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Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Lives (Routledge Research in Gender and Society)
by Janice L. RistockQueer lives remain at the margins of most academic inquiry into domestic violence. When same-sex violence is considered, it is most commonly as an "added on," without close attention to the specificity and meaning of violence within the lives of lesbian/ gay/ bisexual/ transgender/Two-Spirit and queer people (LGBTQ). This edited volume seeks to change this discourse by bringing together the most innovative research about intimate partner violence that is specific to the lives of LGBTQ people. Including contributions based on research conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, the volume is framed around central themes: conceptualizing violence; exploring differing spaces and lived experiences of violence; and the ethical challenges of responding to violence. The contributors also consider issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and other social differences, moving beyond a simple gender lens to one involving a framework of intersectionality.
Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans: Gender, Race, and Reform, 1840-1900
by Ashley BaggettAshley Baggett uncovers the voices of abused women who utilized the legal system in New Orleans to address their grievances from the antebellum era to the end of the nineteenth century. Poring over 26,000 records, Baggett analyzes 421 criminal cases involving intimate partner violence—physical or emotional abuse of a partner in a romantic relationship—revealing a significant demand among women, the community, and the courts for reform in the postbellum decades. Before the Civil War, some challenges and limits to the male privilege of chastisement existed, but the gendered power structure and the veil of privacy for families in the courts largely shielded abusers from criminal prosecution. However, the war upended gender expectations and increased female autonomy, leading to the demand for and brief recognition of women's right to be free from violence. Baggett demonstrates how postbellum decades offered a fleeting opportunity for change before the gender and racial expectations hardened with the rise of Jim Crow. Her findings reveal previously unseen dimensions of women's lives both inside and outside legal marriage and women's attempts to renegotiate power in relationships. Highlighting the lived experiences of these women, Baggett tracks how gender, race, and location worked together to define and redefine gender expectations and legal rights. Moreover, she demonstrates recognition of women's legal personhood as well as differences between northern and southern states' trajectories in response to intimate partner violence during the nineteenth century.
Intimate Partner Violence, Risk and Security: Securing Women’s Lives in a Global World (Routledge Studies in Crime, Security and Justice)
by Kate Fitz-Gibbon Sandra Walklate Jude McCulloch JaneMaree MaherThis edited collection addresses intimate partner violence, risk and security as global issues. Although intimate partner violence, risk and security are intimately connected they are rarely considered in tandem in the context of global security. Yet, intimate partner violence causes widespread physical, sexual and/or psychological harm. It is the most common type of violence against women internationally and is estimated to affect 30 per cent of women worldwide. Intimate partner violence has received significant attention in recent years, animating political debate, policy and law reform as well as scholarly attention. In bringing together a range of international experts, this edited collection challenges status quo understandings of risk and questions how we can reposition the risk of IPV, and particularly the risk of IPH, as a critical site of global and national security. It brings together contributions from a range of disciplines and international jurisdictions, including from Australia and New Zealand, United Kingdom, Europe, United States, North America, Brazil and South Africa. The contributions here urge us to think about perpetrators in more nuanced and sophisticated ways with chapters pointing to the structural and social factors that facilitate and sustain violence against women and IPV. Contributors point out that states not only exacerbate the structural conditions producing the risks of violence, but directly coerce and control women as both citizens and non-citizens. States too should be understood as collaborators and facilitators of intimate partner violence. Effective action against intimate partner violence requires sustained responses at the global, state and local levels to end gender inequality. Critical to this end are environmental issues, poverty and the divisions, often along ‘race’ and ethnic lines, underpinning other dimensions of social and economic inequality.
Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel
by Bettina ApthekerAt eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions.A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.
Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel
by Bettina F. ApthekerAt eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U. S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U. S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions. Includes photos with captions.
An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People)
by Laura S. GrilloThroughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women—the Mothers—make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or pestles, they strip naked and slap their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. In An Intimate Rebuke Laura S. Grillo draws on fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire that spans three decades to illustrate how these rituals of Female Genital Power (FGP) constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. When deployed in secret, FGP operates as spiritual warfare against witchcraft; in public, it serves as a political activism. During Côte d’Ivoire’s civil wars FGP challenged the immoral forces of both rebels and the state. Grillo shows how the ritual potency of the Mothers’ nudity and the conjuration of their sex embodies a moral power that has been foundational to West African civilization. Highlighting the remarkable continuity of the practice across centuries while foregrounding the timeliness of FGP in contemporary political resistance, Grillo shifts perspectives on West African history, ethnography, comparative religious studies, and postcolonial studies.
Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)
by Catherine A. JonesIn Intimate Reconstructions, Catherine Jones considers how children shaped, and were shaped by, Virginia's Reconstruction. Jones argues that questions of how to define, treat, reform, or protect children were never far from the surface of public debate and private concern in post-Civil War Virginia. Through careful examination of governmental, institutional, and private records, the author traces the unpredictable paths black and white children traveled through this tumultuous period. Putting children at the center of the narrative reveals the unevenness of the transitions that defined Virginia in the wake of the Civil War: from slavery to freedom, from war to peace, and from secession to a restored but fractured union. While some children emerged from the war under the protection of families, others navigated treacherous circumstances on their own. The reconfiguration of postwar households, and disputes over children's roles within them, fueled broader debates over public obligations to protect all children. The reorganization of domestic life was a critical proving ground for Reconstruction. Freedpeople's efforts to recover children strained against white Virginians' efforts to retain privileges formerly undergirded by slavery. At the same time, orphaned children, particularly those who populated the streets of Virginia's cities, prompted contentious debate over who had responsibility for their care, as well as rights to their labor. By revisiting conflicts over the practices of orphan asylums, apprenticeship, and adoption, Intimate Reconstructions demonstrates that race continued to shape children's postwar lives in decisive ways. In private and public, children were at the heart of Virginians' struggles over the meanings of emancipation and Confederate defeat.
The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (Critical Asian Studies)
by Perveez ModyThis book provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the individual and the couple in contemporary India.
Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History
by Margot Canaday Nancy F. Cott Robert O. SelfFourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.
Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History
by Margot Canaday Nancy F. Cott Robert O. SelfFourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.
Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History
by Margot Canaday Nancy F. Cott Robert O. SelfFourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.
Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse
by Andreea RitivoiHannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said each steered major intellectual and political schools of thought in American political discourse after World War II, yet none of them was American, which proved crucial to their ways of arguing and reasoning both in and out of the American context. In an effort to convince their audiences they were American enough, these thinkers deployed deft rhetorical strategies that made their cosmopolitanism feel acceptable, inspiring radical new approaches to longstanding problems in American politics. Speaking like natives, they also exploited their foreignness to entice listeners to embrace alternative modes of thought. Intimate Strangers unpacks this "stranger ethos," a blend of detachment and involvement that manifested in the persona of a prophet for Solzhenitsyn, an impartial observer for Arendt, a mentor for Marcuse, and a victim for Said. Yet despite its many successes, the stranger ethos did alienate many audiences, and critics continue to dismiss these thinkers not for their positions but because of their foreign point of view. This book encourages readers to reject this kind of critical xenophobia, throwing support behind a political discourse that accounts for the ideals of citizens and noncitizens alike.
Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse
by Andreea Deciu RitivoiAndreea Deciu Ritivoi is professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on immigration, exile, political discourse, argumentation theory, and intellectual history. She is the author of Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity and Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory.
Intimate Strangers: Commercial Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the Making of Truth
by Veronika SieglZooming in on commercial surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine, Intimate Strangers addresses market expansion into the intimate spheres of life that play out on women's bodies as mothers and workers. Veronika Siegl follows the inner workings of a surrogacy market marked by secrecy, distrust, and anonymous business relationships. She explores intended mothers' anxious struggles for a child in light of stigmatized infertility and the aggressive biopolitics of motherhood; the uncertain but pragmatic pathways in and out of fertility clinics as surrogates navigate harsh economic realities and resist being objectified or morally judged; and the powerful role of agents and doctors who have found a profitable niche in nurturing and facilitating other people's existential hopes. Intimate Strangers discusses these issues against the backdrop of ultra-conservatism and moral governance in Russia, the rising international popularity of the Ukrainian surrogacy market, and the pervasiveness of neo-liberal ideologies and individualized notions of reproductive freedom.
Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980-2020 (Asian American History & Cultu)
by Tritia ToyotaAt the end of the twentieth century, many twenty-something Japanese women migrated to places like Southern California with few skills and an overall lack of human capital. These women, members of the shin Issei community, sought economic opportunities unavailable to them in their homeland. In Intimate Strangers, shin Issei women tell stories of precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality, first in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and later in the United States, where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship. Intimate Strangers charts the experiences of shin Issei lives: their existence in Japan prior to migration, their motivations for moving to the United States, their settlement, and their growing awareness of their place in American society. Toyota chronicles how these resilient young women became active agents in circumventing social restrictions to fashion new lives of meaning. The Nikkei community (Americans of Japanese ancestry who were born in the United States) has been transformed by the inclusion of shin Issei, and Toyota describes the tensions around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and the possibility of common belonging. Intimate Strangers is a perceptive study of migration and community incorporation enacted around cultural differences and processes.
Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age
by Simeon KooleAn insightful history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain told through a single sense: touch. When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present. Intimate Subjects takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge. With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today.
The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation
by Nancy AbelmannThe majority of the 30,000-plus undergraduates at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign--including the large population of Korean American students--come from nearby metropolitan Chicago. Among the campus's largest non-white ethnicities, Korean American students arrive at college hoping to realize the liberal ideals of the modern American university, in which individuals can exit their comfort zones to realize their full potential regardless of race, nation, or religion. However, these ideals are compromised by their experiences of racial segregation and stereotypes, including images of instrumental striving that set Asian Americans apart. In The Intimate University, Nancy Abelmann explores the tensions between liberal ideals and the particularities of race, family, and community in the contemporary university. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research with Korean American students at the University of Illinois and closely following multiple generations of a single extended Korean American family in the Chicago metropolitan area, Abelmann investigates the complexity of racial politics at the American university today. Racially hyper-visible and invisible, Korean American students face particular challenges as they try to realize their college dreams against the subtle, day-to-day workings of race. They frequently encounter the accusation of racial self-segregation--a charge accentuated by the fact that many attend the same Evangelical Protestant church--even as they express the desire to distinguish themselves from their families and other Korean Americans. Abelmann concludes by examining the current state of the university, reflecting on how better to achieve the university's liberal ideals despite its paradoxical celebration of diversity and relative silence on race.
Intimate Violence: A Study of Injustice
by Julie BlackmanTraditional analyses of domestic battery often point to the batterer's need for power and control to explain patterns of violent behavior. Offering a nonjudgmental and compassionate view of the interior life of the batterer, Intimate Violence moves beyond this explanation and transforms our understanding of the psychic origins of abuse. The book is divided into three main sections. The first assesses psychoanalytic understanding of the inner mechanisms of the batterer's violent behavior toward close family members, pointing to disruptions in the abuser's "narcissistic equilibrium." The second section looks more broadly at the ideas of "batterer" and "victim," and the ways these categories—and the social stigma and support accorded respectively—may impede healing and resolution. The third section addresses various treatment methods that promise permanent changes in batterers' behavior.Intimate Violence also deals frankly with the dynamics of the therapist/client relationship in battery cases, particularly transference and countertransference. How do therapists deal with feelings of revulsion for the batterer's behavior, or for the batterer him- or herself? How do they resist the very human urge within themselves to punish their clients? Scalia persuasively argues that these issues subtly undermine counseling, causing resistance to develop within both parties, and that a new approach to therapy is needed. His analysis suggests that "emotional communication" in the context of prolonged and deep psychoanalysis enables patient and practitioner alike to transcend cycles of recrimination and defensiveness.
Intimate Violence: Contemporary Treatment Innovations
by Donald Dutton Daniel Jay SonkinTake an updated approach to treating partner violence! Intimate Violence: Contemporary Treatment Innovations examines new and innovative approaches to treating domestic violence, de-emphasizing the unilateral, psychoeducational approach in favor of treatment modalities that focus on the offenders' individual characteristics. The book presents up-to-date information on techniques for working with men and women who commit intimate partner violence, moving past a "one size fits all" mentality to develop treatment that affects long-term changes in beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes. It also includes a brief history of perpetrator treatment, feminist perspectives on treatment, and recent research findings that suggest domestic violence offenders need more than education and attitude adjustment. Intimate Violence explores key treatment issues not usually found in more traditional approaches, particularly shame and attachment. The book focuses on alternate methods based on assessment and tailored to meet the treatment needs of specific populations, including women, lesbian batterers, men with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and Aboriginal men living in Canada. It also examines the Beit Noam, an Israeli live-in intervention program for abusive men, and addresses the legal and ethical issues surrounding the court-mandated treatment of offenders. An international, interdisciplinary panel of practitioners, researchers, and academics also discuss: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Physical Aggression Couples Treatment (PACT) attachment theory therapeutically based interventions feminist/social learning treatment individual, group, and integrative therapies transpersonal psychology systems thinking field theory and much more! Intimate Violence: Contemporary Treatment Innovations is an essential resource for clinicians, researchers, educators, and advocates working in psychology, social work, counseling, law, health care, and related disciplines.
Intimate Violence: Attacks Upon Psychic Interiority
by Joseph ScaliaOffering a compassionate view of the interior life of the batterer, this book explains the inner mechanisms of the batterer's violent behavior, analyzes society's negative depictions of abuse as well as general ideas concerning victims, and proposes alternative views. Finally the book addresses treatment methodologies that will result in permanent change.
Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture: Representational Tensions
by Suzanne Rintoultimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture identifies an important contradiction in Victorian representations of abuse: the simultaneous compulsion to expose and to obscure brutality towards women in intimate relationships. Exploring representations of abuse in a variety of contexts not limited to marriage, Suzanne Rintoul illustrates how intimate violence became both spectacular and unspeakable in the Victorian period, and how the discernible tension between exposure and concealment across multiple texts as well as within individual ones signals more than confusion about the 'correct' way to deal with the problem of abuse. Rintoul argues that in diverse material consumed by a broad cross-section of Victorian society this tension positions the vulnerable female body as a space through which to explore more general cultural uncertainties regarding gender and class-based hierarchies, and that it often renders the battered woman a cite of social and political oppositionality.
Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom
by Merle HoffmanMerle Hoffman's life story is riveting. A former classical pianist, a self-made millionaire, and a feminist who found her life's work providing abortions, she has been a fearless crusader for women's right to choose. Over the years, Hoffman has used her entrepreneurial spirit to build one of the most comprehensive women's medical centers in the country. In 1971 (two years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion nationally), Hoffman founded Choices, an abortion clinic in New York. As a medical provider, she pioneered "patient power," encouraging women to participate in their own health care decisions. And going against even her own expectations for her life after fifty, she adopted a child and writes about her experience as a mother. Whether addressing the murder of abortion providers like Dr. George Tiller or challenging women to understand their own power over their bodies and the language used to wield such power, Merle Hoffman has been on the front lines of the feminist movement, a fierce warrior in the battle for choice. Merle Hoffman is an award-winning journalist, activist, and women's health care pioneer. In 1971, she founded Choices, one of the first ambulatory abortion centers, which has become one of the nation's largest and most comprehensive women's medical facilities in the United States. She is also the publisher of On the Issues, an online feminist magazine.
An Intimate Wilderness: Arctic Voices in a Land of Vast Horizons
by William W. Fitzhugh Norman HallendyArctic researcher, author, and photographer Norman Hallendy's journey to the far north began in 1958, when many Inuit, who traditionally lived on the land, were moving to permanent settlements created by the Canadian government. In this unique memoir, Hallendy writes of his adventures, experiences with strange Arctic phenomena, encounters with wildlife, and deep friendships with Inuit elders. Very few have worked so closely with the Inuit to document their traditions, and, in this book, Hallendy preserves their voices and paints an incomparable portrait of a vibrant culture in a remote landscape.
The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln
by C. A. TrippThe late C. A. Tripp, a highly regarded sex researcher and colleague of Alfred Kinsey, and author of the runaway bestseller The Homosexual Matrix, devoted the last ten years of his life to an exhaustive study of Abraham Lincoln's writings and of scholarship about Lincoln, in search of hidden keys to his character. In The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, completed just weeks before he died, Tripp offers a full examination of Lincoln's inner life and relationships that, as Dr. Jean Baker argues in the Introduction, "will define the issue for years to come." Throughout this riveting work, new details are revealed about Lincoln's relations with a number of men. Long-standing myths are debunked convincingly -- in particular, the myth that Lincoln's one true love was Ann Rutledge, who died tragically young. Ultimately, Tripp argues that Lincoln's unorthodox loves and friendships were tied to his maverick beliefs about religion, slavery, and even ethics and morals. As Tripp argues, Lincoln was an "invert": a man who consistently turned convention on its head, who drew his values not from the dominant conventions of society, but from within. For years, a whisper campaign has mounted about Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his intimate relationships. He was famously awkward around single women. He was engaged once before Mary Todd, but his fiancée called off the marriage on the grounds that he was "lacking in smaller attentions." His marriage to Mary was troubled. Meanwhile, throughout his adult life, he enjoyed close relationships with a number of men. He shared a bed with Joshua Speed for four years as a young man, and -- as Tripp details here -- he shared a bed with an army captain while serving in the White House, when Mrs. Lincoln was away. As one Washington socialite commented in her diary, "What stuff!" This study reaches far beyond a brief about Lincoln's sexuality: it is an attempt to make sense of the whole man, as never before. It includes an Introduction by Jean Baker, biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, and an Afterword containing reactions by two Lincoln scholars and one clinical psychologist and longtime acquaintance of C. A. Tripp. As Michael Chesson explains in one of the Afterword essays, "Lincoln was different from other men, and he knew it. More telling, virtually every man who knew him at all well, long before he rose to prominence, recognized it. In fact, the men who claimed to know him best, if honest, usually admitted that they did not understand him." Perhaps only now, when conventions of intimacy are so different, so open, and so much less rigid than in Lincoln's day, can Lincoln be fully understood.
Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the Iqwaye Counting and Number Systems
by Jadran MimicaThis is a remarkable work which captures the reader's imagination as only few books do. From a description of the counting system of Iqwaye people of Papua New Guinea, the author develops a deeper and broader interpretation of the Iqwaye kinship system and cosmology, culminating in a powerful critique of western assumptions about the development of rational thought.