This chapter argues that through narrating the specific experiences of enslaved women and their freedom practices, from alternative kinship practices and strategic sexual relationships to knowledge of the slave economy and its reproductive logic, The History of Mary Prince imagines future freedoms while critiquing white inhumanity and the place of enslaved women within slavery’s rape culture. The chapter examines how enslaved women created and held onto kinship; how they used their sexuality to navigate their confinement and challenge ownership over their bodies; how Prince critiques white supremacy and its practices, including rape culture and the inability of white people to have sympathy for the enslaved; and how Prince imagined future freedoms, such as moving back to Antigua as a free woman, and freedom for all enslaved people. Through this analysis the chapter argues that Prince’s narrative challenges the silence of the colonial archive and allows us to see enslaved women beyond the violence they faced.

Sexual health is an important component of a person’s overall well-being. Physiologic, psychologic, anatomic, and hormonal changes inherent to pregnancy negatively affect sexual function. Sexual frequency and satisfaction progressively decline over the course of pregnancy, worsening in the third trimester. Initiating a discussion regarding sexuality during pre- and post-natal care can lessen the degree of sexual dysfunction. It is imperative for providers to counsel pregnant patients that the alterations in sexual function that occur during this time are normal and are seen in most antepartum patients. Additional management strategies include relationship nurturing, stress management, and addressing physical limitations that commonly arise with advancing gestation.

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.

Just as Song of Solomon and Down These Mean Streets inspired Junot Díaz to become a writer, Youngblood (1954), a novel by the radical African American author John Oliver Killens, inspired Piri Thomas to write Down These Mean Streets (1967). What does Thomas’s personal relationship with Killens reveal about the intertextual relationship between DTMS and Youngblood? What can we learn from reading DTMS as a coming-of-age memoir rather than as a coming-of-age novel? What can be gained by reading DTMS from a child-centered perspective? Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s concept of literary ancestry, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, Gerard Genette’s definition of intertextuality, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying, I argue that the shared themes of racial, sexual, and gendered trauma intertextually bind the homosocial coming-of-age narratives in DTMS and Youngblood. I examine how the coming-of-age narratives in each of these texts explore the entanglement of homosocial camaraderie and ethnic, racial, and sexual identity formation. In critically explicating these themes, this chapter expands Latino American and African American literary history and reveals new insights about the intertextual genealogy of influence between DTMS and Youngblood.

Setting sail from Gujarat across the western Indian Ocean, Chapter 2 disembarks on Mauritius, an island of sugar plantations located between South Asia, Africa, and Australia. At the heart of the chapter is Bel Ombre, a sugar plantation owned by a Gujarati merchant from the port city of Rander and the site of his residence in the late nineteenth century. In Gujarat, old merchant homes erase the wider oceanic context of plantation capitalism, slavery, and indentured labor. An emphasis on family itineraries displaces economic profits and proscribed intimacies. To track these points of contact in the late nineteenth century, the chapter analyzes colonial records of plantation ownership in the notarial records in autopsies, letters of helps, and other documents from the Protector of Immigrations records in the Mauritius National Archive in order to understand the broader context of racial capitalism that shaped life in Gujarat’s ports. The chapter argues that plantations – paradigmatic sites of colonial capital – were intimately connected to Gujarat’s havelis. In doing so it provides a critical understanding of family and belonging beyond the endogamous merchant family.

Chapter 3 opens with the haveli of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859) in the Gujarati city of Navsari to explore entanglements of home spaces, local libraries, and histories related to the Parsis. Turning from the colonial archive to the vernacular library and reading room, the chapter examines the nexus between the homes of Parsi capitalists who migrated to Bombay, merchant-sponsored libraries, and Parsi histories authored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These texts (community histories, genealogies, and city histories) were occupied by questions of place, settlement, and community. The chapter argues that the late eighteenth-century relocation of Parsis down the Indian Ocean coastline from old Gujarati ports to British colonial Bombay was a key dimension of this literature. The publication of these texts, the new views of gendered belonging they hold within them, and the creation of libraries in old ports indicate the archival energy generated by colonial capitalism. The chapter places Parsi vernacular historical production within a broader context of colonial thinking on race and gender.

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.