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myth and materiality in a woman’s world 6 Sexualities [Shetland women] are modest virgins, and virtuous wives: for adultery is not known among them. Among the common sort fornication sometimes happens; but their constancy is such, that they are sure to marry one among another. (Capt. Thomas Preston, 12 May 1744, quoted in Thomas Gifford, An Historical Description of the Zetland Islands, p. 104) n the nineteenth century, official conceptions of moral order were largely equated with female sexuality. A moral society was one in which women’s bodies were
5 Sexuality Concerns about increases in young people’s criminality during the Second World War and into the 1960s were accompanied by similar anxieties about sexual activity. Both were viewed by the institutions associated with the state and civil society as symptoms of a decline in Christian values and moral standards. Teenage sexual ‘precocity’ was seen as a social problem because it was connected, in the minds of its critics, with increased incidence of venereal disease, a rising ‘tide’ of births outside marriage (‘illegitimacy’), and cycles of poor parenting
In his analysis of the evolution of sexuality in society in Making Sexual History, Jeffrey Weeks comments that, following a series of major challenges throughout the twentieth century (ranging from Freud‘s work to the challenges of feminism and queer politics), ‘sexuality becomes a source of meaning, of social and political placing, and of individual sense of self ’. This special issue of Gothic Studies intends to foster further research on the topic of queer sexuality. This is research which has already been underway for some time but it has not always been interdisciplinary in nature, as is the case for these five articles, in their discussion of theatre, cinema, and literature or literary conventions borrowed from Gothic novels.
This is an examination of the attempts to regulate female sexuality in twentieth-century Northern Ireland from the 1900s to the 1960s. Using a range of archive material, it opens up areas of a previously neglected history, and contributes to social history, women's history and the history of sexuality. The study explores a range of women's experiences, from those involved in prostitution and suspected of having VD, to the anxieties generated by the behaviour of girls and young women in general, particularly on the arrival of US troops during the Second World War. The activities of organisations involved in protecting and preventing girls from ‘falling into sin’ are examined, and the book contains a new assessment of the Magdalen Asylums and discusses Northern Irish experience in the context of comparative studies of female sexual regulation elsewhere. It identifies certain common themes, including the increasing role of medical experts and medical legislation, but also the uniqueness of the experience of this part of Ireland. The book highlights the commonality of Protestant and Catholic attitudes, clearly seen in their reaction to the public health campaigns against VD and the provision of contraception.
5 Jamie Heckert Sexuality/identity/politics1 Introduction At an anarchist discussion group, I confessed to working for the council. I explained that I felt justified because the sexual health programme in which I was involved was so incredibly progressive. The person to whom I had made this admission replied, rather haughtily, ‘I hardly think sex education is revolutionary.’ Putting aside the idea that something is only worthwhile if it will bring on ‘the revolution’, I was concerned with the apparent attitude that sex education cannot be ‘anarchist’. Perhaps
latter also shows a certain progression towards the deconstruction of gendered identities in India Song and, even more prominently, in Agatha. The preoccupation in Duras with questions of gender and sexuality may be usefully theorised by drawing on ideas central to feminist psychoanalysis. Although both feminism and psychoanalysis have lost the central position they occupied among the various approaches to film studies
In this chapter we focus on the ways film and television comedy have presented gender and sexuality. These subjects cross over in more ways than one. Gender is an issue of difference and difference has continually proved difficult for human cultures to negotiate. Patriarchal culture, that is, society which is structured in order to give the male sex many advantages over the
matched by South Australia the same year and echoed soon after in other parts of the Empire, including India, where it increased from 10 to 12 in 1891. And if, as Antoinette Burton puts it, ‘1885 was clearly the annus mirabilis of sexual politics in locations beyond London’, 1 this seems to have been more than coincidence. Evidence that English developments were originary, their colonial counterparts derivative, is apparently plentiful. The derivative hypothesis, which reads colonial sexuality politics as something England
assesses the understanding of female sexuality that was constructed by these experts and the effect this had on Catholic women’s marital experiences. Second, June’s response epitomised the way that many of the interviewees conflated the Church’s teaching on contraceptive morality with its wider approach to sex. My question was about her experience of practising NFP, but her response
Porno and after If 1968 marked a watershed in French cinema’s engagement with politics and history (see chapter 2 ), 1974 did the same for representations of sexuality. In that year, pornography entered mainstream French cinema. Emmanuelle and the legitimising of the porn film The gradual relaxation of censorship in the late 1960s had seen a steady increase