marriage Archives | Research & Innovation

Playwright and filmmaker to discuss the themes of his work

fmaquito — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Indian playwright, director and filmmaker Mahesh Dattani will give an afternoon reading of two plays along with a discussion about the representation of gender hierarchies and sexualities in his work.

Dattani will read from his plays Seven Steps Around The Fire and Dance Like A Man An Friday, June 15, from 1 to 3pm, at 280A 91��ɫ Lanes, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Winner of India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998 from India’s National Academy of Letters, Dattani is one of the country’s best-known playwrights.

Mahesh Dattani

He is also known for his directing work in the cinema, including films such as Mango Souffle, which won Best Motion Picture in 2003 at the Barcelona Film Festival, and Morning Raga, which took Best Artistic Contribution in 2004 at the Cairo Film Festival.

His plays are crafted gestures of dissent. His oeuvre has forged wide-ranging critiques of Indian heteronormativity, social institutions such as the family, as well as cultural rituals, including marriage, are interrogated and found wanting.

The event is hosted by the 91��ɫ Centre for Asian Research, 91��ɫ’s departments of English and Theatre, and the Sexuality Studies Program at 91��ɫ.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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On Valentine's Day, Professor David Reid says give to your relationship to get results

fmaquito — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 10:00:00 +0000

The best gift you can give your partner this Valentine’s Day isn’t flowers or chocolate, but rather the experience of the relationship they desire, according to a 91��ɫ psychologist.

“In order to have a successful relationship, you really need to be able to give of yourself – to go outside your own needs, wants and viewpoints,” says David Reid, a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Health.

Right: A Victorian Valentine's Day card. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

“It sounds obvious, but I see so many clients who cannot put themselves in their partner’s shoes. Either they aren’t used to thinking in terms of the point of view of their spouse, or they simple refuse to,” he says. “This doesn’t mean you cave in to everything your partner wants. Rather, you learn to be more intuitive and emotionally sensitive towards your spouse. When this is done reciprocally it can create a very positive symbiotic shift in a relationship,” he says.

Reid has studied and documented the dynamics between couples for more than 15 years. He developed a new type of therapy that helps partners create a greater identity for themselves within their relationship, so much so that they begin to talk as if the relationship is part of their individual identities.

“You’re changing the relationship in ways that draw the partners into feeling and thinking of themselves as part of the relationship,” says Reid. “At its best, a relationship can actually allow you to express your identity and get to know yourself in ways you never thought possible,” he says.

His most recent research shows that as a result of participating in couples’ therapy, partners become significantly better at inferring what the other is thinking and feeling – the cornerstone of a healthy relationship.

With couples’ consent, Reid videotaped therapy sessions and then painstakingly studied how each set of partners related to one another. He designed techniques that accommodate the uniqueness of each partner and their relationship, including their respective personalities and added factors such as culture, family dynamics, and other challenges like medical problems.

Reid revisited the couples two years later to document how their relationships had progressed, using an unbiased interviewer. He repeatedly found that couples’ satisfaction was connected to how well they had learned to identify with their relationship as a result of the therapeutic intervention.

“It’s as if they learn to be their own therapists,” Reid says. “When you improve the relationship in ways that accommodate the idiosyncrasies of each partner, often the original issues that you argued about either dissolve, or are really quite easy for the couple to solve themselves,” he says.

Part of his therapeutic process involved interviewing a partner who agreed to pretend to be their spouse, attempting to answer questions from their partner’s viewpoint. Their spouse sat out of sight, and was later interviewed in the same manner.

“There’s a big impact witnessing one’s partner knowing you so well,” Reid says. “In doing this exercise, a husband may find that he knows more about his wife than he’s aware of, and vice versa.”

Reid offers the following tips for couples to strengthen their relationship:

Put your own issues aside and respectfully engage the point of view of your spouse. If you can’t solve the problem, maybe you’re part of it.
Pay attention to your intuitions. Be honest with yourself. Do you feel something isn’t right? There’s a bias in our world to think you can solve every problem with reason.
Learn to listen honestly – not to win a point. Communication is based on feedback. Listen to understand your partner’s meaning, rather than just the words they are using.
Try to accept each other. That includes accepting yourself; no one is perfect. Acceptance can go a long way towards resolving differences.
When you’re having a major disagreement, remember to also speak for the relationship and not just yourself. In those moments of discord think of what would be best for the relationship. Research has found that partners in a well-functioning relationship have learned to make the relationship the bigger priority.
Quit naysaying. Phrases like “I can’t,” “that won’t work,” “we can’t afford it,” can be replaced with formative thinking, such as, “How can we make this work,” “Is there another way we can do this.”
Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. If your partner exhibits behaviour that is upsetting to you, half the battle can be to change yourself in such a way that it leads the other person to evolve, as well.
The secret to longevity is good maintenance. Do those little things to keep the relationship humming along; nurturing, finding value in the relationship, and not taking it for granted. Relationships are not “things.” They are a dynamic ongoing process for growth, well-being and good health.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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History Professor Marc Stein's book questions US Supreme Court's sexually libertarian image

fmaquito — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 10:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ history Professor Marc Stein grew up in the suburbs of New 91��ɫ City in the 1960s and 1970s with a passionate faith in the US Constitution and US Supreme Court as strong protectors of freedom, equality and democracy in the post-war era.

That faith was shaken in the 1980s when the Supreme Court justices upheld state sodomy laws, which he initially attributed to the conservative backlash of the Reagan era. Then, in the early 1990s as a graduate student, Stein stumbled across a 1967 decision upholding the deportation of Canadian citizen Clive Boutilier, which challenged his assumptions about the earlier liberalism of the US Supreme Court.

Boutilier vs. the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was one of the Supreme Court's first major gay rights cases, says Stein, an award-winning author, editor and teacher in 91��ɫ's Department of History, School of Women's Studies ��Ի��Sexuality Studies Program, all in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

What the Supreme Court justices did in this case did not protect equality and freedom. Instead, they upheld a provision of the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act that authorized the exclusion and deportation of aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, which the US Congress, the INS and the Supreme Court interpreted to apply to homosexuals.

Canada had introduced its own version of the US immigration law in the 1950s, but repealed it in the 1970s, a few years after homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US didn't repeal its law until 1990.

Left: Marc Stein

Although liberals celebrate and conservatives condemn the US Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s for its rulings on issues such as abortion and birth control, Stein says, neither is correct in depicting the court of that era as sexually libertarian or egalitarian. He argues this point in his new book , which looks at six major Supreme Court cases – Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Eisenstadt, Roe and Boutilier.

More than half the book is devoted to the Boutilier case. Stein is the first scholar to examine this episode in any depth and to tell Boutilier’s tragic story following the Supreme Court ruling. Boutilier had moved from Nova Scotia to the US with his family in the 1950s and several of his brothers served in the US military. When he applied for US citizenship in the early 1960s and revealed that he had once been arrested, though not convicted, on a sodomy charge in New 91��ɫ City, his legal troubles began.

In doing the research for the book, Stein studied liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage and obscenity, alongside the conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. What he found was that the sexual rights doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1973 was not liberal or egalitarian. In fact, it upheld heteronormative assumptions regarding "the supremacy of adult, heterosexual, marital, monogamous, private and procreative forms of sexual expression," he writes. Marital and reproductive rights were upheld; sexual rights were not. These decisions also reproduced and reinforced social hierarchies based on class, race, gender and citizenship. And liberal and leftist advocates who argued these cases before the Supreme Court "condoned sexual discrimination".

Right: Andrew Boutilier (left), Clive Boutlilier's brother; Joyce Boutilier, Andrew's wife; Clive Boutilier; and Eugene O'Rourke, Clive's partner

Their arguments in birth control and abortion cases, for example, distinguished between laws that interfered with marital and reproductive rights, which they challenged, and laws against adultery, fornication and sodomy, which they said were constitutional, says Stein.

In Boutilier’s case, the ruling concurred with the view that homosexuals suffered from psychopathic personality and so should be deported. After the decision, Boutilier’s case was all but forgotten. The decision against him didn’t conform to popular narratives about the liberalism of the US Supreme Court after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on racial desegregation, so it was ignored.

Stein adds that many US gay and lesbian activists challenged discriminatory policies and practices during the 1950s and 1960s, but that was also forgotten, giving rise to the popular myth that the gay and lesbian rights movement began in the 1970s. In fact, says Stein, it started much earlier and was quite vigorous, as can be seen by the extraordinary coalition that defended Boutilier, which included immigration advocates, civil libertarians and gay rights activists.

"My book is the first to show that the US gay and lesbian movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a well-developed strategy of turning to the courts to defend sexual rights," he says.

The sexually conservative aspects of the Supreme Court's "liberal" decisions on abortion, birth control, interracial marriage and obsenity in the late 1960s and early 1970s vanished from the public consciousness. Instead, the US public came to believe that the Supreme Court's decisions of that era were sexually libertarian and egalitarian. Decades later, the Supreme Court itself seemed to adopt the public's point of view, declaring in its 2003 decision striking down state sodomy laws that the ruling was consistent with the decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, says Stein.

This, he says, is consistent with new theories of "popular constitutionalism," which emphasize the importance of popular understandings of legal rights.

Stein hopes Sexual Injustice will shed light on the implications of some of the Supreme Court’s decisions, as well as the sexual revolution, and help educate the public regarding heteronormative rights and privileges in the past and the present.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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SSHRC-funded international workshop examines forced marriages in conflict stituations

fmaquito — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ law & society Professor (LLB '88) and The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples are hosting an international workshop on forced marriage in conflict situations today and tomorrow in Room 305 91��ɫ Lanes on the Keele campus.

Left: Annie Bunting

Bringing together historians of slavery and women's human rights scholars, this workshop will explore the phenomenon of forced marriage ��Ի��enslavement from comparative and historical perspectives.

During conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda and Rwanda, women were kidnapped, raped and forced into "marriages" with combatants. recently found such gender violations to constitute a new crime against humanity of forced marriage as opposed to sexual slavery.

Workshop speakers will explore the merits of prosecuting those responsible for forced marriage under the heading of Sexual Slavery, Forced Marriage or Enslavement? They will also explore the historical antecedents of servile marriage and enslavement of women.

A keynote presenter at the workshop is , chair of the Women's Forum in Sierra Leone, a national umbrella organization of women's groups in the region. M'Carthy has been working with the for the past three years and will speak about the experiences of female victims in the Sierra Leone war. Other presenters will discuss comparable practices in Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC.

Speaking at the workshop are:

, president of Free the Slaves
Gaëlle Breton-LeGoff, a lecturer at the University of Quebec in Montreal
91��ɫ law & society Professor
, a senior researcher in children, armed conflict and human rights at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University
91��ɫ Distinguished Research Professor Paul Lovejoy, director of The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and
Rosaline M’Carthy, President, Women's Forum of Sierra Leone
, Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa (OSIEA), Harvard Law School
Osgoode Hall Law School Professor
University of Hull Professor Joel Quirk,
, RCUK Fellow in International Slavery at the University of Liverpool
, 91��ɫ PhD candidate in history, The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples
Jody Sarich, DePaul University, Free the Slaves

This workshop is the first of two conferences supported by a grant. In February 2011, Bunting will host a larger international conference in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Today's workshop is supported by numerous areas at 91��ɫ, including the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime & Security, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, the dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), and The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples.

For more information, visit The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples website or contact Kathy Mirzaei, interim graduate program assistant, Department of Sociology, LA&PS.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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91��ɫ study: Work hard at making a good marriage, not changing your partner

fmaquito — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

As Canadians continue to live longer, they can expect to spend more years with their life partners, whatever old age brings, wrote The Globe and Mail May 7:

In fact, the research suggests that, while there’s no guarantee that sticking it out will lead to happiness, good marriages often get better later in life.

“They were like honeymooners, some of them,” says , a professor of social science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, who with her husband, Ben Schlesinger, recently studied 20 couples who had been married at least 45 years by intensively interviewing the husbands and wives separately.

What the happy couples said: Keep busy, maintain a strong social circle, invest energy in your grandkids. The couples reported working hard at their marriages, but not trying to change their partners. They had fun – “these were not dour people,” Aber-Schlesinger says. And they still made plans, even into their 90s. “They didn’t only look back, they also planned ahead.”

The complete article is .

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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