“A Gauntlet” by Bjornstjerne Martinius Bjørnson and “Vera: One for Many: From a Girl's Diary” by Bettina Dorothea Kris in the context of a public discussion about male chastity and double morality in the Russian Empire in the late 19th – early 20th centuries

The article examines the controversy that arose in the public space of the Russian Empire after the publication in Russian of two resonant works of fiction – “A Gauntlet” by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and “One for Many” by Betty Kris – and gave impetus to the development of ethical views broadcast by their authors. In these books, translated into Russian with a difference of almost ten years, practically identical innovative and, one might say, sensational ideas for their time are expressed – Svava and Vera, the main heroines of the works, advocate the abolition of “unjust dual morality” and expect from a man the same premarital “purity”, the preservation of which was traditionally required exclusively from a woman within the framework of the patriarchal paradigm of marriage and family relations. The call for the abolition of double standards, expressed by B.Bjørnson and B.Kris (and embodied, which is important, precisely through the women, the heroines of their works), was directly related to the women’s movement developing during this period. There were incomparably more opponents of the ideas broadcast by the authors, who continued to adhere to the traditional view of sexual morality and the position of women in society, than its supporters. However, the very fact that such a discussion appeared in the public field and the fact that a number of representatives of the medical community, public figures, writers and journalists supported these ideas, speaks of the changes that have already begun to take place in the public consciousness.

The end of “Catholic” sexuality in Italy?

Studies on sexuality in Italy conducted in recent decades show a significant relationship between adherence to Catholicism and sexual behavior. Yet, the last 20 years has also seen an acceleration in the decline of young practicing Catholics, and more and more young people do not follow Catholic teachings regarding sex. We assess whether and in which direction the association between sex and religion has changed by comparing two identical surveys of national samples of Italian university students carried out in 2000 and 2017. We test two sides of a same hypotheses: a weakening vs. a strengthening of the relationship between religion and several sexual behaviors/opinions on sexuality. We find that the reduced proportion of young Catholics has not been accompanied by a strengthened adherence to Catholic sexual morality: today religious youth are more similar to the non-religious than they were at the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, especially among individuals who are single and women, the differences between more or less religious young people continue to be relevant. Thus, despite a weakening of the relationship between sexuality and religion, it is too early to pronounce an end of “Catholic” sexuality in Italy.

The Halalisation of Islam

This article charts the history of the invention of halal and of its extension to an increasingly diverse range of goods, services and even modes of behaviour. Following the works of Bergeaud-Blackler, it argues that halal is not the industrialization of traditional practices but rather that it is ‘born industrial’ as the result of the encounter between neoliberal economic globalization and the spread of consumerism across the Muslim world. It argues that the wild development of halal and its extension well beyond the edible is part of a wider reconfiguration of Islam within a Global-Market frame, away from Nation-State bound forms. From its inception within industrial processes of meat production, halal has been extended to qualify vacation packages, refrigerators and proper sexual morality.

CHURCH DISCIPLINE IN THE PSKOV EPARCHY IN THE XIX-XX CENTURIES. ANALYSIS OF THE SOURCE BASE

Despite the large volume of archival materials on church discipline in Russia of the XIX – early XX centuries, this topic has been studied rather poorly. This article analyzes the source base on the church discipline in the Pskov diocese based on the materials of the State Archive of the Pskov region. During the study of these sources, a count of specific violations of the church discipline among the laity, church officers and the clergy was made, and the main categories of offenses were identified. The main types of punishments for violating church discipline are shown. The gender composition of laypeople in the structure of offenses is considered. The structure of the titles of archival cases concerning violations of the church discipline is also addressed. The author came to the conclusion that clerics were punished mainly for drunkenness and official misconduct. In relation to the laity, the Pskov Spiritual Consistory most often considered cases related to the violations of sexual morality and illegal marriages, as well as murders and suicide attempts. This work is relevant because at present the Russian Orthodox Church is continuing to create unified documentation regulating the issues of the church court. This study, in turn, allows us to update the historical experience of regulating the church discipline and assigning punishments for its violation. The uniqueness of this work lies in the fact that the materials on the church discipline of the Pskov diocese of the XIX – early XX centuries have been analyzed for the first time, and the data obtained were introduced into scientific circulation.

Governing Nonconformity: Gender Presentation, Public Space, and the City in New Order Indonesia

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

THE VIEW OF FEMINIST MAGAZINES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE ON THE MARITAL PROBLEMS AND MORAL GENDER EQUALITY

Feminism today is an alternative philosophical concept of socio-cultural development. The article highlights the marital problem and gender equality in the pages of feminist magazines of the early XX century in the Russian Empire. In modern society, there has been much discussion on the issues of gender equality, prohibition or legalization of abortion, legalization of prostitution, the relevance of legal marriage, child-rearing, etc., that is, socio-cultural aspects. All these issues were raised by the feminist press in the early XX century. The purpose of this article is to analyze the arguments of female correspondents of feminist magazines of the Russian Empire in accordance with the double standards, marriage and methods of achieving true gender equality. As a result of the study, we have identified that during the period moral and ethical issues were recognized as an important part of the “women’s issue”, which were considered by feminist women’s magazines through the prism of two officially recognized sexual institutions in the Russian Empire: marriage and prostitution. Women’s magazines sharply criticized the “double standards”, which set unequal demands on the morality of men and women. According to them, “double standards” was the principal cause underlying the existence of prostitution and humiliated position of a woman in the family, so feminists demanded the recognition of “single sexual morality” either in the direction of “sexual abstinence” or through “sexual freedom” for men and women.

Bold Women, Bad Assets: Honour, Property and Techno-Promiscuities

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism.