Sexual Transgression Research Articles

Domestic violence and associated factors among pregnant women in sub-Saharan African countries from the recent demographic and health survey data: a multilevel analysis.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a human rights violation that often involves violence against women, which appears to be the most prevalent type of abuse. IPV is a global public health issue with major human rights violations. Pregnant women's IPV needs special consideration because of the possible harm that might happen to mothers and their fetuses. The enormous global public health issue of IPV affects physical, mental, and sexual transgressions. Even though there were studies conducted on IPV among women, few studies were conducted among pregnant women in sub-Saharan African countries. Therefore, this study revealed IPV and associated factors among pregnant women from the recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) in sub-Saharan African countries. Multilevel logistic regression analysis used data from the recent sub-Saharan African countries DHS was carried out using this secondary data. For this study, pregnant women between the ages of 15 and 49 were included; the total sample size was 17,672. Multilevel logistic regression models were calibrated to determine the associated factors at the individual and community level with IPV, with a 95% CI and AOR. The prevalence of IPV among pregnant women in 23 sub-Saharan African countries was 41.94%, with a 95% CI of 40.82 to 43.06%. Poorer and poorest [AOR = 1.92; 95% CI: (1.01, 3.67)] and [AOR = 2.01; 95% CI:(1.02, 3.92)], partner alcohol drink [AOR = 3.37;95% CI:(2.21, 5.14)], and no partner education [AOR = 2.01;95% CI:(1.12, 3.63)] were statistically associated factors with IPV among pregnant women. The prevalence of IPV among pregnant women in sub-Saharan African countries was high (41.94%). Low economic status, partner drinking alcohol, and partner no education were the associated factors of IPV. This finding provides clues for policymakers and other organizations concerned about women.

From Body of Order to Body of Disorder: Beatrice’s Ecstatic Metamorphosis in Matilde Serao’s Cuore infermo (1881)

ABSTRACT Matilde Serao publicly supported a behavioural model for women rooted in soberness and restraint. However, some of her fictional heroines led her to places governed by a law of disorder at odds with the moral and social order she officially asserted. This is the case with her first novel, Cuore infermo (1881), where the protagonist Beatrice passes from being a model of restrained order to one of liberating disorder, driven by impulses and desires, culminating in the ecstasies she enjoys with her husband. Resorting to a conceptual apparatus grounded in the notions of ecstasy, repression, pleasure principle, and death drive, and showing how Serao engages with these notions, partly anticipating some of Freud’s findings, the article explores Beatrice’s ecstatic metamorphosis, arguing that Serao provides a depiction of moral, social, and sexual transgression that calls into question women’s established roles in society, unveiling a will to disrupt existence at its core.

Blurring the Lines Between Victimhood and Responsibilization? Sex as Behavioral Problems in Court Decisions on Compulsory Care of Young People

Formal social control of girls has historically focused on disciplining their sexual behavior, and studies show this is still present. This article analyses how authorities describe and give meaning to young people’s sexual behavior when assessing their need of compulsory care. The results show that in the few cases when boys’ sexual behavior is highlighted, it concerns sexual delinquency. The assessments of girls’ sexual behavior largely regards situations where they are exposed to others’ sexual transgressions, risking to victim-blame girls. This is discussed in relation to gendered understandings of sexual behavior and supposed gaps in legislation.

Ethics Education in Psychoanalytic Institutes

ABSTRACT Over the past thirteen years, the Ethics Education Committee (EEC) at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI) has engaged in a dedicated, proactive initiative to help trainees, members, and the field at large, address questions of ethics, boundaries, and professional conduct. This endeavor began in the wake of a series of what are often euphemistically referred to as “egregious boundary violations” at BPSI; in other words, sexual transgressions perpetrated by analysts toward their patients. The initiative evolved to address questions including, but also above and beyond, sexual transgressions, in recognition that complex ethical dilemmas are endemic to our work, though often go un-discussed. This paper will describe why the EEC was formed, the techniques used to open-up discussions of ethical decision-making which have been used at BPSI, national meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), and institutes across the country, and what we have learned about fostering safe environments to grapple with issues around ethical decision-making and professional conduct. Examples of vignettes depicting complex ethical dilemmas, a primary tool in our technique, will also be included.

Transgressive quest/ions? Navigating religion, institutional expectations, and sexuality education in modern Britain

All secondary schools in England have been required to teach Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) since 2019, which has raised particular challenges for – and confrontations with – religious minorities. This paper draws on ethnographic research to centre analysis on the fraught moral binds felt by Jewish parents and educators as they struggle to decide when and how to equip children with knowledge while needing to conform to institutional positions on what protection means. Bodily knowledge is redacted across religious/state models of education, which propagates the maintenance of social boundaries and definitions of sexual transgression, but do not stop the quests and questions that adolescents harbour during puberty and development. The paper draws attention to the use of bracketed words in feminist scholarship to convey how terms are projected as having universal meanings or connotations, which are, in reality, socially situated or at least used in socially sanctioned ways.

Dirty Waters: Urine, Waste, and the Shimmering Trans Body in Nånting måste gå sönder or Something Must Break (2014)

This article examines genderqueer writer/director Ester Martin Bergsmark’s film Something Must Break (2014) and the trans gaze created through the film’s disjunctive imagery. I argue the film’s aestheticization of polluted environments and trans bodies posits a queer alliance between transness and trash. Similarly, Something Must Break’s repeated imagery of urination and body fluids representationally relates transness, waste, and transgressive sexuality to a politics of marginality, which Bergsmark employs in Something Must Break to express these relationalities as sites for creative difference and possibilities of being that exist outside of heterosexual norms. I use post-structuralist and queer interpretations of perversion to reimagine the film’s polluted environments and abject fluids as sites/sights of creation and liveability for trans bodies. I find in the refractions of polluted waters, blood, saliva, and urine in Something Must Break the same cinematic fissures that Eliza Steinbock argues allows for a uniquely trans gaze in their theory of shimmering. In considering a cinematic transgender gaze, Steinbock describes a cinema that eschews the visual reveal and instead portrays a lived trans experience not defined by dualities, but by disjunctions; thus, the unsettled, the (un)becoming, the “shimmering” aesthetics of trans embodiment. I argue Bergsmark achieves a cinematic trans gaze in their imagining of a queer space where pollution, trash, urine, and blood are not symbols of abjection and shame, but embody an opening-up, a vulnerability: a becoming that molds new forms of relationships, new forms of love, and new forms of creation.

Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist Desire

Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist Desire

Women and the Trauma of War in Beirut Hellfire Society: A Gender Study

This article examines the traumatic effects of the Lebanese civil war on women in Rawi Hage’s novel Beirut Hellfire Society (2018). It explores women’s madness and gender identity disorder as two effects of war trauma and examines how indulgence in orgiastic acts of self-annihilation and sexual transgression is a means of countering this trauma. The article also depicts sexuality as one cause of women’s exclusion in war making their bodies simultaneously vulnerable and defiant to all forms of sexual assault exacerbated in times of war. The gender studies approach that focuses on women identities in real wars is used to analyze the women characters in this novel. It aims to show how these traumatic effects and the civil war repercussions pertain to the gender hierarchy of power and the gendered social constructions prevailing before and not during the civil war.

Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation by Amy K. Kaminsky

Reviewed by: The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation by Amy K. Kaminsky Lucille Kerr Kaminsky, Amy K. The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation. State U of New York P, 2021. 244 pp. ISBN: 9781438 483290. The Other/Argentina is a masterful meditation on the relationship between "Jewishness" and "Argentineity." In the study, Kaminsky characterizes Jewishness as a "strand" of otherness that is but one of the threads woven into the fabric of Argentina as a modern nation and as "another way of being Argentine" (1, 22). The book illuminates how Jewish-identified cultural production (i.e., literature, film, visual art) weaves Jewishness into the nation's cultural and social fabric while also presenting Jewishness as a "coherent phenomenon" apart from the dominant culture. Kaminsky skillfully navigates through the paradoxical relationship between these key identifiers ("Jewishness" and "Argentineity"), offering "both close and symptomatic readings" (2) of creative works and discussions of critical and historical materials [End Page 159] that ground the primary materials. Even though Jewishness is "not entirely at one with Argentineity" (200), the study offers readers the possibility of understanding how being Jewish is "another way of being Argentine," if not also, somewhat surprisingly, how being Argentine might also be another way of being Jewish (20). Moreover, the study's title prefigures the complex superimposition of identities and differences that inform both Jewishness and Argentineity. As a book —and as a titular phrase— The Other/Argentina stages "the energizing and exhausting tension between unitary solidity on the one hand and instability and internal fracture on the other, not just of Jewishness but of Argentina as a nation" (52). In the book's eight chapters and brief concluding comments, Kaminsky produces conversational clusters among primary and secondary materials, in which she also intervenes with her own corroborative or corrective comments, focusing throughout on both Jewishness and Argentineity. As the study's subtitle signals, these conversations also reveal how "both sexuality and gender, as both lived experience and ideology, help encode" the meanings of the two primary terms (xiii). Throughout the book Kaminsky highlights the complexity and self-contradictory nature of materials by Argentines who have reflected on as well as represented Jewishness, drawing from an array of works by recognized writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and scholars. Among the writers are: Birmajer, Chejfec, Cozarinsky, Drucaroff, Feinman, Feierstein, Gelman, Glickman, Partnoy, Pizarnik, Rivera, Strejlevich, Szichman, Timerman, Viñas. Among the filmmakers: Blaustein, Burman, Lichtman, Markovitch, Neuman, Solomonoff. Among the visual artists: Brodsky, Kuitca, Kupferminc. And, among the scholars: Finchelstein, Goldberg, Jenckes, Ludmer, Rein, Sarlo. Kaminsky's orchestration of dialogue among these varied voices, as it were, is skillful, at times provocative, and consistently illuminating. Chapter 1 ("Planting Wheat and Reaping Doctors: Another Way of Being Argentine") mainly frames "the encounter between Jews and Argentina" via close reading of two foundational works about Jewishness: Alberto Gerchunoff's Los gauchos judíos (1910), "which stakes a Jewish claim to Argentina's iconic pampas" (4), and Julián Martel's antisemitic novel La bolsa (1891), which sees Jews as a threat to the modern nation's social order. Chapter 2 ("Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Anxiety") takes up the meanings of "Jewishness" within the framework of national discourse about modernity and the anxieties inherent in the perception of the nation as modern and civilized. These first chapters also include references to many recent works of narrative and film that dramatize the same "encounter." In addition, these chapters draw attention to issues of gender and sexuality, highlighted in the book's subtitle, and to figurations of masculinity and sexuality analyzed more extensively in the entirety of Chapter 8 ("Troubling Difference: Jewishness, Gender, and Transgressive Sexuality"). Acknowledging that "identity is not unitary" (48), in Chapter 3 ("Provisional Identity") Kaminsky takes up the difficulty of defining Jewish identity, the concept of "provisional essentialism" —which "is makeshift and temporary" but "provides a useful structure for addressing a culturally constructed, but no less real, entity" (53)— and the rationale for the selection of the study's materials. The author declares that because "Jews themselves can claim the authenticity of insider knowledge and [End Page 160] experience...

The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

Mediterranean Crossings: Sexual Transgressions in Islam and Christianity (10th–18th Centuries). Umberto Grassi, ed. Viella Historical Research 18. Rome: Viella, 2020. 170 pp. €30.

Mediterranean Crossings: Sexual Transgressions in Islam and Christianity (10th–18th Centuries). Umberto Grassi, ed. Viella Historical Research 18. Rome: Viella, 2020. 170 pp. €30.

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Chaucer's Wenches

Abstract: This essay analyzes the eighteen occurrences of the word wenche in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and argues that the idea of the "wenche" persists today, most notably as implicit justification for the rescinding of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US Supreme Court's monumental decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 2022). It takes a Black feminist approach by situating Chaucer's wenches in the context of Black women's history and tracing how the word's resonances continued their pernicious work of making meaning and shaping material realities long after the Middle Ages. It first gives a careful history of wench 's origins and accretion of meaning from the early to the late Middle Ages, paying particular attention to its relationship with the Latin ancilla . It uses the Wycliffite Bible as a lens to explore the term's rapidly accruing connotations of youth, servitude, femininity, and transgressive sexuality, and discusses the connections between "wenche" and reproduction in An Alphabet of Tales and Geoffrey the Grammarian's Promptorium parvulorum before tracing its symbolic freight across the Canterbury Tales and pointing to its underlying role in struggles for reproductive justice in our own time.

Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, La papessa Giovanna e le sue leggende. Un percorso di ricerca tra codici e testi. Florence: Sismel. Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2023, ix, 283 pp., 16 color images.

Myth-making was well in place already in the Middle Ages, whether we think of King Arthur, Emperor Charlemagne, or the mysterious Round Table. Many times, fear of sexual transgression permeated the discourse, which found its vivid expression in the motif of the Popess Joanna, Giovanna, Joan, Anna, Jutta, or the like. Numerous scholars have already dealt with this topic, and this until very recently, but no one has doved more deeply into it than Agostino Paravicini Bagliani. In 2021 he had published an edition of 109 relevant texts dealing with this mythical figure, and in the current book he offers an in-depth analysis of the historical development of this legendary account, investigating the rich manuscript and incunabula tradition, the many different responses to this myth in Latin and in a variety of vernaculars, taking us from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century.

Dirty encounters: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s legacy in David Wojnarowicz’s work

One of the last works by celebrated New York artist David Wojnarowicz is a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s face buried in the dirt. The photograph was staged in 1991, less than one year before the artist died of AIDS. Until now, Wojnarowicz’s photograph has been interpreted as the image of a burial, a reference to the artist’s impending death. This article compares Wojnarowicz’s photo to one of the last scenes of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). The case of (Untitled) Face in Dirt and Teorema indicates the existence of a potentially complex relationship between Wojnarowicz and Pasolini, two queer artists who used provocation and sexual transgression to criticize capitalist society through their work. In this article, this complex relationship is explored to show, on the one hand, the import of Pasolini’s cinematographic and literary work in New York’s underground art scene of the 1980s. On the other, it demonstrates that Wojnarowicz’s last work conveys a positive message about his artistic legacy and future.

Sexual Harassment or Just Coaching? Sport Students Making Sense of Possibly Sexualising Coach Behaviours

Research has shown that athletes are divided in their assessment of possibly sexualising behaviours from coaches towards athletes. How they arrive at their conclusions has received less attention—yet it is crucial to understand as a basis for safeguarding measures. Using video-elicitation focus group interviews with sport students, we zoomed in on different types of ‘grey area’ situations involving coaches and athletes. We drew on social script theory to highlight the cultural tools sport students use to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable coaching behaviours. Our analyses showed that the students drew on two types of scripts in their interpretative work: (1) sport scripts, denoting templates for ‘normal’ coach–athlete interactions (typically with a performance and/or caring rationale), and (2) sexual harassment scripts, encompassing beliefs and expectations of how sexual transgressions play out and among whom. We discuss how the students evaluated concrete grey area situations by comparing and contrasting them with both scripts. In these assessments, the students relied on cues and clues from the portrayed interactions, including the gender of the coach and athlete and knowledge about the specific sport setting. Our analyses demonstrate how views about sexual harassment in sport relate to the specificities of the sport setting and the gendered social dynamics in the situation.

“The Kurds Have Not Made Love Their Aim”: Love, Sexuality, Gender, and Drag in Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn

AbstractThis paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17th-century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn, nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint at any taboo concerning male love for beardless boys, it does display a remarkable asymmetry between male and female same-sex desire; it also displays distinct views of legitimate and transgressive sexuality. Thus, this poem encourages a more historicizing view of the gendered and sexual dimensions of modern (Kurdish and other) nationalism, and a greater attention for the distinct characteristics of vernacular literatures within the premodern ‘Persianate cosmopolitan.’

The Coloniality of Law in Peru:Legal Positivism, Rape & Racialized Morality in Early Twentieth-Century Courts

Objective/context: In the early twentieth century, Peru rejected legal pluralism and, once again, selected a highly European-inflected penal code, undergirded by the prevailing tenets of legal positivism. In doing so, criminal courts became a particularly contested site, where indigenous and mestizas (mixed-race) women shaped and negotiated racial sentiments constructed around their sexuality. In also shaping the meaning of the law itself, I contend that virginity—or lack thereof—patterned legal positivism in Peru. I first detail the historical impact of legal positivism on Peru’s judiciary. I then showcase women’s courtroom narratives (alongside other juridical testimonies) that reveal their struggle for political inclusion. Methodology: This article is built from an analysis of primary and original archival data and is the synthesis of 55 cases of alleged sexual transgressions occurring in the region of Cuzco from 1924 to 1949. Originality: This paper is significant because it is one of only a few that examine the history of legal positivism and rape prosecution in the early twentieth century by incorporating primary archival data to show how women were protagonists in shaping Peru’s unique legal, political and cultural history. Conclusions: Expanding the arguments of imminent Andean scholars of postcolonialism, I argue that the ‘coloniality of law’ in Peru is illuminated by the collusion of legal positivism and fin de siècle racial ideologies that created a new subjectivity for women. In addition to refashioning repressive honor codes (literally embodied in ideas about morality and chastity), the new penal code also broadened a gap where indigenous and mestizo women argued their juridical humanity in criminal courts.

2023 Announcement

Previous articleNext article Free2023 AnnouncementPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is sponsoring a lunch and a scholarly session at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, January 5–8, 2023.LunchThe lunch will begin with drinks and appetizers at 11:45 a.m., and the main course served about noon on Friday, January 6, in a private room at John’s Grill, 63 Ellis Street, San Francisco. The recipient of the annual Marilyn Gaull Book Award will be honored on this occasion. All are welcome to attend. Advance reservations are requested by December 1. For further details, and to make a lunch reservation: www.johnclare.org/WCASession 603: Romanticism And SexualitySaturday, January 7, 5:15–6:30 p.m.Sierra Suite J, Marriott MarquisProgram arranged by the Wordsworth-Coleridge AssociationPresiding: Charles Waite Mahoney, University of Connecticut, Storrs1. “Blake’s Vegetable Loves,” Noah Heringman, University of Missouri, Columbia2. “Elizabeth Moody’s ‘To Dr. Darwin,’ Women’s Writing, and Sexual Transgression,” David Sigler, University of Calgary3. “Queering Liberation in The Woman of Colour,” Halina Adams, Bridgewater State University Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 53, Number 4Fall 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724503 © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.