CFP: Histories of Magic and Sex (Notches)

How have perceptions of magic shaped sexuality, love, and reproduction in the past?

“Bewitched,” “enchanted,” “spellbound,” “possessed” — the language of seduction and love is replete with allusions to magic. In the early modern period, magic and sexuality were deeply intertwined and there was a widespread consensus that humans were vulnerable to mysterious powers, especially when it came to their sex lives. For instance, accusations of love magic appear regularly in the records of the Mexican, Spanish, and Roman Inquisitions. Additionally, Renaissance scholars argued that imagination affected unborn children, forming an infant according to what its mother looked upon at the moment of conception. Amid deadly witch-hunts, anxieties about magic’s effects on fertility emerged in courts and churches. Magic haunted sexuality in innumerable ways.

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Abstinence-Only Sex Education, Tiaras and White Roses: Father-Daughter Purity Balls

The Perceptions of Pregnancy blog, like the Researchers’ Network, aims to reach beyond boundaries and borders, and to facilitate an international and interdisciplinary conversation on pregnancy and its associated bodily and emotional experiences from the earliest times to the present day. Today’s post on American Purity Balls is contributed by Jamie Wagman. 

Abstinence-Only Sex Education, Tiaras and White Roses: Double-Binds and Double-Standards at Father-Daughter Purity Balls

Everything was white. As I entered a gleaming ballroom, I surveyed the scene: a white tabletop featuring a three-tiered wedding cake topped with a castle, and underneath a snowflake adorned canopy, fathers arm in arm with their daughters, each girl carrying a long-stemmed white rose. I was attending a purity ball, or father-daughter dinner dance, where girls, mostly between ages 10 and 16, were about to pledge their virginity to their fathers until marriage.

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Crimes Related to Sexuality and Reproduction (2014)

Oxford Handbook

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Published May 2014

Daniel J.R. Grey,‘Crimes Related to Sexuality and Reproduction’ in Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 225-241.

About the Essay

This essay provides a review of English-language historiography, concentrating particularly (but not exclusively) on discussions of criminalised sexuality in Europe between the sixteenth century and early twentieth century … The themes followed here are the idea of condoned and proscribed sexuality; prostitution; and crimes relating to reproduction.

About the Handbook

Research on gender, sex, and crime today remains focused on topics that have been a mainstay of the field for several decades, but it has also recently expanded to include studies from a variety of disciplines, a growing number of countries, and on a wider range of crimes. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime reflects this growing diversity and provides authoritative overviews of current research and theory on how gender and sex shape crime and criminal justice responses to it.

The editors, Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, have assembled a diverse cast of criminologists, historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and sociologists from a number of countries to discuss key concepts and debates central to the field. The Handbook includes examinations of the historical and contemporary patterns of women’s and men’s involvement in crime; as well as biological, psychological, and social science perspectives on gender, sex, and crimal activity. Several essays discuss the ways in which sex and gender influence legal and popular reactions to crime. An important theme throughout The Handbook is the intersection of sex and gender with ethnicity, class, age, peer groups, and community as influences on crime and justice. Individual chapters investigate both conventional topics – such as domestic abuse and sexual violence – and topics that have only recently drawn the attention of scholars – such as human trafficking, honor killing, gender violence during war, state rape, and genocide.
The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime offers an unparalleled and comprehensive view of the connections among gender, sex, and crime in the United States and in many other countries. Its insights illuminate both traditional areas of study in the field and pathways for developing cutting-edge research questions.

Special Issue of Breac Journal on Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality

A peer-reviewed, paperless, academic journal, Breac begins with Irish Studies and looks outward. It pairs the work of accomplished and emerging scholars in short, focused issues with the hope of cultivating international discussions in a digital forum.

The fifth issue of Breac will explore gender and sexuality issues in Irish Studies and Irish culture. Guest editors Moynagh Sullivan and Abigail Palko invite contributions that consider issues of gender and/or sexuality, broadly defined, with a particular interest in papers that engage with intersectionality or interrogate the impact of biopolitics on everyday life.

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