Sex offered intimate access to the emperor; imperial sex partners therefore were potentially amongst the most influential members of court, even if they lacked official positions or were of low social status. This chapter begins by discussing and explaining an historical anomaly: the absence at Rome of a ‘harem’ – an institutionalized reserve of women attached to the court as exclusive sexual partners for the emperor. It then examines the access to the emperor that sexual partners like concubines had, and the influence of these partners on court dynamics. Finally, it considers the role of sex, sexuality, and gender expression in the performance of imperial power at court. Underlying the analysis are the often outrageous tales told by the sources about emperors’ sex lives; the chapter argues that these cannot be simply taken at face value but are useful in reconstructing patterns of thinking about how sex intersected with imperial power.

The queer femme disrupts the legibility of queerness and politics since the feminine is scapegoated for its subjugation as false and inferior. This essay explores the cultural genealogy of queer femme invisibility by reading white women physician characters in late nineteenth-century New Woman novels in relation to the science of sexology and feminist dress reform as contrapuntal forces that informed the viability of gender expression. Henry James’s The Bostonians, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and William Dean Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice present variations on the cultural dichotomy between femme and science framed by the marriage plot. Through the politics of dress the possibility of the queer femme is both acknowledged and erased as a legitimate expression and valid identity. These novels trace an incipient femme sensibility bound to whiteness that disrupts assumptions about the coherence of representation required for viability of minoritarian gender identities.

Identifying and quantifying sex differences and similarities has been a central research question and fascinated scientists for centuries. A large body of work has been accumulated on this topic; however, conclusions are often drawn as if they are applicable across cultures even though studies have predominantly relied on Western samples. This chapter reviews cross-cultural literature on several early childhood sex differences in domains of development that have caught attention in the literature recently: gender-typed play, gender identity, and gender expression. We also offer an overview of possible influences on sex differences, including evolutionary, biodevelopmental (genetics, sex hormones, and immune factors), and sociocultural mechanisms (socialization and macro-cultural factors). Given that a cross-cultural perspective has often been lacking in this literature, this chapter reviews research on early gender development in males and females from Western populations as well as the non-Western populations wherever possible to highlight important cultural (in)consistencies.