This book examines the (in)visibility of romantic love in the legal discourse surrounding modern Australian marriage. It looks at how romantic love has become a core part of modernity, and a dominant part of the Western marriage discourse, and considers how the ideologies of romantic love are (or are not) replicated in the legal meaning of marriage. This examination raises two key issues. If lo…
This open access book investigates the pathologisation of homosexuality during the fascist regime in Italy through an analysis of the case of G., a man with "homosexual tendencies" interned in the Collegno mental health hospital in 1928. No systematic study exists on the possibility that Fascism used internment in an asylum as a tool of repression for LGBT people, as an alternative to confineme…
Gender Studies; Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging; Family
"Health and healing have been central concerns throughout human history. Individuals and societies have devised multiple ways to health. Healing practices have often been linked to questions of knowledge, power, politics, and morals. The limits of acceptable healing have been contested by men and women, priests and doctors, elites and commoners, indigenous peoples and colonialists. Successful h…
What was romance like for Canadians a century ago? What qualities did marriageable men and women look for in prospective mates? How did they find suitable partners in difficult circumstances such as frontier isolation and parental disapproval, and, when they did, how did courtship proceed in the immediate post-Victorian era, when traditional romantic ideals and etiquette were colliding with the…
Christian Haag holds a diploma degree in Sociology from the University of Bamberg and also studied at the National University of Ireland in Galway. He has taught and researched at the chair of Sociology I at the University of Bamberg, at the State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg (ifb), and at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His work is focussed on social inequality, …
As a result of widespread mistreatment and overt discrimination in all dimensions of their lives, women lack significant autonomy. The central preoccupation of this book is to explore key sources of female empowerment and discuss the current challenges and opportunities for the future. Schematically, three main domains are distinguished. The first is marriage and women’s relative bargaining p…
Drawing in contributions from the United States, the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book seeks to foreground shifting experiences of teenage pregnancy and parenting in time and space. In the process, the work cuts across enduring ‘stigma' contests and dominant discourses which seek to capture, understand and render fixable the ‘problem' of teen…
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency marked a conclusive end to the Reagan era, writes John Kenneth White in Barack Obama's America. Reagan symbolized a 1950s and 1960s America, largely white and suburban, with married couples and kids at home, who attended church more often than not. Obama's election marked a new era, the author writes. Whites will be a minority by 2042. Marriage is …
Drawing in contributions from the United States, the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book seeks to foreground shifting experiences of teenage pregnancy and parenting in time and space. In the process, the work cuts across enduring ‘stigma' contests and dominant discourses which seek to capture, understand and render fixable the ‘problem' of teen…