Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender. Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.

Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender. Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.

Animals, and our ever-changing relationship with them, have left an indelible mark on human history. From the dawn of our existence, animals and humans have been constantly redefining their relationship with one another, and entire civilizations have risen and fallen upon this curious bond we share with our fellow fauna. Brian Fagan unfolds this fascinating story from the first wolf who wandered into our prehistoric ancestors' camp and found companionship, to empires built on the backs of horses, donkeys, and camels, to the industrial age when some animals became commodities, often brutally exploited, and others became pets, nurtured and pampered, sometimes to absurd extremes. Through an in-depth analysis of six truly transformative human-animal relationships, Fagan shows how our habits and our very way of life were considerably and irreversibly altered by our intimate bond with animals. Among other stories, Fagan explores how herding changed human behavior; how the humble donkey helped launch the process of globalization; and how the horse carried a hearty band of nomads across the world and toppled the emperor of China. With characteristic care and penetrating insight, Fagan reveals the profound influence that animals have exercised on human history and how, in fact, they often drove it.

Parasocial Romantic Relationships: Falling in Love with Media Figures explores how, why, and to what effect individuals develop romantic feelings toward people they “know” from the media. These imaginary, one-sided relationships, dubbed parasocial romantic relationships, are both profound and pervasive, Riva Tukachinsky Forster argues. These relationships can take many forms, including adolescents who develop celebrity crushes on popular music artist, anime enthusiasts who “marry” their favorite characters, and fanfiction authors who insert themselves into narratives as romantic interests of the protagonist. Through analysis of surveys, in-depth interviews, and historical examples, this book advances our understanding of parasocial romantic relationships on both a sociocultural and a psychological level. The data and theories analyzed offer insights into how individuals can become romantically engaged with people they do not actually know, some of whom may not even exist in reality. Ultimately, Tukachinsky Forster argues that although these relationships exist only in the mind of consumers, they serve important psychological functions across different stages of life and can lead to significant consequences for individuals’ nonmediated relationships. Scholars of media studies, communication, psychology, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

“This remarkable group of women have narrated their personal experiences with animals—what they have learned and how it has transformed their lives.”—Common Boundary “A celebration of compassion . . . Women are opening new ways of communicating with and understanding the animal world.”—The Seattle Times Though women have long felt kinship with animals, in the past they seldom participated in the study of them. Now, as more women make animals the subject of their investigations, significant new ideas are emerging—based on the premise that animals are honored co-sharers of the earth. This unprecedented anthology features original stories, essays, meditations, and poems by a vast array of women nature writers and field scientists, including: Diane Ackerman • Virginia Coyle • Gretel Ehrlich • Dian Fossey • Tess Gallagher • Jane Goodall • Temple Grandin • Susan Griffin • Joy Harjo • Barbara Kingsolver • Ursula le Guin • Denise Levertov • Linda McCarriston • Susan Chernak McElroy • Rigoberta Menchú • Cynthia Moss • Katherine Payne • Marge Piercy • Pattiann Rogers • Linda Tellington-Jones • Haunani-Kay Trask • Gillian Van Houten • Terry Tempest Williams

Focusing on the author's own marriage and on a group of case studies, this book vividly illustrates the obstacles married couples face today and offers help in overcoming them.

On Intimate Terms looks at the internal logic of lesbian relationships, arguing that they are not patterned after heterosexual ones but rely on the interplay of psychosexual differences between women. The book suggests that everyone seeks psychic complementarity with an Other in intimate relationships as a way of supporting personal growth and development. A complementary partner is one who is different in some individually meaningful way, not necessarily in terms of gender. Drawing upon interviews with individuals and lesbian couples, literature on lesbian psychology, and contemporary psychoanalytic theory, Beverly Burch observes a special attraction between primary lesbians - women who have been attracted to other women from an early age - and lesbians who formerly were heterosexual. This difference may be a source of tension for lovers, but it also attracts and bonds them in conscious and unconscious ways. The intimacy between lesbian partners permits interpersonal exchanges that foster the continuing development of each, according to Burch. This development can occur in three areas, with the significance of each varying from couple to couple. It can be a source of both conscious and unconscious psychosexual exchanges, a way in which each partner can experience "the road not taken" through her relationship with the other. The partners' different histories can reflect different ways of negotiating difference itself, a pivotal theme in the development of adult women. And gender role identities related to different developmental experiences can be played with, expanding the experience of being female in a way that can challenge gender categories.