This chapter examines the role of the papacy in the history of marriage regulation in a long-term perspective. The core theme of corporeality is investigated between doctrine and practice. On the one hand, the body is a central good whose rights of use are mutually exchanged by the spouses within the framework of the marriage contract; on the other hand, it is a deadly burden, the place where the flesh manifests itself with its law that contradicts reason. In the light of this tension, the position of papal authority – in particular the power to bind and dissolve – is addressed by examining its pronouncements, especially the Decretales, conciliar legislation, and the publication of encyclicals and apostolic exhortations up to the most recent on the subject: Amoris laetitia, by Pope Francis I. Finally, some cases that have been dealt with by courts such as the Penitentiary, the Holy Office, and the Rota are examined.

This chapter argues that scholars of sex, sexuality, and gender have begun to engage with global histories, but in a selective manner and often characterised by ideas of one-way dissemination from Europe to locations beyond its borders. It suggests some entry points for a richer, multidirectional historiography, including the movements of indigenous and colonised peoples, economies of trading sex, the regulation of reproduction, and new histories of feminisms. Non-binary forms of gender and queer sexualities are prominent within such literatures and help to complicate established narratives. The chapter also highlights historiographical contributions that diversify our histories away from ‘great power’ geopolitics and draw out the specificity of regions such as eastern and central Europe and the experiences of ‘non-aligned’ states and of non-state actors such as religious organizations and racialized historical actors.

This chapter takes three plant types – the shady tree, the happy crop, and the wayside flower – as starting points for an exploration of ancient attitudes towards plants as both in harmony with and divergent from human worldviews and goals. It demonstrates how the same or similar plants can represent very different moods in different settings, sometimes positively reinforcing a human view, sometimes obstructing it. The connection between the sense of a human lifespan and the longevity or brevity of plants’ lives is forged and reforged in different contexts, while very human concerns with morality and aesthetics are differently projected onto these three broad categories of plant. Ranging from the earliest Greek works to the mid-imperial period of Rome, the chapter highlights both some continuities and some differences emerging in the course of around 900 years of literary engagement with plants.

This chapter emphasises the multifaceted influences that impact individuals as they initiate, sustain, and terminate relationships. These relationships extend beyond the immediate couple, involving broader kinship and societal frameworks. People make nuanced distinctions between various relationship forms and the roles and responsibilities assigned to partners. The chapter highlights the significance of local terminologies in conveying the manifestation of pleasure, different relationship forms, and emotional dynamics. While the fluidity of contemporary relationships in Freetown may appear less burdened by inequality than rural marriages, they encounter their own set of challenges. Such relationships lack reliable foundations, potentially collapsing and leaving individuals without the support of family or community. Additionally, violence can emerge from power imbalances, manipulation, and the complex interplay of emotions and entitlement. This chapter sheds light on how love and relationships are intricately interwoven with societal expectations, personal aspirations, and economic constraints, ultimately shaping the emotional landscape of Freetown.

Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.

Americanist literary criticism has long emphasized the “new” as moments of rupture with traditional modes of interpretation. From New Historicism to the New Americanists, this introduction takes stock of some of these developments over the last twenty years, providing at once an overview and ideas about new directions that the field of nineteenth-century Americanist literary criticism might take in the future. In particular, it highlights the importance of critical modes that focus on bodies and sexualities, move away from the nation-state, adjust the scales of analysis, and reconsider aesthetics.

This chapter examines how women within the boundaries of the family and marriage became central to interwar Japan’s international relations. Scholars have argued that Japan’s politics, economy, and society shifted from liberalism and internationalism in the 1910s–1920s to conservatism and isolationism in the 1930s. While women’s history has been studied along the same lines, this chapter explores the continued reinterpretations of emerging ideals about gender, emphasizing the continuity and discontinuity of Japan’s modernity spanning those two decades. At the heart of those ideals were informal marital relationships – socialist and companionate marriages – introduced from Soviet Russia and the United States, and global concerns in the League of Nations about human trafficking involving prostitution and daughter adoption. Japanese intellectuals, social leaders, and diplomats continued to engage with reformist ideals to address women’s inequalities in marriage and the family. However, their appeals to progress redefined Japanese women in the preexisting family system and considered them to be promiscuous, reinforcing gendered burdens and sexual differences within Japan’s national contexts.

This chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.

In Islam, sexual relations are permissible within marriage between a man and a woman. Islam encourages fertility between legally married couples; therefore, the treatment of infertility is permissible. Contraception use for family planning is permissible, but the use of contraception for permanently limiting the number of children is debated. The use of a third party in reproduction is not accepted in Islam. It is advisable that Muslim men or women seek medical care for sexual and reproductive issues from Muslim health care providers of their respective sex.

Epilepsy remains the most common neurologic disorder in childhood and adolescence, with certain epilepsy syndromes such as childhood absence epilepsy (CAE) and juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) being more common in girls. Psychiatric disorders are a common comorbidity in children with epilepsy, especially two behavioral conditions: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder. In addition, psychosocial issues of stigma, bullying and violence remain potent disruptors of patients’ development at this stage in their lives. Emerging information on how cultural, ethnical and gender diversity may affect care should also be taken into consideration and proactively addressed. As the care of children and adolescents with epilepsy has grown more complex over the past decades, the transition from pediatric to adult care systems needs to become purposeful, such as the medical, psychosocial, educational and vocational needs of young adults with long-term medical conditions are actively

In this chapter we focus on associations between intrusive parenting, the parent–adolescent relationship, and adolescents’ information management strategies. Theoretically, parenting that threatens adolescents’ autonomy leads to suboptimal adolescent adjustment. We discuss when overprotective parenting, psychological control, behavioral control, and helicopter parenting may be intrusive and how they are associated with the parent–adolescent relationship and adolescent information management. We also consider parental intrusiveness and adolescents’ information management in two specific contexts, namely in relation to adolescents’ sexuality and media use. We suggest that an intrusive parenting environment is not the optimal way to promote healthy adolescent information management.

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This chapter explores the diversity of experiences lived by women during the Vietnam War where they participated as politicians, soldiers, diplomats, covert agents, employees, and active civilian voices. The chapter focuses on the years 1954 to 1975 to illustrate the changing expectations and opportunities for women from the fall of the French colonial government through escalation. The chapter introduces the experiences of women across both the North and South to illustrate similarities and differences that occurred as a result of the large-scale American presence in South Vietnamese urban spaces. In particular, the study explores the lines between civilian and combatant. Through their active participation, women shaped foreign relations through their politics, labor, and interactions with leaders and servicemembers. The military and interpersonal violence of the conflict also had unique and lasting impacts on women. Overall, the chapter seeks to examine women’s roles within the context of the war to understand their influence on the conflict.