Friendship, Marriage-Like Relationships, and Informal Marriage

This chapter discusses issues of establishing adult relationships, including friendship and informal marriage, and how individuals have attempted to regulate their upcoming marriage by entering into prenuptial agreements. The road to marriage has traditionally consisted of romantic friendship, courtship, engagement, and then formal marriage. It is during the formal or informal engagement period that a couple may think of entering into a prenuptial agreement. However, this behavior pattern has changed dramatically in the past fifty years. There may no longer be defined periods on the road to marriage, and marriage itself may no longer be the final relationship between two people. Whatever the arrangement, the relevant legal questions are the following: What relationships should be labeled “family”; who should be authorized to make such a designation, the state or the parties themselves; and should the state regulate them? At the present time, two kinds of adult relationships that are not formally recognized by the state as marriage are contract cohabitation and domestic partnership or civil union.

Very Queer Friends

ABSTRACT: Elena Ferrante has long acknowledged the influence of Alba de Céspedes’ 1949 novel Dalla parte di lei on her writing, particularly in terms of conceiving female characters. In Ferrante’s newest novel, La vita bugiarda degli adulti, the prominent theme of queer friendship between young women echoes and reconfigures elements from Dalla parte di lei. This article delves into the capacious queer relationality depicted in both novels, tracing the presence of transmasculinity and feminist re-writing as key elements in both. Situating the two novels’ representations of women’s intimacy in their socio-literary contexts, I analyze the ways in which they utilize models like the «fiamma», romantic friendship, sisterhood, and female husbands. Neither author identifies as lesbian or queer; thus my close reading of the frankly sexual and deeply romantic scenes between female characters seeks not to assign the writers or their books to a category, but rather to elaborate the queer dimensions of relationality that they explore. Ultimately, I propose that a significant part of what makes these queer, lesbian, and transmasculine representations possible is a shared feminist project of reading, writing, and rewriting from one’s own perspective: dalla parte di lei. In this sense, what Ferrante’s narrator-protagonist Giovanna owes to de Céspedes’ narrator-protagonist Alessandra is not only the possibility of a queer life and a feminist voice, but the potential for narrating queer feminist experience as relational.

Friendship

The French Protestants defined a diplomatic policy of romantic friendship, which would be earned through what they called “allure,” intended as a means for powerfully befriending Indigenous allies and making them obedient, as well as of gathering information on economically valuable resources. Through this diplomacy of love, the French also sought to create a broad Indigenous and Protestant opposition to the Spanish. However, in their relationships with Indigenous people, the French lied, revealing their sense of political weakness, and ultimately became dependent on the Indigenous King Saturiwa.

«Exegi monumentum»: the reflection of Schumann’s images in the Variations by J. Brahms on the theme by R. Schumann op. 23

Background. The problematics associated with the personal and creative relationships between Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann, as well as the nature of their reflection in art, have been worrying the minds of researchers for more than a century and a half. One of significant, but little-studied aspects is the embodiment of Schumann’s images and associations in the four-handed piano works by J. Brahms. The article objective is revealing of the semantic specifics of the reflection of Robert Schumann creativity in the Variations by Johannes Brahms on the Theme by R. Schumann, op. 23. The study methodology determined by its objectives is integrative and based on the combination of general scientific approaches and musicological methods. The leading methods of research are the semantic, compositional-dramaturgic and genre-stylistic analyses. Results. Acquaintance with Robert and Clara Schumann (soon transformed into a romantic friendship) was a landmark, turning point in the life and work of J. Brahms. It was R. Schumann, who at some time first called young Chopin a “genius” and who also predicted to Brahms – at that time (in 1853) to almost no-known young musician – a great future in his latest article “New Ways” (after long literary silence), where the appearance of new genius solemnly proclaimed. The long hours of companionship of Brahms with Robert and Clara Schumann were filled of conjoint piano playing, very often – in four hands. Addiction to the four-handed duet playing was vividly reflected in the creativity of both, Schumann and Brahms. Creativity of J. Brahms is one of the highest peaks in the history of the genre of a four-handed piano duet. A special place among Brahms’ piano four-handed duets is occupied by the only major cyclical composition – the Variations on the Theme of R. Schumann op. 23 in E Flat Major, 1861. Variations op. 23 were written by the composer for the joint four-handed performance by Clara and Julia Schumann – the wife and the daughter of R. Schumann. The author dedicated his composition to Julie Schumann, with whom he was secretly in love at that time. The theme of variations is the melody, which was the last in the creative fate of R. Schumann. This theme was presented to Schumann in his night visions by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn; the composer managed only to write down the theme and begin to develop it on February 27, 1854, on the eve of the tragic attack of madness, which led him to the hospital in Endenich. Brahms’s ethical and aesthetic task was to preserve for humanity the last musical thought of the genius and perpetuate his memory, creating an artistic monument to his great friend and mentor. Brahms’ idea is connected with the composer’s philosophical thoughts about death and immortality, about the meaning of being and the greatness of the creative spirit. This idea is even more highlighted due to the genre synthesis of the “strict tune” of the choral and the mourning march “in memory of a hero”. The level of associativity of each of these genre spheres is extremely high. It includes a huge range of musical and artistic phenomena The significant associative semantic layer of music of Variations is connected, of course, with Robert Schumann’s creativity. Brahms most deeply penetrates into the world of musical thinking of Schumann, turning to the favorite Schumann’s principle of free variation. The embodiment of this idea becomes both the tonal plan of the cycle, and the peculiarities of the genre characteristic of individual variations, and the psychological accuracy of specific figurative decisions, and the logical unity of the artistic whole with emphasizing of semantic significance of private details. In Schumann style, Brahms wrote the first four variations of op. 23. (Strictly speaking, the very idea of a “musical portrait” of a friend and like-minded person comes from the Schumann’s “Carnival” and “Kreisleriana”). Tonalities in the Variations get the semantic importance: E flat major as friendly and bright and E flat minor as intensely passionate. The tonal sphere “E flat major – E flat minor” for Brahms is the symbol of unity of the sublime and earthly, bright and gloomy, tragically passionate and calmly contemplative, it is a kind of image of the Universe, the Macrocosm that created by the individual musical thinking of the composer. The features of philosophical programmaticity of generalized type inherent in the Brahms conception predetermined the peculiarities of the figurative dramaturgy of Op. 23, reflecting the development and interaction of the main emotional-semantic lines of the cycle – lyrical, sublime tragic, fantastic, heroic and triumphal. The circle of the figurative development of the cycle is closed by the Schumann’s theme, creating an intonational-thematic and semantic arch framing the entire composition. The main theme of the Variations acquires here – as a result of a long and tragic dramatic way – features of a lyrical epitaph, a farewell word: “Exegi monumentum” – «I erected the monument»… Conclusions. In general, the music of Variations by J. Brahms on the Theme by R. Schumann is striking in its moral and philosophical depth, the power of artistic and ethical influence, emotional and figurative abundance and significance, compositional completeness and clarity of the dramatic solution. Variations on the theme by R. Schumann are a unique musical monument to the genius of Robert Schumann, created by the genius Johannes Brahms in honor and eternal memory to his great friend and teacher in the name of Music, Friendship and Love.

Unethical Adaptation: Indigenization and Sex in Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden (2016)

In contemporary cultural scenes saturated by ‘intermediality’ and ‘transmediality’, adaptation studies have challenged the distinction and hierarchy between the source and its adaptation, the author and the reader-spectator, and a variety of genres and media. While early critics of adaptation studies centred on fidelity criticism, recently Linda Hutcheon breaks free from literary elitism and emphasizes how stories, ‘like genes’, adapt to new environments ‘by virtue of mutation’. Hutcheon argues, ‘the fittest [stories] do more than survive; they flourish’ in today’s fierce competition for ‘cultural selection’. This postmodernist notion of adaptation as proliferation, however, remains curiously reticent about the ‘value’ of such proliferation. My article argues that in the era of textual proliferation, adaptation has an ethical responsibility to voice the story of the socially and sexually ‘unfit’. I then analyse The Handmaiden as a failed attempt at this ethical project. Directed by Chan-wook Park, a South Korean auteur, The Handmaiden borrows from Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), a novel about female romantic friendship in nineteenth-century England. Although Park’s visually stunning film epitomizes the indigenization of the ‘fittest’ story, its graphic portrayal of lesbian sex and change of setting leaves the question of sexual objectification of Asian women and Japanese colonization unanswered.

Same-Sex Love among Early American Women

The task of recovering the history of same-sex love among early American women faces daunting challenges of definition and sources. Modern conceptions of same-sex sexuality did not exist in early America, but alternative frameworks did. Many indigenous nations had social roles for female-bodied individuals who lived as men, performed male work, and acquired wives. Early Christian settlers viewed sexual encounters between women as sodomy, but also valued loving dyadic bonds between religious women. Primary sources indicate that same-sex sexual practices existed within western and southern African societies exploited by the slave trade, but little more is known. The word “lesbian” has been used to signify erotics between women since roughly the 10th century, but historians must look to women who led lesbian-like lives in early America rather than to women who self-identified as lesbians. Stories of female husbands who passed as men and married other women were popular in the 18th century. Tales of passing women who served in the military, in the navy, and as pirates also amused audiences and raised the spectre of same-sex sexuality. Some female religious leaders trespassed conventional gender roles and challenged the marital sexual order. Other women conformed to female gender roles, but constructed loving female households. 18th-century pornography depicting lesbian sexual encounters indicates that early Americans were familiar with the concept of sex between women. A few court records exist from prosecutions of early American women for engaging in lewd acts together. Far more common, by the end of the 18th century, were female-authored letters and diaries describing the culture of romantic friendship, which sometimes extended to sexual intimacy. Later in the 19th century, romantic friendship became an important ingredient in the development of lesbian culture and identity.

Is Reality TV a Bad Girls Club? Television Use, Docusoap Reality Television Viewing, and the Cultivation of the Approval of Aggression

In this study, associations between overall amount of television viewing as well as viewing of reality programs featuring adults in romantic, friendship-oriented, or familial settings and the approval of physical and verbal aggression are examined. Consistent with genre-specific cultivation theory, findings among 248 U.S. adult survey respondents show the ability of exposure to docusoap reality television as well as its perceived reality to predict normative beliefs about aggression, even under multiple controls. Additional analyses explore differences between men and women in the sample and explore approval of female-perpetrated compared with male-perpetrated aggression.