Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire

Engaging with Foucault’s ideas on sexuality, this book demonstrates how conservative organizations and the Supreme Court have misunderstood Christian beliefs on marriage and the family. It challenges the long-held assumption that American values are based on “Judeo-Christian” norms, by comparing ancient Christian discourses on marriage and sexuality with contemporary ones, maintaining that modern family values owe more to Roman Imperial beliefs than to the Bible. Ultimately, this book undermines the conservative ideology of the family, starting from the position that early Christianity, in its emphasis on celibacy and denunciation of marriage, was in opposition to procreation, the ideological norm in the Greco-Roman world.

Ideologiese normverplasings en die Afrikaanse handwoordeboek van die negentigerjare

Ideological norm replacement and the Afrikaans desk dictionary of the ninetiesIn South Africa the past decade has been marked by extensive sociopolitical changes and by concomitant linguistic changes. These changes may be regarded as instances of norm replacement - a process during the course of which a norm or a set of norms is gradually replaced by another norm or set of norms. It is maintained that the standard synchronic dictionaries of a language not only have the obligation to reflect lexicalised norm replacements, but also to make projections with regard to future use. Two standard synchronic desk dictionaries of Afrikaans, namely the eighth edition of Verklarende Afrikaanse Woordeboek (1992) and the third edition of Verklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (1994) are explored with special regard to their reflection of norm replacements within the domains of race and political ideology. It is shown that the compilers of these dictionaries consciously and sincerely aimed at removing all racial bias but that they failed to record the diversity of meaning within the political lexicon and the semantic shifts which have occurred within that lexicon during the past decade.