Gender and Sexualities

Existing research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth homelessness identifies family rejection as a main pathway into homelessness for the youth. This finding, however, can depict people of color or poor people as more prejudiced than White, middle-class families. In this 18-month ethnographic study, the author complicates this rejection paradigm through documenting the narratives of 40 LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. The author examines how poverty and family instability shaped the conditions that the youth perceived as their being rejected because of their gender and sexuality. This rejection generated strained familial ties within families wherein the ties were already fragile. Likewise, the author shows how being gender expansive marked many youth's experiences of familial abuse and strain. This study proposes the concept of conditional families to capture the social processes of how poverty and family instability shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and rejection for some LGBTQ youth.

This petition argues that erotic comics are an important cultural record of the way in which diverse sexualities are understood and portrayed, and sexual fantasies explored. An Erotic Comics Anglophone Archive (ErotiCAA) will preserve these works for research by scholars in many different disciplines.

One of the biggest problems facing anyone researching pornography/erotica or comics, and therefore doubly so for anyone researching erotic/pornographic comics, is finding and gaining access to primary materials. So we have decided to have a go at establishing an archive in the UK to collect and catalogue English-language porn and erotic comics.

We intend to approach a number of libraries and research institutions to host and/or fund the archive. Persuading them to support us will be a lot easier if we an show that there is a need for this archive, so to help with that we’ve started this petition.

We’ve already got this kick-ass logo designed for us by Alison Lucy Stone and meetings set up with a couple of big libraries. Help us out by signing the petition? And if you’d like to be more involved, please tweet Dr Anna Madill @UKFujoshi or Dr Jude Roberts @tangendentalism - we’d love to hear from you!

Moving from the “chivalric love” epoch to the “true-love” generation of the Victorian Era of the 19th C, society evolved from being “relational” into “individual” - the underlying elements in this formation of human society are the transforming forces of namely “capitalist economy”. Industrial advancements culminated in the agricultural labourer / independent farmer bringing their labour to the emerging factories. From among the theories developed to make sense of this transformation – how new modes of production became embodied in the social institutions, Marxism holds an outstanding place. It  is a school of political thought that addresses ‘love’ issues in its formulation of a new social structure. The “relational” nature of male-female relationships as within two different family structures in Engels’ work; The Origin of the Family deserves attention. Engels’ reflections on bourgeois family features vs. household in association with ‘love’ and the Woman Question from this standpoint in reference to Tong’s Feminist Thought – Marxist and Socialist Feminism is what this paper seeks to unravel.

Existing studies of women’s sexual happiness and pleasure most often centre on sexual satisfaction, orgasm, and sexual dysfunction, largely failing to allow women to narrate their own experiences. With the recent release of the first drug to ‘treat’ women’s waning libidos a qualitative examination of women’s notion of ‘good sex’ is more pressing and urgent than ever. We need to extend feminist critiques of power, control, patriarchy and agency to the study of women’s sexuality and sexual happiness. Using semi-structured interviews with 20 women from a 2014 community sample collected in a large southwestern US city, we analyse women’s descriptions of and definitions of ‘good sex’ (as defined by respondents), as well as their experiences of sexual encounters that felt joyous and happy. Analysis revealed four themes in women’s descriptions of good, happy and joyous sex: (1) Physical pleasure, wanting and orgasm; (2) Emotional connection and relationship satisfaction; (3) Comfort and naturalness; (4) Control over sexual scripts. Ultimately, our findings suggest that women prioritized relational components of sexuality – particularly reciprocity, bonding, focus, attentiveness and flexibility of sexual scripts – over the more physical, orgasm-based, ‘release’ aspects of sexual encounters. We discuss the implications of the gendered study of happiness as framed within patriarchal and male-dominant definitions and in the clinical treatment of sexual dysfunction.

We explore the multi-layered concept of asexuality. After giving a brief history of the use of the term asexual, we explain and debunk some of the myths associated with the term, while offering a brief summary of some current literature. We clarify how asexual differs from celibacy and illuminate the particulars of asexuality compared to several Diagnostic and Statistical Manual diagnoses. By situating asexuality within a historical and current socio-cultural context, we examine the gap between self-identified asexuals’ experiences and cultural misunderstandings of asexualities. After briefly addressing diversity within the asexual community, we argue for several avenues of future research.

Any work on Muslim sportswomen inevitably needs to examine the (growing) debates in the Muslim world and in the social sciences concerning Muslim women’s public visibility and public sexuality. One of the central questions I will address is related to the earlier debates and cultural/religious contradictions regarding women’s physicality, their bodies, appearance and public visibility. Olympics and international games however, raise another debate on the ways in which a woman’s body is exposed to international audiences which is linked to complex feelings on national pride (and how this sense of pride and nation is perceived), women’s public sexuality and Islamic pride (which also takes gendered forms). This piece analyses the debates on public visibility and sexuality of Muslim sports women among Islamic circles, including fatwas and the media. In particular, the paper builds on the responses received from sporty Muslim women themselves during semi-structured in-depth interviews in Istanbul. During my interviews, I showed photos of various Muslim sportswomen, which were taken during international games. Female members of women-only gyms were interviewed on their involvement in sports and how their involvement is shaped or constrained by people closest to them at home or at work. The interview data indicate that a large group of women redefine modernity by using a religious framework, and reinvent what it means to be a modern Muslim woman. This act of redefinition has produced both an acceptance of and resistance to certain conservative values regarding gender. In some contexts, women have energetically participated in the propagation of political Islam while simultaneously making their voices heard and claiming agency for redefining modesty, bodily movements and public sexuality as well as security in response to outfit regulations of international games.

TO READ THE WHOLE BOOK -- PLEASE GO TO THE "CHAPTER" SECTION FOR POETICS WHERE EACH CHAPTER HAS ITS OWN PDF. It has been published in 1990 and is also available for free download from the University of California Press.

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

... We would also like to acknowledge Nikki Afzal, Musthak Ahmed, Sanjida Akhtar, Fahad Ansari, Mohammed Ali Abdul Aziz, Fatema Dossa, Beena Faridi, Huda Hllaiyil, Parveen Hussein, Khadijah Islam, Anas Kabar, Changez Ali Khan, Musa Kazi, Shaheen Mamood, Sister ...

This chapter explores the processes of gendered self-identification among non-heteronormative ethnic Fijian men in contemporary Fiji. Although these men perform masculinity in diverse ways, they all display an ambiguous relationship to Fijian traditional notions of gender and masculinity as normative concepts.  This highlights the often complex relationship between individuals’ experiences of gendered identities and culturally specific, dominant notions of gender.

The debate about sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) creates a divide amongst countries working with the international human rights framework. Several countries (including the Vatican and members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) contest the rights of persons of diverse SOGI, while others like Canada and Sweden, promote these rights. The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) facilitates UN State Parties to assess human rights records and formulate recommendations. While quantitative research has scrutinised these recommendations and focused on polarisation between countries, analysis from a qualitative perspective is scarce. This article examines to what extent recommendations allow persons of diverse SOGI to be considered as rights-holders, able to claim and enjoy their rights. A qualitative study, applying critical discourse analysis, examined 2,343 recommendations issued during the period 2008-2020. The majority reflected a binary interpretation of the rights of persons of diverse SOGI, limiting rights for individuals whose identity does not fit the conventional divide between women and men. In light of these findings, this article argues that while the rights of persons of diverse SOGI are considered in the UPR, recommendations should go further by addressing three particular issues: anti-discrimination, the fight against violence and decriminalisation of persons of diverse SOGI.

The contemporary rise of antifeminist and anti-PC movements through a masculinist backlash has been accompanied by diverse reinvigorations of conservatism. The transition from the postCold War era to a current age of man-dominated global politics is rendering increasingly palpable the manifestations of masculinist understandings and practices of security and violence, in which patriarchal and misogynistic beliefs occur in diversified instances and constitute ideologies and movements that necessitate a dependence on uncritical internalizations of gendered hierarchies and binaries.

There is little South African research on gender and sexual minorities’ reproductive decision-making and, to date, no published work explicitly focused on gay men. Motivated by the virtual absence of gay men in research, as well as their marginalisation more generally, we undertook a qualitative investigation of gay men’s thoughts, feelings and perspectives of fatherhood, fatherhood decisions, and experiences of pathways to parenthood.  Framed by a reproductive justice perspective, the aim of the study was not only to generate new knowledge, but also to inform policy, services, and advocacy.  In this paper we present some of the findings from our discursive analysis of participants’ accounts of their own experiences of the pathway to parenthood or remaining ‘childfree’. We locate our analysis within the broader South African context and show how the entanglement of various social identity markers—particularly gender, race, and class—come to bear on participants’ experiences.

""Religion and technology are still perceived as incompatible. Muslim women are imagined as uneducated and backward. Yet, thousands of them have created their own spaces on the Internet, where they discuss contemporary events and dispute religious interpretations. In an age when no other religion is demonised as much as Islam, Muslim women's discussions on the Internet provide captivating and valuable accounts of their lives and views as female believers.

MUSLIM WOMEN ONLINE: EXPLORATIONS OF FAITH AND IDENTITY IN THE VIRTUAL SPACE is the first book to explore the largely unknown online world of Muslim women, located in different places across the globe, mostly in the US and Europe but also in Muslim majority countries. Located within Islamic feminist discourse, the book analyses women’s views on education, culture, marriage, sexuality, work, dress-code, race, class and sisterhood. I have discovered that in the online context, as opposed to during offline interactions, Muslim women are much more willing to cross boundaries between traditional and progressive interpretations of Islam and engage in a dialogue with supporters of different views on women's Islamic rights and responsibilities. Throughout the book, I highlight women's argumentative techniques and their thorough knowledge of Islamic sources which they use to justify their points in online discussions. The book is also one of very few publications looking at both egalitarian and traditional Muslim women's views, the latter being largely ignored by academic scholarship. Complementing these two categories, it introduces a new category of holists, who seek reconciliation between egalitarian and traditional Muslim women and introduce a middle ground, which creates a basis for Islamic sisterhood. Most importantly, it looks beyond hermeneutic differences between the women and emphasises ways in which traditionalists, egalitarians and holists attempt to engage in a common debate and understand each other's views.
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