Whose Past and Whose Future: Free Love and Love Marriage among “Kafirs” of the Hindukush in an Early Nineteenth-Century Persian Ethnography

This paper deals with some practices and conceptions relating to love and marriage in a now-extinct pre-Islamic culture of the Hindukush, as described in an extremely precious, yet very little-known, Persian ethnographical source (ca. 1840). Written by a munshī from Peshawar under instructions from the French general Claude-Auguste Court, who was then in the service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, this is probably the single most important pre-Robertson source about the “Kafir” cultures of Nuristan. While a complete translation and thorough study of the unpublished document, by Stefano Pellò and Alberto Cacopardo, is now forthcoming, in these brief notes we show how free love and love marriage, often perceived as “modern” concepts in many parts of Asia, were envisioned by Tak and Shamlar, two elders from pre-Islamic Kamdesh.

Untangling Darwinian Confusion around Lust, Love, and Attachment in the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough

The myth of true, lifelong love promoted low divorce rates among farmers who depended on each other for survival. In the urban ecology after industrialization, it became increas­ingly clear that long-term monogamy goes against human nature. In the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-1800s literary movement, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and others clashed in a battle over modern mating morality. Each interpreted Darwin to fit their own agenda, suggesting naturalistic understandings of “free love” and “true mar­riage,” some of which were laughable while others landed authors in prison. Evolutionary theory from our present era suggests that human mate choice is guided by three brain systems: erotic lust, romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment; our species thus evolved for serial pair-bonding with extra-pair copulation. Using these and other evolutionary insights, this article evaluates narratives from the Modern Breakthrough, which laid the foundation for today’s gender-equal and sexually liberal Nordic societies.

Between Passion and Compassion: The Story of the Stone and Its Modern Reincarnations

This study reconsiders The Story of the Stone as a literary exemplum of the “Buddhist conquest of China.” The kind of Buddhism that Stone embodies in its fictional form and makes indelible on the Chinese cultural imagination simultaneously indulges in and wavers from the Mahāyāna teachings of the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. The dialectics of truth and falsehood, love and emptiness, passion and compassion, which Stone dramatizes and problematizes, continues to stir the creative impulses of artists in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China. This study features three of Stone’s modern reincarnations. Tale of the Crimson Silk, a story by the amorous poet-monk Su Manshu (1884–1918), recasts at once the idea of Buddhist monkhood and that of “free love” in early Republican China. In Lust, Caution, a spy story by the celebrated writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995), a revolutionary heroine is compelled to weigh the emptiness/truth of carnal desire against the truth/emptiness of patriotic commitment. Decades later, love and illusion dwell again at the epicenter of a fallen empire in the director Chen Kaige’s (b. 1952) 2017 film, The Legend of the Demon Cat, in which an illustrious poet sings testimony to the (un)witting (com)passion of a femme fatale.

Liberdade e igualdade para as mulheres na perspectiva da anarquista Emma Goldman

O presente artigo tem como finalidade apresentar alguns aspectos de uma investigação acerca do percurso político intelectual da anarquista Emma Goldman (1860- 1940), centrando a reflexão, em especial, no pensamento goldminiano sobre o universo de dominação em que a mulher estava inserida, destacando seus principais algozes: o Estado e a Igreja. De fato, é inegável que a trajetória vivenciada pela anarquista influenciou sua forma de ver e escrever sobre o mundo, principalmente a sua defesa da emancipação feminina a partir da quebra de pressupostos morais, de modo a possibilitar que a mulher conseguisse sua liberdade a partir de um processo de tomada de consciência. Nesse percurso, a emancipação sexual e intelectual, bem como o amor livre e a maternidade voluntária, emergiam como valores positivos a serem adotados.Palavras-chave: Anarquismo; liberdade; emancipação feminina. AbstractThis paper presents some aspects of an investigation about the intellectual political trajectory of the anarchist Emma Goldman (1860-1940), focusing the reflection, in particular, on Goldminian though on the universe of domination in which the woman was inserted, highlighting its main executioners: the State and the Church. It is undeniable that the trajectory experienced by the anarchist influenced her way of seeing and writing about the world, especially her defense of female emancipation through the breaking of moral assumptions, to enable women to achieve her freedom from a process of becoming aware. Along this path, sexual and intellectual emancipation, as well as free love and voluntary motherhood, emerged as positive values to be adopted.Keywords: Anarchism; freendom; female emancipation.

Space and Romance: a Study of Feminist Position in Miss Sophia’s Diary and Sealed Off

Interrogating two cases, Sealed Off and Miss Sophia’s Diary, this paper seeks to apply spatial narrative theories to extract two spatial dimensions, namely physical-space and subjective-space, and interpret the authoresses’ feminist positions based on their deliberate writing on intricate feminine consciousness and psychology that male writers would not be able to experience. The images of men in the novels are also analysed to expose the independent and rebellious consciousness of the two heroines based on the two novelists’ deconstruction of the male-centred portrayal of masculinity in female discourse. It has been found that for women whose consciousness is awakened to seek liberation, physical-space symbolises a double metaphor, offering the possibility of the birth of new women in China during the May Fourth period, but also a cage that imprisons women in their quest for independence; subjective-space more specifically represents the May Fourth new women’s confrontation and mortification with their pursuit of free love, and the deviation of both male and female stereotypes prevalent in traditional Chinese literature.