If you’ve heard about any historical romance, then you’ve probably heard of Outlander. The popular series by Diana Gabaldon follows Claire Beauchamp Randall, an English nurse who falls through time when visiting standing stones in the Scottish highlands in 1946. Transported to 1743, she is picked up by a band of Scots highlanders and falls… Read more →
Tag: Marriage
“Ample Justification for the Deed”: Public Interest in the “Sickles Tragedy” as Gender Performance
Congressman Daniel Sickles murdered Philip Barton Key on February 27, 1859, just steps from the White House. The day before, Sickles’s wife, Teresa, had tearfully confessed to an affair with Key, who was then the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. When Key, oblivious to this new development, appeared in view of the Sickles… Read more →
Scheduling My Miscarriage
Scattered across my journals, you’ll find various iterations of multi-year plans, listing off months, allowing me to plan my way backward toward deadlines. In the spring of 2014, while wrapping up the first year of my doctoral program, I made such a list. My husband and I had been married for nearly four years, and… Read more →
Civil War Soldiers’ Wet Dreams
The American Civil War is arguably the most written about topic in American history. Yet for all that has been researched and published, sexuality during the Civil War has been difficult to uncover. This is not due to lack of interest; instead, it is the product of the silences surrounding sexuality during the era. As… Read more →
Revisiting Loving v. Virginia (1967): A Review of Loving (2016)
In June 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Perry Loving married in the District of Columbia. The couple then returned to their home in Caroline County, Virginia. In the parlance of the time, Mildred was “colored.” Richard was white. Six weeks later, the local sheriff and his deputies burst into the Lovings’ bedroom in the middle… Read more →
Yes, I’m a Wife, But You Can Call Me the “Current Supporting Spouse”
The year my second son was born, I went to work, and my husband stayed home. It was the most luxurious year of my life. In the mornings, I nursed my baby while my husband brought our older child to preschool. When he got back, I handed off the baby, said, “bye, Sweetie, see you… Read more →
Love Won: The Irish Referendum
Last May, the Republic of Ireland legalized same-sex marriage, just 22 years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993. This was put to a referendum in Ireland due to the change to the Irish Constitution’s definition of Marriage. While there are obvious and real issues with allowing a public vote on human rights, the Yes… Read more →
Obergefell v. Hodges, Marriage Equality, and the Making of Global Queer History
One morning in late June, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue its history-making decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the collection of lawsuits challenging state bans on same-sex marriage in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee. While predicting the outcome of Supreme Court cases is an inexact science at best, most signs suggest that a majority of… Read more →
More Than Marriage Equality
By Adam Turner
I celebrate with all my heart the recent victories of the campaigns in Washington, Maine, and Maryland to to legalize same-sex marriage. It brings me immense pleasure every time I see another crack in the wall of discrimination against LGBT people – and all people. Now the Supreme Court has taken up the issue as well and there is a lot of excellent coverage on what this might and might not mean for the marriage equality movement. That’s not going to be my focus here, though. I also don’t intend to get into the clear parallels with interracial marriage and the Loving v. Virginia case. Instead, I’ll explore the issue of marriage itself in thinking about the question: Why is marriage the goal?
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage: A Night at the Drive-in
Sex education is tricky stuff. We’ve heard some about it already here on Nursing Clio. And many of us awkwardly shuffled through it one way or another in public school. The only real “talk” I remember from my parents was a noticeably scientific explanation from my microbiologist father, which pretty much cleared up my curiosity at the time, I recall. The public school side of it was mostly anatomy