursive shift in purity culture that presents sex as “great” and a “gift” as long as it occurs within heterosexual marriage. Yet the loudest voices continue to represent “religion” as a reactionary position. As Kristy Slominski’s Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States beautifully documents, long before conservative Protestants began to wage battles against sex, liberal Protestants had already formatively shaped public understandings of sex. By expanding the religious groups under investigation to include liberal Protestants, as well as their interfaith efforts with Jews and Catholics, she reminds readers that religion is not a unified concept, nor is it inherently a conservative force that seeks to restrict sex. Teaching Moral Sex weaves together the histories of two sex education movements that dominated the twentieth century—the first, initially called the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), played a critical role in the first part of the century until a group originally called the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) picked up the mantle in the [End Page 159] 1960s. To situate the role of religion in these movements and explore how it shaped their motivations and strategies, the book is divided into five substantive chapters that delineate the “phases of the movement for public sex education” (7) and also provide an overarching chronological narrative for how we arrived at contemporary sex education disputes. To provide a context for the emergence of sex education, Slominski convincingly argues in chapter one that readers must first understand how late nineteenth-century liberal Protestant efforts to combat prostitution were bridged with moralized medical efforts to reduce venereal diseases. Rather than science and religion existing in tension, she illustrates how liberal Christian values served as the glue that held together these different social movements as they merged to become ASHA. After establishing their origins, chapter two turns to explain the type of sex education curricula that ASHA helped to create and their efforts to partner with colleges, YMCAs, and the military to provide these programs. Recognizing the limitations of scientific facts to change the sexual attitudes and behavior of young people sufficiently, ASHA relied on liberal Christian ideals and normative frameworks to craft a “moral education.” Again, illustrating the failure of overly simplistic binaries, Slominski reveals how medicine and religion worked collaboratively to shape cultural norms around sexuality that constrained it to marriage but also challenged what they saw as repressive tendencies to label all aspects of sex as negative. Chapter three chronicles how these redemptive efforts to conceptualize sexuality as a positive force were channeled into family life education programs. In addition to taming the taboo subject, she notes how family life became a common framework that facilitated interfaith conversations, since Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants all saw the family as the basic unit of society and feared that it was in need of support. While family life education dominated midcentury efforts, chapter four explains how SIECUS emerged once again to argue that sex education should be a public health concern and how their efforts to develop comprehensive education programs incited what we have come to know as the “sex education controversies” of the 1960s. Conservative Protestants’ negative responses to their situational ethics that promoted personal choice and responsibility over moral absolutes showcase how these debates were not an example of secularism versus religion but were at least partially structured by theological differences in moral decision-making. Slominski also illustrates that liberal Protestants’ “new morality” began to transform sexuality into a site of spiritual growth long before conservative Protestants would do so. Chapter five pulls these themes together to showcase how conservative Protestants’ engagement with SIECUS...

Queer Precursors: Same-Sex Desire in Charles Prentiss’s The American Bee

Queer Precursors: Same-Sex Desire in Charles Prentiss’s The American Bee Helen Hunt (bio) In 1797, a recent Harvard graduate named Charles Prentiss published what might be the first collection of American short stories: The American Bee: A Collection of Entertaining Histories, Selected from Different Authors and Calculated for Amusement and Instruction. Taken together, the stories in The American Bee endorse an antiauthoritarian outlook promoting women’s self-determination, sexual and otherwise, and encouraging men to resist the tyranny that underlies patriarchal ideals. Two texts in this already radical collection, one with American authorship, celebrate decidedly queer bonds for both men and women. While a modern reader might expect that such a collection would not have had a mainstream literary readership, Prentiss specifically marketed the works he published to the friends he had made during his time at Harvard. He must have believed that the antiauthoritarian message of The American Bee would appeal to this network of educated, like-minded, elite young men scattered across New England and the mid-Atlantic. Surprisingly, The American Bee’s queer stories seem to have occupied the center, not the neglected margins, of New England literary culture as Prentiss imagined it. Prentiss’s privileged family history is another reason a reader might be surprised to see antipatriarchal and queer themes featured in his work. He grew up in a New England family that had gained enough prominence for C. J. F Binney to write its biography in 1852.1 His father was a minister, and his brother-in-law was a New Hampshire congressman. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1795 and that same year married Sophia Gardner of Leominster, herself a minister’s daughter from a well-connected family, and they settled there. Prentis turned down a career in law to pursue life as an author, editor, [End Page 1] and publisher of both literary and political works. He published The American Bee early in his career, in 1797, right after he and his brother stopped printing the Rural Repositor, of which, according to Binney, “about one hundred of his old college friends were subscribers, as he was a favorite with them.’”2 Prentiss only remained in New England for a short time; in 1799, he moved to Georgetown, after which he worked in Baltimore until he left to tour Europe in 1804. After his return, he worked as a printer and author in Virginia, Maryland, DC, and Massachusetts. He died in 1820 at age forty-six.3 Turning down a legal career to become an itinerant printer was a risky choice that meant Prentiss traded stability and prestige for financial risk and social obscurity. Many printers faced bankruptcy after the Revolutionary War, and most magazines lasted for just a few years. Consequently, Prentiss must have had an excellent reason to take this chance; his decision testifies to his personal investment in literature, as he consciously worked to ensure that US belles lettres made space for women’s sexual self-determination and same-sex relationships as alternatives to heterosexual marriage. While Prentiss’s family history has attracted scholarly attention, his literary productions have not. The American Bee is rarely read; it is never mentioned in histories of US fiction; and it is the subject of only one scholarly article.4 It is a surprisingly accessible text, since a transcription is available for free through the Evans Early American Imprints Text Creation Partnership, and the Evans Digital Edition and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online houses facsimile pages. Nonetheless, The American Bee has suffered the same neglect as nearly all of the short fiction published before 1820 and of the many compilations of stories published after that, even though “between 1820 and 1845, compilations containing huge amounts of short fiction formed twenty-nine percent of the literary market.”5 As Jared Gardner demonstrates, the emphasis on a unique American vernacular style has privileged individual genius and exceptional Americanness in a way that systematically detracts from the transatlantic tradition of the periodical and has led to the critical neglect of magazines and the short fiction that populates their pages.6 The American Bee certainly participates in this transatlantic exchange in a way that troubles a simple...

Anticipating the plot: overdetermining heteronormative destiny on the twenty-first century screen

ABSTRACT This article examines narrative temporalities in three texts – the Hollywood romantic film The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), the nine-season sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014) and the reality television show Love is Blind (2020-) – in order to show how formal choices such as editing, voiceover narration and event selection reveal an investment in heteronormative ideals. These narratives foreground time in a way that is specific to their medium, all achieving a tension between securing heterosexual marriage and reproduction in their characters’ futures and threatening to jeopardise these very endings. However, the more the resolution becomes certain, be it through prolepsis by a retrospective narrator, literal visits to the future in the storyworld or the contrivances of reality television, the more the participants in the narrative appear ‘trapped’ in a preordained timeline, in ways that resonate with how subjects exist in relation to ideologically dominant modes of living. Using Judith Roof’s argument about the metaphorical heterosexuality of narrative form, Mark Currie’s notion of depresentification and Sarah Ahmed’s analysis of ‘happy objects’, the article argues that repeated anticipations of a predetermined heteronormative ending undermine, rather than reinforcing, the desirability of the goals that the characters are striving to reach.

The ethics of marriage in American evangelicalism

AbstractThe idea that marriage should be treated as a site of pious ethical work is widespread in conservative Christian discourse. This article considers how and why conservative American evangelicals have come to regard the everyday routines of heterosexual marriage as potential forms of religious labour that can cultivate robust Christian subjectivities along with successful conjugal relationships. It argues that the notion of pious marital work was strongly shaped by the secular culture of therapeutic counselling and self‐help that developed during the twentieth century. While pious ethics and secular, everyday ethics are often seen as distinct, this historical perspective illuminates the modern coevolution of secular and conservative religious conceptions of marriage, revealing how each has linked marital work to personal as well as societal redemption.

Internalized Sexual Orientation Stigma and Mental Health in a Religiously Diverse Sample of Gay and Bisexual Men in Lebanon

ABSTRACT This study explores the correlates of internalized sexual orientation stigma, psychological distress and depression in a religiously diverse sample of gay and bisexual men in Lebanon. A convenience sample of 200 participants completed a cross-sectional survey. Bisexual men reported greater internalized sexual orientation stigma and less outness to their family and were more likely to face family pressure to have a heterosexual marriage than gay men. People of no religion reported more outness than Muslims and Christians but also higher psychological distress and depression. Multiple regression analyses showed that religiosity, outness, family pressure to marry and being bisexual were positively associated with internalized sexual orientation stigma; and that frequency of attending one’s place of worship was negatively associated with psychological distress and depression. Individuals may be coping with adversity through engagement with institutionalized religion, which also appears to be a source of negative social representations concerning their sexuality.

Pope Francis, Civil Unions, and Same-Sex Marriage: Theological Reflections

This essay examines civil union and same-sex marriage in relation to the Catholic doctrine of heterosexual marriage. It concludes of civil union that it is a civil reality, the concern of civil, not ecclesiastical, authority. It finds in Catholic marriage three bonds between believing spouses, of love, of law, and of Sacrament (upper case), and argues that in same-sex marriage there are three bonds, of love, of law, and of sacrament (lower case). The spouses themselves control the bond of love, a legal authority controls the bond of law, and the belief of the spouses that their marriage is a symbol of the presence of God in the world controls the bond of Sacrament/sacrament. A conclusion of the essay is that the argument of the Church against same-sex marriage is judged to be non-probative by a majority of its members, especially of its younger members, and a change could be possible.

A shift from home to the market: The marketization of reproductive labor in India

Commercial surrogacy marketizes life's work. In the era of neo-liberalism, women's work, which is often intimately performed within a heterosexual marriage in exchange of support, now remains a principal avenue to earn money. This form of feminization of labor has led to the emergence of markets for women's reproductive capacities. The present study stems from my ethnographic journey into the lives of the women who work as surrogate mothers in India. The narratives presented in the paper emerge from my prolonged fieldwork in Anand, Gujarat. It engages with the experiences, understandings, and the voices of these women, who I term reproductive laborers, in order to examine the notion of putting one's reproductive capacities in this intimate market for money.

Gay Fathers’ Coparenting Experiences with Their Ex-Wives

This grounded theory study examines postdivorce coparenting experiences of 16 fathers who had children in the context of heterosexual marriage and later identified as gay. They described coparenting experiences as either mostly cooperative or uncooperative. When ex-wives accepted them as gay men and good fathers, the gay fathers described their coparenting as cooperative. When ex-wives expressed homonegativity, the fathers described coparenting as uncooperative. These fathers also reported more adversarial divorce proceedings, more intense anger, and less ability of their ex-wives to move on postdivorce. Although the fathers in this study are fairly racially and generationally homogenous, their stories provide insights into a unique cultural context older white gay men may experience when navigating coparenting with ex-wives. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1550428X.2021.2008285 .

Designing a model of attachment styles in the reconciliation of emotional relationships with the mediation of communication skills in married students of Hamedan University of Medical Sciences

Background and Aim: One of the successful factors in married life is proper communication skills between couples. Various researches have shown that communication problems are one of the most common problems expressed by couples. The present research was carried out in order to provide a model of attachment styles in the reconciliation of emotional relationships with the mediation of communication skills in students of Hamedan University of Medical Sciences. Methods: The current research method was correlation and structural equation modeling. The statistical population of this study included 410 married female students of Hamedan University of Medical Sciences in 2019-20, who were selected by convenience sampling. The data were collected using the Marital Compatibility Questionnaire (Spanier, 1976), Hazan and Shaver (1985) Adult Attachment Styles Questionnaire and Christensen and Salawi (1984) Communication Skills Questionnaire. Data analysis was done by path analysis using AMOS and SPSS version 20 software. Results: The results showed that secure attachment (β=0.14; P<0.001) had a direct effect on communication skills. Also, the indirect path of secure attachment with emotional compromise with the mediation of communication skills was significant (P<0.001). Conclusion: Therefore, according to the significant role of the components of secure attachment style and communication skills, therapists can examine the level of responsibility, happiness, increase resilience against psychological pressure in the discussion of examining and treating marital adjustment problems and teach communication skills in couples.

"You all are sisters! We are all family!" The construction of parenthood in 'RuPaul's Drag Race'

Drag queens epitomise gender fluidity, where the heteronormative binarism male/female is blurred and parodied. Their unconventional nature is reflected in the structure of their community, where they have created alternatives to the heteronormative family, which is historically based on heterosexual marriage and parenthood. Drag families are to be seen as places of personal and financial support, a refuge for young gay men who have been rejected by their “real” families and have financial problems. This study seeks to give prominence to the construction of parenthood in RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-2021) by analysing the discourse – i. e. the system of statements – around drag family, parenthood and sisterhood in a corpus of 174 episodes. The research is carried out in the light of Corpus Linguistics, with the use of #Lancsbox, a software for the analysis of language data and corpora.

Listening and being listened to as affection exchange in marital discussions about the #MeToo movement

Marriage offers a context where individuals may have to discuss difficult topics. Discussing such topics, especially when there is a chance of disagreement, may lead to differences in the ability for spouses to listen to one another. In this study, we surveyed 746 individuals in heterosexual marriages to understand their listening in conversations about the #MeToo movement. Our findings indicate that being a good trait listener does not help one’s situational listening ability. We also see evidence that perceiving disagreement from one’s spouse and perceiving the spouse’s ability to listen are more likely to predict one’s own situational listening. Marital quality significantly moderates these associations as well. We consider these findings in light of affection exchange theory, suggesting listening may be a form of affection exchange in marriage.