Sexual Propriety Research Articles

Managing Marriage: Advice Columns and Interethnic Intimacy in Colonial Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article examines interethnic marriage (naitai kyōkon) in colonial Taiwan in the early 1930s, which was a key site of contestation over the imagined imperial future. Its reading of political discourse on interethnic marriage alongside marital advice columns in colonial Taiwan’s largest daily newspaper, Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, reveals the contradictory ways in which interethnic marriage emerged in the popular imaginary as a site where the future of the empire could be consolidated – or undermined. Despite official endorsements of interethnic marriage, the pages of Taiwan nichinichi shinpō reveal widespread opposition to interethnic relationships. Such opposition – often rooted in racial prejudice – was simultaneously criticised as an obstacle to the state objective of ‘harmonious integration’ (naitai yūwa) and excused by marital advice columns due to concerns about sexual propriety. Amid widespread anxiety about upholding conservative sexual morality, advice columns were reluctant to unequivocally encourage enthusiastic young people to enter into interethnic marriages. Instead, they implied that colonial intimacy should be treated with caution. What emerges from these incongruous attitudes is an image of a colonial society still deeply ambivalent over how best to manage colonial intimacy and the future direction of the empire.

Webcam modelling in Korea: censorship, pornography, and eroticism

ABSTRACT The South Korean government enforces strict censorship against pornography. In spite of such regulations, there is a vibrant webcam modelling industry in Korea that operates under the radar. I examine how censorship influences perceptions of Korean webcam models and their viewers. The central questions that drive this article are: how does censorship against pornography impact the ways that individuals engage with their sexual desires in online spaces; and what are the broader sociocultural consequences of such censorship? I explore these questions in conversation with feminist scholarship on webcam modelling, censorship, and erotics. I argue that webcam models and their viewers form an illicit eroticism whereby they derive pleasure from defying the norms of sexual propriety. I argue that the illicit eroticism that forms as a result of censorship against pornography may have negative outcomes for how women’s sexuality is conceptualized in the Korean cultural context.

Anthropology and #MeToo: Reimagining fieldwork

Abstract#MeToo deals in the everyday ambiguous and intersectional, providing a space for discussion of the grey areas of sexual propriety. Since 2017, when the term was mobilised spectacularly in the US entertainment industry, other industries have undertaken an examination of their own practices and norms. In this paper we consider the implications of this political moment for the discipline of anthropology, and specifically the idea of ‘the field’ in the context of anthropological training in Australia. We argue that fieldwork is tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, fetishised by anthropologists as a transformative domain in which the normative rules of gendered interaction are temporarily suspended in favour of fruitfully engaging informants. Drawing on Bourdieu, we argue that ‘the field’ (the methodological and symbolic space) is a ‘field’ (a domain of recognition) that junior anthropologists enter with the expectation that they will suffer as a necessary part of their initiation, placing some PhD students at an enhanced risk of sexual violence. We reflect on the attitude of anthropologists to fieldwork as part of a professional illusio, a belief in the value of ‘playing the game’ that limits our capacity to modify our methodology to make it safer for neophytes and to reimagine a more just discipline.

‘Almost Normal’, or, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Swift But Were Afraid To Ask

AbstractThis article seeks to situate Jonathan Swift and his reception in the modern history of sexual norms. Through close attention to several moments across Swift's canon that touch on non‐normative sexuality, and to early intertexts that interpret those moments, including an unsolicited illustration by William Hogarth, I contend that Swift should be recognised – and was recognised by his initial readers – not only for testing the limits of sexual propriety but also for exposing, with characteristically devious subtlety, the contradictory and unpredictably destructive means by which sexual conduct began to be classified and regulated in post‐1688 Britain.

The Third Revolution

The Third Revolution

Still Unmarried: Black Women and Relationship Advice Literature

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which racial patriarchal tropes from E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s public-policy report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) have been reconstructed for the present via relationship-advice literature marketed to heterosexual black women under the guise of love and increasing the rate of black marriage. A close analysis of the connection between historic pathological narratives of the black family and the current self-help genre exposes racial and gendered politics, concessions, and negotiations within the black community. Utilizing popular relationship-advice literature that achieved New York Times bestseller list status—Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (2009), Tyrese Gibson and Rev. Run’s Manology: Secrets of Your Man’s Mind Revealed (2013)—this article focuses on the culturally embedded linkages among the concepts of worthiness for respect, sexual propriety (chiefly in heterosexist terms), and behavioral decorum—especially when directed at women. It also looks at the gate-keeping function these norms serve in regulating and limiting black women’s right to full political and social recognition. In so doing, this article reveals the ways in which relationship-advice literature maintains black women’s subordinate position within the black community, as well as within the dominant white society.

“I can be your Tinder nightmare”: Harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace

On Instagram, the accounts Bye Felipe and Tinder Nightmares feature screen-grabbed messages of sexist abuse and harassment women have received from men on dating apps. This paper presents a discursive analysis of 526 posts from these Instagrams. Utilising a psychosocial and feminist poststructuralist perspective, it examines how harassing messages reproduce certain gendered discourses and (hetero)sexual scripts, and analyses how harassers attempt to position themselves and the feminine subject in interaction. The analysis presents two themes, termed the “not hot enough” discourse and the “missing discourse of consent”, which are unpacked to reveal a patriarchal logic in which a woman's constructed “worth” in the online sexual marketplace resides in her beauty and sexual propriety. Occurring in response to women's exercise of choice and to (real or imagined) sexual rejection, it is argued these are disciplinary discourses that attempt to (re)position women and femininity as sexually subordinate to masculinity and men. This paper makes a novel contribution to a growing body of feminist work on online harassment and misogyny. It also considers the implications for feminist theorising on the link between postfeminism and contemporary forms of sexism, and ends with some reflections on strategies of feminist resistance.

Gender, Sexuality, and the City in the Early Twentieth Century

Gender, Sexuality, and the City in the Early Twentieth Century Birgitte Søland (bio) Laurie Marhoefer. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. xvi + 340 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4426-4915-6 (cl); 978-1-4426-2657-7 (pb); 978-1-4426-1957-9 (epub). T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Bricktop's Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. xix + 377 pp.; map; ill. ISBN 978-1-4384-5501-3 (cl); 978-1-4384-5500-6 (pb); 978-1-4384-5502-0 (epub). Ageeth Sluis. Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900-1939. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. x +381 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8032-9382-3 (pb); 978-0-8032-9390-8 (epub). The early twentieth century was an era of social and sexual upheaval. Following war and revolutions, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed ruptures in traditional gender arrangements and the emergence of new forms of sexual behavior, especially in urban areas. Almost a decade ago, the path-breaking collection of academic essays, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization tracked visual representations and contemporary debates about this new embodiment of femininity as they played out in countries ranging from France, Germany, and Soviet Russia to China, India, Japan, and South Africa.1 Other studies have documented additional examples of gender and generational conflicts between the two world wars.2 The three books under review here provide further case studies of the ways in which gender and sexuality were renegotiated in the context of early twentieth-century urban modernity, specifically in Paris, Berlin, and Mexico City. Paris in the interwar years attracted not only thousands of French men and women migrating from the countryside in search of work, but also large numbers of Europeans and Americans eager to enjoy the cosmopolitanism and freedom that the city represented. Among these were African American men and women who found in the city a welcome respite from American racism and restrictions. The focus of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting's lively book, Bricktop's Paris is the intrepid and adventurous, but [End Page 188] generally overlooked, group of Black American women who made their life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. Exploring the experiences of twenty-five African American women—including well-known stage performers such as Josephine Baker and Florence Mills; the renowned night club owner and entertainer, Ada "Bricktop" Smith; literary stars such as Nella Larsen; and less familiar writers and artists such as Jessie Faucet and Laura Wheeler—Sharpley-Whiting describes her work as "a collage, a multilife biography . . . an assembled portrait of black women's lives as they lived them for however long in Paris" (13–14). Drawing on an impressive array of source materials, including interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, family papers, magazines, newspapers, literature, art, poetry, recordings, films, musical scores, posters, programs, photographs, and city maps, Sharpley-Whiting manages to piece together an extraordinarily rich account of these women's time in Paris. Some visited the city for merely a few weeks; others made it their home for months or years. Born after 1880, most were young and unencumbered by husbands and children. A few arrived with substantial bank accounts; others barely had money to cover the passage across the Atlantic. Most sought to make a living through popular culture; others came to pursue professional or academic training. Many were writers, musicians, and artists; a few were students; one came to pursue her training as an aviator. Yet, in spite of their differences, they all found Paris to be a space where they could pursue their dreams and hone their talents. In and around Montmartre and the rest of Bohemian Paris, where most of them settled, they found a world where expectations of female domesticity, sexual propriety, familial obligations, and racial subordination could be set aside, if only temporarily. Surely, Paris was not colorblind, but the French seemed at least "not color averse," especially when compared to the bare-knuckled racism of America (7). Besides, the relatively small number of...

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes

Reviewed by: Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes Mariana L. R. Dantas Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. By Marisa J. Fuentes. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 217. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-2418-4; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4822-7.) Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is an ambitious attempt to foreground enslaved women in the history of urban slavery in Barbados and the Americas more broadly. It does so by developing new [End Page 967] methods to reconstruct their experiences and voices from bits of archival evidence produced by and for the dominant forces and narratives of slavery. It cautions us against the danger of reproducing white colonizing power, and the commodification and brutalization of enslaved bodies and persons, through traditional readings of historical documents that are only layers deep. It calls instead for readings "along the bias grain" of historical evidence, which stretch out the fabric of the past to visualize underlying threads of meanings, intentions, and power dynamics that frame patterns of behavior, understanding, and practices (p. 7). In this manner, Marisa J. Fuentes argues, we can begin to reconstruct and critically examine the complexity of enslaved women's experiences. It also becomes possible to address agency through a careful contextualization of the actions and decisions of enslaved and slave-owning women in a constraining world that normalized gender, racial, and sexual violence. Fuentes's analysis builds on an extensive historiography (carefully acknowledged in her footnotes) that has expanded knowledge about the history of women in slavery, reframed questions, and revealed methodologies that counter the silence of the archives. She adds to that historiography by weaving together several analytical threads—borrowed from women and gender studies, black feminist theory, critical historiography, and cultural studies—into a rendering of the past that resists unexamined and complicit accounting of the degradation black women suffered. The book's five chapters are centered on fragments of enslaved women's stories that are barely visible in the historical record, which Fuentes unravels to reveal the strands of an exploitative and violent reality that (re)shaped black women's lives and bodies. Through Jane, who briefly appears in a runaway slave ad, Fuentes discusses how the built environment of Bridgetown manifested and enforced white colonial power. She imagines Jane's interactions with and knowledge of the town's sites, from wharves to jails, to consider how slaves who contemplated flight assessed the promises and dangers of the urban space. Rachael Pringle Polgreen, the well-known mulatto freedwoman and Bridgetown brothel owner, and Joanna, a former slave manumitted in Polgreen's will, help Fuentes explore black female sexuality and the question of agency in the context of sex work. The violence of slavery, including perceptions of enslaved women as sexually available, left them vulnerable to abuse, coercion, rape, and economic exploitation. Enslaved women in this environment were hardly sexual operators, Fuentes argues, but survivors of their sexualized status. Fuentes's analysis of an adultery case involving a white woman, and complicated by an attempted armed assault against her husband by her lover's cross-dressed male slave, further highlights the sexualization of black female bodies in Barbados. The white woman's claim to sexual propriety, and the black enslaved boy's ability to cross town unnoticed at night in women's clothes, relied on assumptions about black female promiscuity. Through Molly, a slave executed for an attempted poisoning, Fuentes explores slavery and its archive's relentless criminalization of enslaved men and particularly women. As Molly's case reveals, any nonconforming or suspicious action by the enslaved was used as justification for the punishment, brutalization, and destruction of life and body. The final chapter of Dispossessed Lives examines testimonies of the brutality of slavery collected by the Privy Council investigating slavery and the case for [End Page 968] abolition in the late eighteenth century. Guided by the faint cries of the women instead of the recorded words of the witnesses of their debasement, Fuentes demonstrates that these testimonies often ignored the perspective of enslaved black women and aimed to expiate the guilt of...

Fortune, Fame, and Desire: Promoting the Self in the Long Nineteenth Century by Sharon Hartman Strom

Reviewed by: Fortune, Fame, and Desire: Promoting the Self in the Long Nineteenth Century by Sharon Hartman Strom Yvette J. Saavedra Fortune, Fame, and Desire: Promoting the Self in the Long Nineteenth Century. Sharon Hartman Strom. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2016. ISBN 978-1-4422-7265-1. 260 pp., cloth, $39.50 In Fortune, Fame, and Desire: Promoting the Self in the Long Nineteenth Century, historian Sharon Strom examines the marketplace development of the period between 1820 and 1910 with a perspective that shifts the historiographic focus from the rise of entrepreneurship and the development of a sophisticated economy to one emphasizing individualism and the commodification of the self (xi). Geographically, her study is centered in the mid-Atlantic states, New England, and Ohio, with a tangential discussion of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Framing her study within the contours of the long nineteenth century's social, economic, and political changes, Strom argues that "the growth of urban culture, the explosion of a vast print industry, and new forums for public speaking created expansive arenas for self-presentation" in the two decades preceding the Civil War (xi). She contends that broader changes in education for women, the negotiating and questioning of religious orthodoxy, the rise of reform groups, the growth of popularity of public lectures, and the increased acceptability of theater created opportunities for middle-class individuals to create their public images, improve their social and economic status, and disrupt accepted gender and racial norms. Organized into seven chapters, this largely biographical work provides detailed narratives of the lives of men and women such as diplomat, writer, and novelist Ephraim George Squier; stage actress Lola Montez; publishers Miriam Follin and Frank Leslie; abolitionists, activists, and writers Francis Watkins Harper, Anna [End Page 321] Dickinson, Laura Briggs James; and spiritualists Harriet Green Wilson and Warren Chase among others to illustrate how their written works—such as novels, weeklies, and travel literature—as well as their public performances, and social activism provided an avenue to create their fame and acquire their fortunes and material desires. Building on cultural historian Eric Lott and media scholar Linda Williams's view of melodrama as a device for talking about the end of slavery, immigration, northern race relations, racial mixing, the decline of sexual propriety, and the "dissatisfaction of domesticity," Strom contends that these biographical narratives show how men and women—white, black, and racially mixed—negotiated their places within a changing social reality and context (xv). By highlighting the promotion of the self in the lives and works of these middle-class people, Strom disrupts views of the nineteenth century as one of Victorian "stuffiness and conformity," pointing instead to the existence of personal independence, adventure, and the pushing of boundaries of social acceptability (xiii). For example, the nontraditional living arrangement of Squire, Follin, and Leslie; Montez's flouting of gender propriety through stage performance and dance; and the transgression of racial and sexual boundaries through same-sex and interracial sexual relations and desires all demonstrate how these historical actors defined, redefined, and rejected societal notions of gender, race, sexuality, and morality (57, 42, 41, 45, 88, 133). Although Strom's discussion of sexuality and morality through Squire, Follin, Leslie, and Montez's lives describes their contesting of sexual and gender norms, she is remiss in analyzing many of these examples and often remains on the level of description. This work's strength lies in Strom's discussion of race, gender, abolition, women's suffrage, and black civil rights. Specifically, the chapters on Francis Harper, Harriet Wilson, Anna Dickinson, and Laura Briggs James provide a clear and strong analysis of the confluence of various historical moments, politics, and identities. These chapters weave a story, aside from the individual biographies, that shows how these women's literary works, activism, and lives created their identities as well as influenced broader society. Written for a general audience, this book's in-depth biographical narratives provide great detailed information about specific historical actors. Readers unfamiliar with the broader social and cultural history of the nineteenth century may find the work difficult to follow but if they read alongside works that help contextualize the era, they will appreciate...

Dystopia as Liberation: Disturbing Femininities in Contemporary Thailand

Despite the stereotypical, outsider view of Thailand as a thriving hub of international sex tourism, traditional and local constructions of Thainess instead privilege the position of the ‘good’ Thai woman—a model of sexual propriety, demure physicality and aesthetic perfection. This is the image of femininity that is heralded by Thailand's Tourist Authority and by government agencies alike as a marketable symbol of cultural refinement and national pride. But this disturbing ‘utopian’ construction of femininity might for some be considered a dystopia shaped by forms of power centred on elite urban rule. In mainstream definitions of Thainess, the monstrous and grotesque inverses of ‘good’ womanhood are located in the ‘dystopian’ visions of rural-based folk traditions that abound with malevolent female spirits and demons, and in the contemporary Thai horror films that draw on these tropes. Adopted by Thai feminists and by street protestors in Bangkok at times of recent political unrest, portrayals of a ‘monstrous-feminine’ have been adopted as central to a carnivalesque strategy of response and resistance to elite discourses of control. Such forces serve to symbolically disturb and destabilise middle-class constructions of a Utopian vision of Thainess with Bangkok as its cultural core. This paper examines instances of how and why the counter-strategy of primitivism and monstrosity has developed, and the extent to which it translates ‘dystopian’ expressions of female sexuality in new imaginaries of ‘dystopia’ as a space of liberation from stultifying cultural and political norms.

‘At risk by fact of birth’: perceptions and concerns about medical male circumcision for HIV prevention in northern Malawi

In this article, we draw on critical approaches to risk to examine varied and interlaced perceptions of personal risk for HIV which young men in an area of traditionally low male circumcision have to Malawi government’s new policy of medical male circumcision for HIV prevention, locally known as mdulidwe. In this article, we draw on data from in-depth interviews (n = 29) and focus groups (n = 24) with young men aged 18–24 years undertaken in 2013 in an area with traditionally low rates of circumcision, Livingstonia in the northern region district of Malawi. Our findings show that the push for medical male circumcision in this region has given rise to a perception that the penile foreskin is an inborn anomaly that leads to excessive risk for HIV provoking anxiety, confusion, uncertainty, fatalistic views, and waning faith in national response to the epidemic. Our analysis of the data indicates that medical male circumcision has ushered in a layered and sometimes conflicting understanding of risk for HIV/AIDS where established ideas grounded in sexual propriety and risk-taking are being re-evaluated and reinterpreted within an emerging worldview coloured with sensibilities pertaining to notions of bodily normalcy. This indicates that the men in our study had a nuanced understanding of risk for HIV that incorporated notions of sexual risk-taking with corporeal impropriety, necessitating appropriate public risk communication about HIV/AIDS and policy responses for its prevention.

Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity by Carmen Nocentelli (review)

nocentelli, carmen. Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. ix + 262 pp.In this wide-ranging yet no less rigorously argued study, Carmen Nocentelli proposes that the early modern concepts of sexuality and race proceeded from contextually and historically contingent constructs. Rather than viewing them as parallel categories, she posits that both developed from an extended continuum of interrelated social practices and discourses that revolved around religion, culture, geography, and contemporary biophysiological notions. Her main focus, however, is the European obsession with sexual difference, and its resultant transformation into racial distinctions. In response to the question of how sexual propriety, as perceived in the early modern period, inflected what was ascribed to racial difference, and vice versa, Nocentelli analyzes a profusion of texts-mainly chronicles and treatises, but also epic poems, plays, and a picaresque novel-that classified systems of race and erotic during the period of European overseas expansion. With a nuanced nod to anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli's The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality, and its problematization of oppositional modes of individual freedom and social constraint, Nocentelli provides an overarching interdisciplinary framework for understanding the formation of identity through the social structures of early modern European settlements across the vast lands of what was then known as India.Starting from her premise that matters of eros quickly turned into matters of ethnos (5) when colonial societies were formed, she studies the cultural practices recorded by the abundant travel literature of the early modern period as markers of sexual and racial identity. While these narratives were shocking readers with their ethnographic accounts of Asian lewdness and debauchery, Nocentelli tells us, colonial governments were busily supporting interracial marriages. She is quick to point out that there were differences across the numerous Asian contact zones, just as she has taken care to read an impressive number of sources in, among other languages, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as English, respecting the variances among European states. Nonetheless, she also finds that, in Asia even more so than in the Americas, European colonizers similarly colonized by means of interracial unions. Her study concludes that the category of race developed from Asian challenge and resistance to the education of desire imposed through heterosexual marriage.The book's six chapters investigate the changing responses by Europeans to their encounter with Asian sexual practices as detailed in travel narratives. Chapter one is dedicated to penile implantation, first recorded by the Italian explorer Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan's navigation to and death in the Philippines. Genital piercing and modification (still commonly practiced in Southeast Asia) drew continued attention from early modem travel writers as aberrant customs that threatened the social order, becoming signs of the culture's bestiality andparadoxically, because they were also viewed as control measures against themsodomitical practices. Nocentelli argues that these customs served as racially identifiable masculine traits, unlike the scant accounts of female genital modification such as infibulation, which allowed for women's cultural, and thus racial, malleability.Chapter two elucidates the convertibility from one culture to another by analyzing the Isle of Love episode in Camoes's Os Lusiadas as a literary example of imposed intermarriage. In imitation of legendary Roman imperialism, the episode's violent scenes between Portuguese sailors and island nymphs, while referencing classical mythology, stand also for Portuguese expansion, first as intermarriage with Islamic women during the Reconquest (although this remains questionable), and then as imperial conquest marriages that kept Asian deviant sexualities at bay. …

‘The Honour & Credite of the Whole House’

ABSTRACTA concern with honour was ubiquitous in early modern England. Yet analyses of honour among the social elite in the period have been surprisingly restricted in scope, focusing most often upon the issues of honour-based violence and sexual propriety. This article considers an often overlooked source of honour, family unity, and examines it through the efforts of several families to heal rifts between various members of the family. In a social landscape which placed a high premium on the observation of proper forms of obedience and deference within the family, unity within a family mattered a great deal and had the ability to affect the honour of its members.

Modesty From Cats, Sexual Morality From Doves: Orthodox Jewry's Silence in the Face of Sexual Misconduct

Jewish tradition maintains that the laws pertaining to modesty and sexually sanctioned behavior must be maintained at all costs. Despite these injunctions, sexual misconduct in the Orthodox Jewish (OJ) world has been met with deafening silence from the religious leaders who are most responsible for upholding traditional Jewish values. This article attempts to explore how a society that has taken pride in its strict adherence to laws of modesty and sexual propriety has recently found itself embroiled in numerous sexual abuse scandals. In the first section of the article, clinical vignettes are used to examine the role played by systematized, dissociative processes in both the sexual abuse itself and the silence surrounding it. The second section of the article examines particular features of OJ life, which, enabled by defensive operations including denial, minimization, and self-deception, have resulted in a culturally sanctioned tendency to deny the existence of sexual misconduct or, when such denial is impossible, to dismiss it as relatively harmless behavior.

The Morphing of a Folktale: Sallāma and the Priest

A legendary anecdote of early Islamic origins about a songstress attempting to seduce a pious man, a humorously moralizing tale that promotes sexual propriety and, more specifically, male resistance to the temptations of the female voice and body through its dramatic presentation of a Qurʾānic verse, has inspired a number of modern fictional works. Most of these adaptations expand and elaborate on the contents of the anecdote while remaining within the genre of narratives of sexual abstinence. The film Sallāma (1945), however, turns the songstress, played by Umm Kulthūm, into a chaste figure, and screenwriter Bayram al-Tūnisī reworks the ‘Sallāma and the Priest’ anecdote accordingly. The scene in the film which is based on the tale, and which culminates in Umm Kulthūm's incantation of Qurʾānic verses, does not warn against the temptations of the flesh associated with the female voice, but argues instead that woman's voice is not ʿawra. Woman's voice is not, in other words a ‘private part’ that should be concealed in the context of prayer, but rather a useful instrument of collective worship.

Female nurses’ sensitivity to male genitalia‐related care in mainland China

To discover the latent psychosocial construct of female nurses' sensitivity to male genitalia-related care in the context of sexual conservativeness. Many nursing activities involve direct exposure or contact with male external genitalia. In the sexually conservative culture and the predominance of female nurses, this area is the subject of continuing interest and investigation. Methodological research design. An item pool related to male genitalia-related care was generated through a panel of experts and then reduced to a short form questionnaire, the Female Nurses' Sensitivity to Male Genitalia Related Care scale. Using data from a purposive sample of 588 female nurses, the structure of the questionnaire was examined using structural equation modelling. The validity was examined against existing scales. The 13-item Female Nurses' Sensitivity to Male Genitalia Related Care scale has a two-factor structure with high internal consistency (α = 0·87) and test-retest reliability of 0·90. Nearly all model fit measures reach the criteria of being an acceptable model fit except chi-squared statistics. Scores on Female Nurses' Sensitivity to Male Genitalia Related Care can be best predicted by that of brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, Embarrassability Scale and Situational Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale. The anxiety of projecting a positive image and the pursuit of sexual propriety may underpin female nurses' sensitivity to male genitalia-related care. This trait can be measured by the 13-item female nurses' sensitivity-male genitalia-related care scale with satisfactory psychometric properties including internal consistency, reliability, content validity and construct validity. Particular attention shall be paid to the negative effects of social rules or norms including sexual propriety rules over (female) nurses' perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. Strengthening nursing education in this regard is important to overcome negative effects on female nurses of male genitalia-related care.

Making the Immoral Moral: Consensual Unions and Birth Status in Cuban Law and Everyday Practice, 1940–1958

Abstract This article explores the 1940 Cuban Constituent Assembly debates about consensual unions and birth status as legislators created a new legal process called equiparación de matrimonio civil that would grant to citizens in consensual unions the same rights and benefits that legally married citizens enjoyed. Equiparación, if granted, could enable a child born to unmarried parents to change his or her birth status in formal records. While some legislators considered the creation of the new constitution an opportunity to erase existing privileges and protections based upon outdated social and moral hierarchies embedded in Cuban legal structures, others argued that “family” issues had no place in a constitution. The Constituent Assembly’s debates about birth status illuminate how issues concerning sexual propriety and family were intertwined with antidiscrimination efforts during Cuban state formation. Nevertheless, legislators’ lofty ideas about equiparación contrast sharply with ordinary citizens’ attempts to claim their newly extended rights in judicial courts. A comparison of the legislators’ debates and ordinary Cubans’ efforts in the courtrooms to claim equiparación exposes the core contradictions between maintaining discriminatory and disenfranchising social hierarchies and protecting the fundamental equality of citizens during a period of democratic renovation in Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s. On a broader level, this article links the history of the family, law, and state formation to narratives of historical change and the production and reproduction of social hierarchies based upon race, class, and gender in modern Latin America.

“Where the Danger Lies”: Race, Gender, and Chinese and Japanese Exclusion in the United States, 1870-19241

Race too often is used as the explanatory variable for understanding immigration exclusion, marginalizing the significance of race making, ethnic differentiation, and gender construction in particular. This article explores these processes by examining exclusionary policies implemented against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the mid- 1870s to 1924, the year the National Origins Act was passed. Politicians, intellectuals, and moral reformers used a gendered logic - the construction of idealized gender norms, roles, and sexual propriety and the attachment of these meanings to male and female bodies - to distinguish Japanese immigrants from the Chinese immigrants they followed, allowing for ethnic differentiation and dissimilar policies. The convergence toward exclusion rested on a racialized logic - the construction and attachment of inferior status and meanings to immigrant groups through discourse, formal and informal categorization, or social closure - which claimed that the Japanese were unassimilable and racially undesirable like the Chinese. Exclusionists focused on the immigrant women, decrying their sexual and gender impropriety as evidence of the groups' threats to the sanctity of white families, which imperiled the nation. Gender and race both mattered in these logics and their meanings were constructed as their salience interconnected.

Raunch Culture Goes to School? Young Women, Normative Femininities and Elite Education

Public concern about popular culture's sexualisation of women and girls is regularly voiced in the Australian media. Young women grow up against a backdrop of ‘raunch culture’ (Levy, 2005), which for some scholars represents a ‘new’ femininity (Gill, 2007), in which ‘hyper-sexual’ forms of (hetero)sexual expression are now expected of young women and girls, despite ostensibly being about choice and personal empowerment. In this article, I explore the constructions of girlhood and femininity amongst young women attending an elite, single-sex, private school in Melbourne, Australia. Elite schooling for girls is often associated with highly classed notions of (hetero)sexual modesty and propriety, epitomised in the reality television program Ladette to Lady. Here I consider how hypersexualities are configured within students' constructions of themselves and others, and I explore their relationship to classed expectations of identity for privileged girls. I examine the role that classed norms of identity play in mediating these girls' negotiations of hypersexualities.