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 explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter analyses crimes involving procuring sex, including procuring sex by deception. It argues that to appreciate the nature of these offences, and their place within this book, it is necessary both to understand how the verb ‘to procure’ was interpreted, including when and why it required deception, and to pay attention to the acts whose procurement was proscribed by law. The chapter provides elucidation on both fronts, showing how the procuring offences were geared towards prohibiting ‘illicit’ (i.e., immoral) sexual activities and therefore criminalised the use of deception to lure others into committing such acts. In demonstrating this point, the chapter argues that a culturally sensitive vision of what makes intimacy valuable shaped and constrained the use of the procuring offences. Finally, the chapter argues that the demise of the procuring offences set the stage for the expansion of the crime of rape by deception and that examining how the procuring offences worked yields important lessons for those attempting to engage critically with this development.

Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

This chapter investigates Gwen Harwood’s subversion of gendered presumptions of authorship and style. After discussing her skilful redress of a male-dominant literary culture through hoax poetry, it considers how Harwood mobilised male personae to critique the cultural valuing of science and reason, explore sexual immorality, and address women’s experience of domesticity. It discusses how Harwood celebrated motherhood but was also one of the earliest writers to articulate its associated realities of exhaustion, loss of self, and feelings of despair and rage. The chapter argues that Harwood lays important groundwork for second-wave feminism while representing the ambiguities of care and connection. The chapter also engages with Harwood’s later exploration of death and the dynamic between sex and spirituality.

This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

In this chapter, we examine the evolving definition of sex tourism. Through a comprehensive literature review focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, we assess the long history of commodified sex and travel and the difficulties in defining the practice as exclusive to heterosexual men purchasing sex or as a phenomenon exclusive to the Global South. A case study of Havana, Cuba, contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial cities benefitted from commodified sex connected to travellers and racialized bodies. In analyzing the scholarship on sex tourism, we appreciate the heterogeneity of arrangements, identities, ambiguity, and fluidity of relationships. Both hosts and guests are looking for opportunities to enhance their lives and to challenge the gender, sexual, and racial dictates of their society. Tourist-related intimacies, therefore, are used for personal and familial gains and mobility in the global political economy. The findings reveal that while some studies have adopted narrow definitions, a more comprehensive approach argues for understanding sex tourism as part of a spectrum of intimate encounters that combine sex and money, encompassing everything from marriage to sex work.

This chapter presents an overview of, and insight into, the sexual lives of the inhabitants of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. It examines both public attitudes and private behaviours by focusing on three key areas: marriage, prostitution, and male same-sex relationships. The discussion of marriage looks at the traditional ages at which men and girls traditionally wed, how marital partners were chosen, and the emotional and sexual life of married couples, as well as divorce, widow(er)hood, and remarriage. The section on prostitution considers the wide variety of sex workers operating in classical Athens, the conditions in which they worked, and the status they enjoyed. The discussion takes in streetwalkers and brothel workers whose services could be bought cheaply (pornai), trained musicians and dancers who provided entertainment at all-male drinking parties, and high-fee hetairai renowned for their looks, wit, and intelligence. The last section examines the practice of pederasty, a traditionally elite pursuit which saw adult men form relationships with pubescent boys. This discussion covers courtship and its power dynamics, the age of participants, and the ways in which pederasty is depicted in art, as well as shifting public attitudes towards pederasty throughout the classical era.

By the early eighteenth century Edo (present-day Tokyo) was one of the largest cities in the world. Sex and erotic allure could be found in many guises in this commercialized urban setting, both in the city’s streets and in print. This chapter sets out to argue that sex assumed a multiplicity of meanings in this context that ranged from pleasure and procreation to potential pathology. To this purpose, it begins by tracing various discourses surrounding the three phenomena that have arguably received the most sustained attention in research to date, namely the sex trade, male same-sex desire, and the erotically explicit materials known as ‘spring pictures’ (Japanese shunga 春画/ shunpon 春本). The final sections aim to move beyond the standard narrative of the Edo period’s flourishing erotic culture by focusing on the female reproductive body, as well as medical and health discourses, thus aspiring to unsettle the paradigmatic character of this (male) pleasure-centred mode of sex and repudiate the monolithic view of early modern Japanese sexuality as unregulated.

As seemingly cognate sub-genres of history, the history of sexuality and women’s history have a complicated relationship. Both tell 1970s origins stories from global north liberation movements, despite the scholarly scrutiny of sexuality and women in earlier historical periods. Core journals and publications reveal these sub-fields’ distinctive, sometimes incommensurate development trajectories. Perhaps due to their recent advent, presentism is clear in both, with the corollary of a marked post-1800 skew of most research and publications. Women’s history tracks women, in all their subdivisions, of necessity with focus upon sexualities in many registers, while seeking address of race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and international and global foci. Alternatively, the history of sexuality prioritizes sexual minorities and erotic alterities, welcoming studies of identities, expression, and representation. Key themes are transgressive resistance against repression and heteronormativity, entailing special concentration on same-sex history. Women figure within these themes, while innovative feminists are influential historians of sexuality. Nonetheless, women’s history and feminist analysis of sexualities have no default standing for the history of sexuality. In short, intellectual, methodological, and political properties prove less reciprocal than might be presumed. These exciting areas of history should evolve, to illuminate crucial topics for both, for instance reproduction. As both pursue aims to incorporate all historical periods and regions, their interconnections may become stronger.

This chapter considers Shelley’s attempt to think before the “Error and Truth” of Enlightenment humanity, and before the binaristic split between the white male bourgeois Human and those not included in those definitions of humanity. Tracing his iconoclastic resistance to normative categories of gender, race, and the human as well as his idealistic attempt to recreate those categories in a reading of The Witch of Atlas, with its double creation of Witch and the Witch’s “sexless” creature, the chapter explores the poet’s radical understanding of gender and sex beyond the male–female binary alongside the poet’s commentary and critique on the dimorphic gender–sex systems circulating in discourse of his day. The chapter argues that his imagining of the creation of new beings – both the Witch and her creature – figure Shelley’s reply to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as an alternative being beyond Western, Enlightenment notions of the human. Particularly through the envisioning of the nonbinary being of the Witch's creature as well as its flight through the world as an “image” and “sexless thing,” Shelley attempts to conceive of a continuum of gender and sex, one in which the gendered and racialized alterity of the Witch’s creature is embraced and prioritized, even though it may be imperfectly imagined.

This section provides examples for a number of different kinds of documents associated with the courts, with crime and punishment, namely Curia Regis Rolls (published for the early thirteenth century in a fascinating series of volumes), Ecclesiastical suit rolls, relating to questions of adultery and fornication, Gaol Delivery rolls recording the pleas of those who were then freed from prison, and the Assize of Bread, concerned with maintaining standards in the production of bread and ale.

Ælred is principally famous for his spiritual works such as his work on friendship, written at the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in Yorkshire. Less well known is the letter he wrote to a friend regarding the dramatic incident involving a young girl at the Gilbertine monastery of Watton. The girl, after a sexual liaison with a young man in the male part of the monastery, becomes pregnant but when the nuns discover this they treat her and the man with brutality. When she gives birth, a miracle occurs and the baby disappears, apparently in accordance with God’s will. Ælred is asked to investigate and reports in a very compassionate and perceptive manner in subtle and beautiful Latin prose.