The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.

Even if everyone wants to talk about sex, the most intimate aspects of a culture are the little things, which are often the most opaque. Jokes, toilet etiquette, and mutual deferrals in doorways mark shared achievements of mutual recognition. But humor and bodily practices can be the least translatable of cultural identifiers. Diaspora and foreign observers tend to overlook local class differences and a deep-seated culture of political skepticism, fixating instead on more superficial revelations of sexual behavior that may not be so surprising. How do we translate cultural differences? Is it even possible to understand each other’s jokes?

In the mountains, guerrilleras politicized the organization of reproductive labor, as their memories of armed struggle make clear. Their efforts embodied the everyday making of a liberated territory based on feminist interpretations of revolutionary values. I focus on the two largest guerrilla groups rooted in opposite ends of the country: the Popular Liberation Forces in Chalatenango department and Revolutionary People’s Army in Morazán department. I show how women fought to collectivize food production, gain access to sanitary napkins, navigate reproductive choices, and pressure FMLN leaders to punish infidelity and sexual violence. Such efforts resisted sexism within the ranks, transformed camp norms, and challenged sexist definitions of who constituted a revolutionary. From these everyday experiences, combatant women developed a vision of women’s liberation and fought to put it into practice, using documentaries to disseminate their message. In doing so, they helped to shape the political discourse of the insurgency.

Euphemisms, a particular type of idiom especially prevalent in American English, are vague or indirect expressions that often substitute harsh, embarrassing, or unpleasant terms. They are widely used to navigate sensitive topics like death and sex. “Passing away,” for example, has long been an accepted term to describe the act of dying. When euphemisms are in use for the length of time it takes to become lexicalized, they are often replaced with new ones, a phenomenon known as “the euphemism treadmill.” Correctly interpreting and using euphemisms can be difficult for EFL learners – and can lead to misuse since these expressions may rely on relevant cultural knowledge. That is unfortunate, given that euphemisms hold sensitive meanings. Artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants can now go beyond grammar correction to suggesting edits for more inclusive language, such as replacing “whitelist” with “allow-list” and “landlord” with “property owner.” Such suggestions can help inform EFLs and users from diverse cultures – who carry a different cultural baggage – of unintended bias in their writing. At the same time, these assistants also run the risk of erasing individual and cultural differences.

The women of the loyalist zone were a crucial component of the antifascist imagined community the volunteers believed they were fighting for. Chapter five shows that Spanish women ߝ although largely absent from subsequent accounts of the International Brigades ߝ were a major presence in the volunteersߣ lives, whether in the form of loyalist posters depicting heroic mothers beneath the shadows of German aircraft, news articles highlighting the tireless antifascist work taking place in rearguard factories, or letters from relatives back home encouraging the soldiers to fulfil their masculine duty by continuing to fight the enemy at the gates. Encounters could be even more direct, with many volunteers striking up relationships with young women in villages, finding themselves looked after by Spanish nurses in hospitals and pursuing opportunities for sex in brothels. To understand the origins, reception and impact of these encounters, this chapter investigates the volunteersߣ gendered assumptions about masculinity and femininity at a time of war. In so doing, it argues that encounters with women directly fed into their overlapping identities as men, as soldiers and as antifascists.

Chapter 6 uses doctrinal analysis to ask what the word ‘disfigurement’ means, and whether we can justify treating disfigurement differently from the related concepts of appearance and obesity. It identifies significant gaps created by a law which only protects a small subset of people experiencing appearance disadvantage – those with severe disfigurements – and which excludes many of those disabled by social barriers because of other aesthetic differences, such as those experiencing hair loss, those whose bodies are differently sized or those with facial movement impairments (such as facial palsy or synkinesis). It doubts whether these inconsistencies and mixed messages can be justified. It also considers whether other protected characteristics – such as sex or age – can be drafted in to fill the gaps in legal protection, but concludes that this may amplify the inconsistencies within the law.

The so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus highlights the importance of ethical living if Israel is to be holy as God is holy. This chapter discusses the historical-critical arguments around the composition of the Holiness Code but focuses mainly on bridge Leviticus creates between the holiness of Israel’s tent and God’s tent. Ethical purity is as important as ritual purity in Leviticus and requires holiness in every aspect of Israel’s life.

In the Doctrine of Right, Kant describes domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The Feyerabend lectures lack this framework, but the same set of marriage, parent-child, and master-servant relationships are united under the framework of “domestic societies.” This chapter explores domestic right in Feyerabend, mapping Kant’s careful resistance to conceptualizing these relationships in terms of property right in light of debates about marriage, domestic right, labor, and slavery unfolding in the 1780s. This resistance is informed by a paradox at the heart of Kant’s thinking about domestic right, namely, his claim that marriage and servitude are rightful while sex work and slavery are not. This puzzle arises because Kant follows Achenwall in locating slavery in domestic right, which leads to his innovative framework of domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The deep entanglement of Kant’s thinking about sex, and about service and slave labor, should lead us to think about these problems together, and to challenge the silos in Kant scholarship that treat his thinking about gender and sex distinctly from slavery and race.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter looks at the evidence of Pepys’s diary manuscript and at the implications of Pepys’s decision to write in shorthand. These are dimensions usually missing from discussion of this key source, for the nature of Pepys’s shorthand is generally not well understood by commentators. Pepys used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system, known as ‘tachygraphy’. The chapter begins by explaining how this system worked and how it shaped Pepys’s prose style. With illustrations from Pepys’s manuscript, it uses his description of the Great Fire and Charles II’s coronation to show how his pages differ from what is in print. It then explores the escalating methods of disguise that he developed for sexual passages and the implications of this. Finally, it considers what his manuscript tells us about his intentions in writing, especially about his sense of who might read his diary.

A poet celebrated for his syncretism, Shelley’s sense of fluidity arguably extends to his understanding of sex and sexuality, as he wrote during a time of peak flexibility and transition in thinking about gender-sex. Reading Erasmus Darwin’s descriptions of variously sexed plants, Ovid’s tales of shapeshifting, and William Lawrence’s intertwinement of sexed and racialised bodies, Shelley, the great poet of relation, comes to see the body as materially shifting, porous, and relational. Reading passages from A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love alongside the figure of nonbinary, intersex creation in ‘The Witch of Atlas’, Asia’s transformation into the posthuman ‘lamp of light’, and the nonhuman ‘shape all light’ in ‘The Triumph of Life’, this essay suggests Shelley began to understand polymorphous sexuality connected to sexed bodies of shapeshifting, mutable morphology.