• Our relationships with our family members, friends, and romantic partners are important to our body image and can have both negative and positive effects on our sense of self.

• Developing friendships and romantic partnerships can be an important part of your life during your teens and adulthood and can open you up to feelings of vulnerability about your appearance; experiencing some stress surrounding the initiation of relationships is common.

• Maintaining healthy relationships can contribute to your positive body image development.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.

This chapter investigates the literary practices by which twentieth-century Black queer writers have simultaneously utilized, challenged, and modified the generic conventions of autobiography. They do so, Abdur-Rahman argues, to articulate nonnormative pleasures and collective politics that are not readily conveyed by standard autobiographical writing. Because autobiography typically follows the trajectory of a linear narrative of progress, conventional autobiographies capture neither the complicated histories of African diasporic subjects nor the quotidian experiences and social conditions that shape collective Black life and politics. Queer autobiographies typically take the form of the coming-out narrative, which emphasizes the primacy of sexuality over other components of personal identity and other forms of (communal) becoming and belonging. Abdur-Rahman deploys recent reconfigurations of sexual disclosure from "coming out to inviting in" to argue that Black queer life writing redefines the domains around which sexual identities are believed to cohere.

This chapter examines and defines a number of terms fundamental to understanding women including sex, gender, gender identity, gender roles, sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual and gender fluidity, and gender/sex. Although these aspects of being a woman are connected, they are nonetheless distinct. To understand what it means to be a woman, it is important to understand the complexities of each of these concepts both within and across cultures as well as to take an intersectional approach that considers all of a woman’s identities. We propose that the answer to the question of who is a woman is that women are those individuals who identify as being a woman, regardless of their sex assigned at birth, gender roles, sexual orientation, or sexual identity. We also concluded that although there are certainly some biological differences between men and women, women’s sexuality and sexual well-being can be best understood from a social constructionist perspective that takes sociocultural influences into account.