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Vrushali Patil's book, "Webbed Connectivities: The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality," challenges the Euro-centric perspective of gender and sexuality studies. Patil argues that the transnational turn in the field has produced knowledge beyond Euro-American borders but has displaced the transnational itself. She proposes the concept of "webbed connectivities" to rewire common concepts in the sociology of sex, gender, and sexuality. The book explores the historical connections between race, colonialism, and imperialism in shaping sex, gender, and sexuality. Patil's work aims to connect seemingly disparate histories and geographies and offers a blueprint for transforming contemporary field formation. [Extracted from the article]

Sexual violence against men in conflict settings is neither a rare nor recent phenomenon, yet its absence in academic scholarship and humanitarian initiatives remains glaring. Despite the advances in our understanding of the determinants of wartime sexual violence against women, surprisingly little empirical research exists on sexual violence against men in conflict. Acts of sexual violence are commonly enacted against men in war, yet because they do not fit more narrow definitions of rape, accounts of these experiences are often misclassified as "torture." Moreover, in many countries experiencing pervasive conflict-related sexual violence, there exist restrictive laws regarding sodomy and homosexuality, reducing the chances that males will report their experiences. Using originally coded data on sexual and gender identity laws and reported incidents of sexual violence in civil conflict, I find that laws that outline the protection of sexual and gender identity expression including the decriminalization of same-sex activity are significantly associated with reports of acts of sexual violence against men. The results speak to the gap in the literature on male sexual violence with tangible consequences for the distribution of humanitarian aid, availability of medical and psychological services for victims, and aims of peacekeeping missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnus Hirschfeld fut un brillant médecin allemand militant pour la dépénalisation et la déstigmatisation de l'homosexualité. Pendant la très libérale République de Weimar (1918–1933) il publia ses articles avant-gardistes, il créa son Institut des sciences sexuelles (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) , où eût lieu la première chirurgie transgenre publiée, réalisée sur Dora Richter en 1931 (nous nous intéresserons à ce premier compte rendu d'intervention réussie) et multiplia les interventions pour faire abolir le paragraphe 175 du code penal imperial, pénalisant « la sodomie ». Finalement la montée du nazisme l'obligea à fuir son pays et à finir sa vie en France. L'œuvre d'Hirschfeld resta inachevée. Son activisme politique, sa surmédiatisation lui valurent de nombreuses critiques au sein même du mouvement gay et lesbien de l'époque. Qui était cet étrange médecin (l'Einstein du sexe , comme le présentait un promoteur américain lors de ses conférences en 1930) qui cumulait les défauts, pour l'époque, d'être à la fois juif, homosexuel et gauchiste ? Magnus Hirschfeld was a brilliant German doctor campaigning for the decriminalization and destigmatization of homosexuality. During the very liberal Weimar Republic (1918–1933) he published his avant-garde articles, he created his Institute of Sexual Sciences (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), where the first published transgender surgery took place, performed on Dora Richter in 1931 (we will be interested in this first report of successful intervention) and multiplied the interventions to abolish paragraph 175, penalizing "sodomy". Ultimately the rise of Nazism forced him to flee his country and end his life in France. Hirschfeld's work remained unfinished. His political activism and his over-media coverage earned him numerous criticisms even within the gay and lesbian movement of the time. Who was this strange doctor (the Einstein of sex, as an American promoter presented him during his conferences in 1930) who combined the faults, for the time, of being at the same time Jewish, homosexual and leftist? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Sexual assault is an important social issue that influences women’s lives. Despite a significant increase in 2018, there is no reliable information available in the Kingdom of Bahrain about female sexual assaults. The aim of this study is to investigate the pattern of reported sexual assaults among living female victims in the Kingdom of Bahrain. All medicolegal reports of sexual assaults in living female victims from 2016 to 2020 were included. Reported cases were studied for sociodemographic data of victims, assailant data, assault circumstances, and medicolegal findings and procedures. Results The prevalence of female sexual assault allegations was 7%. During the studied period, there were 272 cases of sexual assault overall. Most cases were in the age group 18–30 years (41.2%). In 58.1% of assaults, the assailant was the boyfriend or partner of the victim. The medicolegal examination took place within 2 days after assault in only 32%. Forensic examination of sexual assault victims revealed extragenital injuries in only 30.9% of cases. Sexual assaults involving mixed penetration occurred in 66.9% of victims, followed by vaginal penetration (30.1%), then anal penetration (2.9%). The final medicolegal opinion confirmed positive assault in 38.6% of allegations and negative assault in 32.4% of allegations, while allegations that have no firm medicolegal conclusion were 29%. Conclusions Despite the efforts made in Bahrain, there is an underestimated problem of sexual violence against females which needs a robust multilevel strategy including the roles of education, law, and non-governmental institutions.

The aim of the research: explanation of the types of adultery and the ruling on each type from the books of the Islamic jurists. Research Methodology: in this research, the researcher relied on the comparative analytical inductive method, by collecting the types of adultery from the books of Islamic jurists, and an analytical study of what the jurists of each school of thought have said in ruling on each type by comparing their statements and weighing between them. Main sections of the research: introduction, preface, six chapters, and conclusion. Top research results: the researcher concluded through his study of the subject that the chosen definition of adultery should be a definition of the essence, not a definition of the conditions of the punishment. He also concluded that sodomy, bestiality, intercourse with the dead, intercourse with minors, and intercourse with relatives are all types of adultery, according to the most correct of the jurists' statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sexual assault is an important social issue that influences women's lives. Despite a significant increase in 2018, there is no reliable information available in the Kingdom of Bahrain about female sexual assaults. The aim of this study is to investigate the pattern of reported sexual assaults among living female victims in the Kingdom of Bahrain. All medicolegal reports of sexual assaults in living female victims from 2016 to 2020 were included. Reported cases were studied for sociodemographic data of victims, assailant data, assault circumstances, and medicolegal findings and procedures. Results: The prevalence of female sexual assault allegations was 7%. During the studied period, there were 272 cases of sexual assault overall. Most cases were in the age group 18–30 years (41.2%). In 58.1% of assaults, the assailant was the boyfriend or partner of the victim. The medicolegal examination took place within 2 days after assault in only 32%. Forensic examination of sexual assault victims revealed extragenital injuries in only 30.9% of cases. Sexual assaults involving mixed penetration occurred in 66.9% of victims, followed by vaginal penetration (30.1%), then anal penetration (2.9%). The final medicolegal opinion confirmed positive assault in 38.6% of allegations and negative assault in 32.4% of allegations, while allegations that have no firm medicolegal conclusion were 29%. Conclusions: Despite the efforts made in Bahrain, there is an underestimated problem of sexual violence against females which needs a robust multilevel strategy including the roles of education, law, and non-governmental institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early modern Italy, stereotypes about Muslim men's supposed inclination towards the vice of 'sodomy' gave rise to fears that Christian masculinity was being tainted. Eighteenth-century court records from the Republic of Genoa and the Papal States contain numerous instances of cross-confessional male relations that faced persecution by state authorities. In each of these cases, Christian men were prosecuted for taking a sexually 'passive' role in relation to sexually 'active' Muslims, while the reverse scenario was never pursued. This article argues that the sexual focus of judicial authorities obscured the enduring bonds of affection and mutual obligation that developed between men across religious lines. The existence of these relationships unveils an intimate sphere of connections across faith in the early modern Mediterranean while highlighting an intersectional site of Christian social anxiety, where fears of religious contamination overlapped with concerns about same-sex intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 6 September 2018, after decades of queer activism, the Supreme Court of India declared unconstitutional the centuries-old law against sodomy, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Shelly Chopra Dhar's Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How Ifelt when Isaw that Girl, 2019) and Hitesh Kewalya's Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan (Be Extra Wary of Marriage, 2020) were the first two popular Hindi-language films, on same-sex love and desire, to be released after the scrapping of 377. We note the significance of Ek Ladki and Shubh Mangal to destigmatizing non-normative sexualities as well as the identitarian impulse of these films to name, illuminate, and mainstream queer love. We examine these films as they intervene in the broader field of representation and make complex maneuvers to normalize same-sex love and coax the consent of mainstream audiences. They do so by incorporating queer identity and same-sex love in ways that render it non-threatening to the heteronormative status quo. The intertextual allusions to popular Hindi cinema, however, carry queer transgressive potential as they allow for a claiming of a genealogy of queer desire in Hindi cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an alternative, sexual reinterpretation of Machiavelli’s Mandragola from an alternative sexual perspective focusing on sodomy (in its sixteenth-century meaning), and especially male-male sexuality. In this reading, Messer Nicia is, put in today’s terms, a homosexual and, at the same time, surprisingly enough, the key, princely character in the play. Dri ven by a desire to establish a new, less oppressive familial order, Nicia is able to renew his corrupted family by means of a conspiracy aimed at liberating Lucrezia’s sexuality from the restraints of the dominant morality. Mandragola constitutes an intrinsic part of Machiavelli’s political project, showing how the explosion of sexual desire beyond the confines of dominant heteronormative morality can serve as a productive way of expressing plebeian desire not to be oppressed and commanded by the great, which proves beneficial to all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces of trans feminine pasts are scattered all across the colonial archive. In New Spain, glimpses of Indigenous trans women's lives can be found in the records of conquistadors as early as the sixteenth century. While such early colonial representations of trans femininity span myriad religious, imperial and literary contexts, they are all underpinned by one harrowing reality: the widespread, colonial pursuit of trans feminine death. To 're‐member' – á la Saylesh Wesley – trans feminine pasts in the colonial archive, this article traces structures of, and resistance to, colonial trans misogyny in the sodomy criminal trials of Mexico (1604–1771) and the Catholic missions of California (1769–1821). Pushing against an extant 'cistoriography' that has simply archived these stories within the history of sexuality, I ask: What may be gleaned by centring trans femininity and womanhood as core to not only the lives of historical subjects, but the reason many of their lives were so violently taken? By re‐membering trans misogyny in this way, we may finally name and centre the long‐erased trans feminine historical subject, illuminate the complex, changing structures of her past worlds and trace the oft‐forgotten lineages of not just trans feminine death, but trans feminine survivance in its face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursued by authorities throughout the 1930s, Heinrich Habitz left behind a significant paper trail of official documentation, arrest warrants and imprisonment records. As Germany slipped further under National Socialist oppression, Habitz's status as a homosexual man who sold sex marked him as a target of police repression. Even after the end of the war, the Hamburg Prosecutor's Office attempted to locate and again prosecute him under the infamous §175 'sodomy law'. By rights, the study of Habitz should provide insights into the continuities of anti-queer repression between authoritarianism and democracy, but for one key point: 'Heinrich Habitz' existed only as a paper identity in official bureaucracy, and the 'man' authorities repeatedly persecuted was, in fact, a self-identified woman named 'Liddy Bacroff'. Through a series of semi-autobiographical writings, alongside official paperwork, Liddy Bacroff presents the value of but also the difficulties facing the (re)construction of queer and, in particular, transgender (pre)histories. In this instance, the historian is not just faced with the problem of how this life, and others like it, should be represented in historiographical terms. We are left also with the question of how this victim of National Socialist barbarity should (or rather, can) be remembered: as the paper identity that provided a succession of carceral authorities with the justification to persecute and ultimately murder a cisgender gay man, or as the lived experience of a woman whose unique self-understanding allowed her to carve out her place in a society that otherwise relegated her to its margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Islamic State, IS, is known for extreme violence and publishing and distributing extreme violent material online. IS's public executions have previously been researched in the context of state legitimacy building, but this research has mostly focused on Western and/or foreign victims, leaving out other demographic groups, like local sexual and gender minorities, and what role their murders play in building IS's legitimacy. This research analyses IS's violence against sexual and gender minorities and how this violence helped build IS's legitimacy regionally and internationally. To analyse a quasi-state actor with legitimacy aspirations, I develop a theoretical framework using Michel Foucault's paradigms of sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power. Utilising visual and audio-visual material from 18 different executions of victims accused of homosexuality, I argue that the persecution and murders of sexual and gender minorities build IS's legitimacy on two levels: the local and the international. Furthermore, the "Us vs. Them" dichotomy typical for terrorist organisations is also formed in these executions and becomes present on these two levels. The research demonstrates that the participation of audience, whether present or witnessing the executions online later, is at the heart of the rationality of power in these executions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1809 thirty-eight-year-old ship's surgeon James Nehemiah Taylor was caught in the act of sodomy with his helper on a naval vessel at sea. After being court-martialed in the port [...]

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Recently digested evidence from the 1740s confirms both patterns and variety in the sodomitical subculture of Paris in the 1720s and 1730s that historians have already analyzed. Men who desired men understood the methods and hazards of solicitation in the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, where the police deployed decoys to entrap them. Records of arrest demonstrate continuity over three decades as well as evolution in practices of surveillance. In 1748–49, agents interrogated not only the men they arrested but also the men these men mentioned, who named others, almost none of whom ended up in prison. We still do not know why the police prioritized information over imprisonment at this time because we have no documentation about administrative deliberations. Thanks to archival inquiry, however, we can now follow the steps that preceded the shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit variations in the timing of decriminalization of same-sex sexual intercourse across US states to estimate the impact of these law changes on crime through difference-in-differences and event study models. We provide the first evidence that sodomy law repeals led to a decline in the number of arrests for disorderly conduct, prostitution, and other sex offenses. Moreover, in line with the hypothesis that sodomy law repeals enhanced mental health and lessened minority stress, we show that these repeals led to a reduction in arrests for drug and alcohol consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Article, I demonstrate that legal mobilization by activist litigants combined with a comparative methodological jurisprudence has been central to the "transnational legal process" of the generation and diffusion of the sodomy decriminalization norm since the 1950s. My analysis of the transnational comparative jurisprudence relies on a comprehensive legal survey of seven decades of decriminalization jurisprudence (1954-2022), primarily using successful cases. Although the scholarship on the well-known Dudgeon, Toonen, and NCGLE cases often asserts the influence that these cases had on subsequent domestic court constitutional jurisprudence, I suggest that it is the domestic privacy jurisprudence of lobbyists, legislators, claimants, and judges from the United Kingdom and United States in the 1950s through 1970s that shaped the claims-making in Dudgeon and Toonen. Conversely, I argue that the difference between the outcomes in Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas can be explained in part by developments in transnational equality and human dignity jurisprudence that resulted in a shift from the privacy legal frame to the equality and human dignity legal frame and a shift from a spatial conception of privacy to a decisional (personal choice) conception of privacy. Additionally, I move beyond scholarship centered on European and U.S. case law to include the jurisprudence from the Global South (2005 to present) that, to my knowledge, has yet to be analyzed systematically and comparatively. My Article is among the first to analyze the five landmark decriminalization cases decided in 2022, and one of the few that discusses judicialized sodomy decriminalization in transnational and comparative constitutional perspective. This inquiry is retrospective: how has legal mobilization and comparative methodological jurisprudence contributed to understandings of sexual freedom and the justifications for sexual freedom? But it is prospective as well. Sixty-six countries retain sodomy prohibitions; will the sodomy decriminalization trend continue, and if so, what role(s) will legal mobilizations play? There is also the question of backlash and retrenchment--whether homosexual conduct will be recriminalized in jurisdictions that have decriminalized. In 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas essentially invited reactionary and regressive forces in society to bring to the U.S. Supreme Court cases that would overturn Griswold v. Connecticut and its progeny in the LGBTQ rights space--Lawrence and Obergefell v. Hodges. I recommend activists and their allies begin the work of upholding Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell by exploring not only U.S. domestic jurisprudence but also transnational jurisprudence--in international human rights law and comparative constitutional law--to support the continued legalization of adult, consensual, same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]