This chapter explores an 1886 judicial decision by Justice Syed Mahmood (d. 1321/1903)—the son of the famous Indian Muslim reformist and educator Sir Syed Ahmed Khan—on a case involving the restitution of conjugal rights, namely, the ability of a husband to sue his wife in court for unlawfully abandoning the martial home. This decision is important for the ways it reflects the operation of Islamic law in a context of British domination, in which premodern Islamic legal norms are read through the lense of the British Common Law tradition, and in which the apparatus and ecosystem of Islamic law have been transformed almost beyond recognition by the emergence of the modern state.

Take a broad look at American family and friendhip ntworks, examining marriage, child-rearing, and other family and personal relations among the consuls and members of the American community in the Mediterranean.

This chapter explores a controversial 2005 legal opinion (fatwā) of the MUI—the Indonesian Ulama Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) empowered by President Suharto in 1975 to serve as a semi-official religious authority—on the subject of interreligious marriage, and specifically, marriage to so-called ‘People of the Book.’ The MUI finds such marriages to be unlawful, based on the preponderance of harm over benefit therein. This is somewhat surprising given the general permissibility of such unions according to the four Sunnī schools. The logic of the arguments produced in favour of the prohibition are discussed, as well as the political and social contexts of the debate.

This chapter focuses on Sappho’s engagement with epic, by focusing on the appeal and significance of her songs for audiences beyond Lesbos. The argument is in three parts. First, it demonstrates that Lesbos was famous for its women and its songs also independently of Sappho: her songs helped to increase the reputation of her native island by revealing exactly what went into the making of its glamorous women. In fragments 98, 44, and several others, we see lovely women and precious goods crossing the sea and causing great delight on arrival – or disappointment when they fail to materialise. Likewise, Sappho’s own songs must have travelled overseas causing pleasure and, simultaneously, increasing the value of Lesbian exports, including women (whether they travelled overseas as brides or upmarket courtesans). Second, this chapter observes that, in both Sappho and Alcaeus, heroic characters drawn from the Trojan saga are always involved in travelling and getting married. Finally it makes the point that, in Sappho’s extant fragments, intertextual engagements with epic work primarily by superimposing the itineraries of people dear to her onto the routes traced by heroes and heroines in their own journeys of homecoming and homemaking.

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.

Chapter Three analyzes Rogers’ move into vaudeville , the national entertainment circuit that fascinated the American public during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Oklahoman became a star attraction whose cowboy garb and tremendous roping skills delighted audiences all over the country. Rogers also gradually developed another skill that became his calling card – humorous commentary. As an emblem of the American West that was gradually disappearing in the wake of urban, industrial growth, and a natural humorist whose down-home jests and good-natured wisecracks delighted audiences, Rogers began to establish a national presence. This period also saw his stormy courtship of, and marriage to, Betty Blake, a young woman from back home. The marriage would last for the rest of his life.

Chapter Ten analyzes Will Rogers the private individual. Looking at the real person behind the celebrity entertainer and writer, it focuses on several personal qualities that defined his adult life. He manifested a great loyalty to his wife, four children, and the idea of family. He maintained his rural roots, sustaining a lifelong attraction to riding and roping, horses and cattle that culminated in his beloved ranch domicile outside Los Angeles. He developed a cadre of close friends from the worlds of entertainment, journalism, and politics. Possessed of abundant nervous energy, he became addicted to travel, both nationally and globally. A man of common tastes in food, clothing, and entertainent, he nonetheless harbored an intense desire to succeed. At the deepest level, Rogers displayed a certain bifurcated quality: essentially reserved, earnest, moody, and sometimes ill-at-ease in private, but tranforming into a witty, charming entertainer and pundit when dealing with a group. Thus the private man balanced an authentic, common man persona with the popular, down-home, humorous image of "Will Rogers" that he crafted throughout his adult life.

Marriage equality was a significant achievement, one that yielded both practical and symbolic benefits for hundreds of thousands of queer households. At the same time, marriage equality is not the same as full equality. In the years since the Obergefell decision, LGBTQ rights advocates have continued to fight difficult and demoralizing battles against harmful laws and policies, which have increasingly targeted transgender rights. However, the movement’s past successes should offer hope for the future. The history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy reveals that small victories at the state and local level, brought about by working with nonlegal actors, can transform both the law and society. Although advocates have not yet achieved gay liberation’s visions of the future, they have attained meaningful reforms. The movement’s history thus offers a crucial reminder that the law can change society for the better.

The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.

, During the 1980s and early 1990s, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the country, thousands of gay men and lesbians perished from AIDS-related infections. Their same-sex partners quickly discovered that they had no rights because the law did not recognize their relationships. Advocates consequently pressed municipalities to adopt domestic partnership programs, a concept that originated in union efforts to secure benefits for unmarried partners. In the 1980s, cities, towns, and counties around the country began offering both health benefits to their employees as well as registries where all couples could record their commitment. The total number of these programs were small, and the rights they offered were limited. However, they helped produce new debates over the nature and meaning of family. They also inspired queer workers in the private sector to demand domestic partnership benefits from their employers. By the mid-1990s, domestic partnership benefits had become a mainstay of corporate America.

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, same-sex couples had become visible as partners and parents, as well as integral members of straight families. This chapter demonstrates how these previous victories on behalf of the queer family made marriage equality possible. When the movement for marriage equality began, advocates emphasized that allowing same-sex couples to marry was a matter of ensuring justice and equality. However, that argument failed to persuade decisionmakers, who instituted same-sex marriage bans around the country. Advocates were only able to gain legal ground when they began emphasizing how discrimination harmed longstanding, devoted same-sex couples, the children they raised, and the straight parents who loved them. They were able to stake these claims because gay- and lesbian-headed households already existed, thanks to years of family-centered strategies. Although marriage equality is the queer rights movement’s best-known success, it came as a postscript to decades of family-centered strategies.

Chapter 7 is focused on conversions in a family context, collecting and comparing evidence from Gaul, Hispania, and Italy. The starting point is an examination of the secular and ecclesiastical rules governing interdenominational marriages and the differences in church loyalty between parents and children. Then the conclusions drawn from the normative sources are connected with what we know about the social reality of ‘mixed’ families. Given the nature of our evidence, the chapter focuses primarily on marriages and conversions in royal contexts. It analyses the examples from the ruling house of Suevi, marriages in the Burgundian family of Gibichungs, and marriages between the Visigothic and Frankish ruling families.

This chapter surveys the culture, knowledge, practice, and experience of sex in Chang’an (modern Xi’an), capital of Tang dynasty China, during the eighth and ninth centuries. It discusses courtesans and candidates, medical and religious texts, sex in literature, and ideals and practices of marriage. The era coincided with the height of the examination culture, whereby all government officials were expected to demonstrate high literacy skills and knowledge of Confucian classics. As the Tang administration increasingly relied on the civil service examinations to recruit high-ranking officials, so Chang’an became the site where examination candidates and graduates mingled with courtesans and flaunted their sensual pleasures. The changing religious landscape throughout China also reshaped how sex was understood and experienced in Chang’an in the Tang era: while Daoist sexologists continued to produce writings about the art of the bedchamber, Tantric Buddhist ideals of sexuality as a source of spiritual energy took root. Meanwhile Tang medical texts discussed sex extensively, providing a theoretical basis for treating symptoms related to intercourse and pregnancy and prescribing aphrodisiacs. The very first wave of erotica in Chinese history appeared. Aspects of Chang’an sexuality exerted a strong influence on sexuality in China for centuries to come.

This chapter presents an overview of key views on erotic desire and its management as well as common practices and norms in the Greek and Roman worlds from the seventh century BCE to the third century CE. No single canonical text or religious moral code existed that prescribed sexual relations. Instead, we rely on their rich textual and visual culture to reconstruct standards, attitudes, and practices. We know most about the sexuality of elite male citizens since most texts and visual objects were created by and for them. Gender and status were key components in any sexual relations, with the citizen male having the greatest access to partners: wives, sex labourers, other free men and boys, and enslaved people. Sexual virtue was expected of free citizen women and girls, but it may not have excluded sexual relations with other females, at least in the Greek world. The chapter surveys concepts of desire in literature (by genre) and sexual imagery in art (including male, female, and transgender bodies), and considers the everyday practices and experiences of sexuality for free, enslaved, elite, and non-elite. What emerges is a complex and even conflicting view of desire and sexual relations. Rather than a belief system, we more accurately talk about discourses of ancient sexualities.

This chapter discusses social concepts, notions and assumptions that prevailed in the ancient Near East concerning human sexuality. Its introduction supplies chronological, geographical, and cultural definitions to explicate what is meant by the term ‘ancient Near East’, and expands on the sources of information used in the chapter, their contributions and limitations. The introduction also elaborates on the categories and aspects of human sexuality discussed in the chapter. Subsequently, the chapter is organized thematically. Each theme focuses on a specific category of sexuality, which is discussed according to the pertinent sources of information available to us, including legal, literary, cultic, and others. The categories surveyed in the chapter are: Sex and Reproduction, Sex and the Body, Gender Norms and Inequality, Sex and Marriage, Sex and Slavery, Sex and Politics, Sex and Religious and Cultic Practices, and Sex and Criminal Law. The chapter demonstrates how different textual genres reflect the role of sexuality in ancient Near Eastern societies: official law regulated sexual behaviour, literary texts echoed social norms, and cultic texts related to a variety of matters that involved human sexuality. The chapter highlights topics such as male privilege and gender inequality, social hierarchy, and cultural differentiation.

This chapter provides an overview of how various aspects of sexuality are dealt with in different Islamic traditions. If first looks at the Qur'an, the Sunna and pre-modern Islamic legal sources. It then focuses on how some medical and erotological sources dealt with the issue in the past, and finally looks at how contemporary feminists are pushing back against patriarchal interpretations of Islamic traditions. The chapter argues that pre-modern texts can help explain how sexuality is understood in contemporary Muslim-majority societies, where continuities are as striking as ruptures, especially when coming to religious or legal sources. It also reminds us of the danger of essentialism, oversimplification and lack of historical contextualization when looking at Islamic and religious traditions in general.

This chapter reviews what can be gleaned about human sexuality from the evolutionary and ethnographic record. Ancestral human sexuality leaves neither fossil nor archaeological evidence, but inferences about how humans mated, consorted, parented, formed partnerships, and aggregated into families can be drawn from two large and growing bodies of work, both discussed in this chapter. The first are anatomical and biological indicators of ancestral mating patterns inferred from fossil evidence as well as observations from nonhuman primates. The second is ethnographic research across an array of contemporary human societies, which highlights variation in mating, marriage, and family structure. Together, biological indicators and cross-cultural patterns shed light on the legacy, constraints, and possibilities carried forward into the diverse and variable expression of human sexuality today. Humans have a deep ancestry in a social structure of males and females living in social groups together, although how humans organize themselves is structurally different from anything observed in our closest relatives. Not only do families form around long-term pairbonds in all societies, but there is also a great deal of flexibility in who constitutes the pairbond, the families that surround them, and in the prevalence of extra-pair relationships.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.