Sexuality Studies

First published in 1988, this volume redefined the anthropological study of menstrual customs. Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, it challenged the previously widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination that underlay it. Offering feminist perspectives on comparative gender politics and symbolism, the book has interested students and scholars in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems. Originally listed as a “Notable” book in Choice, it later won the first Most Enduring Edited Collection Prize, awarded by the Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction (a unit of the American Anthropological Association.). The book continues to be taught regularly around the world.

Catalina de Erauso was a Spanish nun—turned soldier—who lived in 17th century Spain. Dressed as a man for almost two decades, she travelled to the Colonies to test her luck in the army, where she made the grade of ensign. In 1624 she wrote her memoirs. Unfortunately, the original manuscript was lost and the text which has survived is a copy, probably penned by an amanuensis. In 1996, an English translation of her memoirs was published. In my paper I will argue that the translation of the Stepto’s translation reflects a cultural bias and shows little effort at researching the nun's deeds and words. I will also examine gender attitudes in the Renaissance, and later periods, and the role of the Church in curtailing women from attaining intellectual maturity. To back my claims, I use Catalina's original text and contrast it with subsequent editions. I hope to prove that the English translation veers more towards sensationalism than to a deep and abiding respect for the nun’s misfortunes.
Keywords: Gender; translating issues; transvestite; Basque; anachronisms

This thesis (288 pages) represents an qualitative and historic inquiry into the meaning of abortion in present day Norway. The thesis includes new material (interviews with women and men), focused analysis of the relation and dynamics between religion, gender and present ideology of equality, as well as thorough discussions on theory (theories of Culture, Myth, History, Gender), and the development of a feminist foundation for a feminist theory of Myth.

Sex work has enjoyed a wealth of sociological interest over the last three decades. However, sexual pleasure experienced by women sex workers with their clients has been largely missing from the conversation. This article seeks to redress this gap by looking at the qualitative narratives of nine women who were working in sex work in Victoria, Australia in 2009. By viewing these narratives through Foucault's power/ knowledge/discourse nexus, together with his later work on ethics of care of the self, it posits that sex worker women draw on and resist various discourses around intimacy, performance, and pleasure in regards to their sex work and their personal lives. With this interplay in mind, the analysis supports the third feminist perspective that sex work is a complex space where dominant and subjugated discourses mingle to produce myriad experiences traversing the exploitation/empowerment binary represented by the feminist sex wars.

In the modern game of baseball the game can no longer claim to be completely won on the field. Instead, the game is now won on computers in dingy clubhouse rooms by number crunchers that would probably do better in industries such as finance or science. When looking at the revolution of sabermetrics (also known as performance scouting), or the statistical analysis of baseball data that drastically differed from the old-school visual-based method of scouting, the first thought to your mind is not a comparison of the conflict that surrounds the issue of abortion.

Abstract:

This paper examines mid- 20th century pre-Stonewall American butch-femme bar culture in light of that community being a sacred community for many of its participants as it was “the only place,” a phrase used by many of the informants, to describe the bar as the place that many of them could have any community at all in the contested period when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill.  This paper continues that examination exploring this community in light of a possible sacrality, and the bar as an ecclesiastical site that was the birth site of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights, in contrast to the commonly held assumption that such rights began with the Stonewall Riots of the late 1969.
Further this paper proposes that this re-framed view of the community may be helpful to gerontological studies today as it allows a window through which the elder informants can view their past experiences through a gaze of spirituality. This gaze has not been previously available to them as the gay bar culture has been seen by many who participated in it as without deep meaning. By re-framing the period as having deep meaning, akin to religious significance, it allows the participants to enjoy the benefits that spirituality has been shown to have for the aging process. This community is then seen as a possible site of a lived corporeal theology. For instance, it demonstrates that traditional religious activities (such as marriage) and activities labeled “religious” because of their community functionality took place in the bars.

Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer (LGBTQ) are at greater personal and academic risk than their heterosexual peers (Kosciw et al, 2012).  Many experience a negative school environment and few see themselves represented in the curriculum.  According to the literature, few English/Language Arts teachers are utilizing LGBTQ-focused texts in their courses (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005; Author, 2014).  This case study demonstrates how one English/Language Arts teacher provided challenging, safe, inclusive educational experiences for students.  In so doing, the instructor also provides an example of critical pedagogy in practice.  The multiple strands of the teacher’s instructional approach are discussed, with the goal of helping inservice and preservice teachers to envision ways in which they, too, might challenge inequity and support LGBTQ and other students.

Aesthetics of Excess examines how the bodies of women and girls of color are racialized through cultural discourses of aesthetic value that mark them as excessively sexual “others,” and how in turn, aesthetic value is generated through the presentation of their bodies. Finding that the sexualized styles of working class Black and Latina women and girls generate cultural capital when appropriated in contemporary art, while drawing mockery and denigration in everyday contexts, the book argues that aesthetics of excess are targeted for regulation when embodied by women and girls of color because they signify forms of class, gender, sexual, and racial difference that agitate norms of respectability and social mobility. Conversely, when classified as “art,” these aesthetics generate value in galleries and museums as ironic, streetwise, and edgy. The book employs participatory research with young women of color, critical readings of art and popular culture, and autoethnography to provide new frameworks for understanding the relationships between cultural production and racialized bodies that can be variously exploitative and socially transformative. The book is grounded in Hernandez’s community arts work with Black and Latina girls through Women on the Rise!, an outreach project she established at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida.

Technological advancement has swiftly changed the world.  Gone are the days, when one used to consider a book or meet a person for knowing about a particular topic/issue. Modern world due to the complex social-economic structure, needs to abide by the trends of and changes in the technology. Internet, the greatest inventions of all times, is one of the wonders of modern world that has produced revolutionary changes. It has enabled us to solve the problems ranging from biological diseases to space satellite allocation. This assignment will discuss the specific use of Internet, i.e. choosing a webpage from the internet and analyzing its contents in the light of authenticity and validity.

Članek analizira zgodovino raziskovanja spolnega vedenja v Sloveniji. Analiza vključuje tri vidike: kaj in kako se je raziskovalo ter kakšna je tradicija raziskovanja spolnega vedenja v primerjavi z zahodnimi državami. Avtorji ugotavljajo, da pri nas ni tradicije raziskovanja spolnega vedenja, kakršno poznamo na Zahodu. Prve raziskave segajo v začetek devetdesetih let dvajsetega stoletja, pred tem pa so se izvajale raziskave kontracepcijskega in reproduktivnega vedenja, niso pa vključevale vprašanj o spolnem vedenju. Večina raziskav je s področja javnega zdravstva, med njimi pa ni večjih organizacijskih, metodoloških in vsebinskih razlik. Edina večja razlika je usmerjenost družboslovnih raziskav v pozitivnejše vidike spolnega vedenja (seksualno zadovoljstvo), javnozdravstvene raziskave pa so zasnovane problemsko (rizično spolno vedenje).

Este livro é uma tentativa de entender o percurso por trás da pergunta Existe índio gay?, tantas vezes ouvida durante a ampla pesquisa feita pelo autor, focando na colonização das sexualidades indígenas na história brasileira. O livro, voltado também para não especialistas, busca fazer com que pessoas interessadas no tema possam pensar questões relacionadas às origens da homofobia e do racismo no Brasil. Uma das coisas demonstradas aqui é como os vários povos indígenas no país aceitavam, sem maiores problemas, um conjunto de práticas às quais o colonizador viria a se opor por não se enquadrarem em seus modelos de sexualidade, moral, religiosidade ou ciência. Em resumo: a homofobia chegou nas caravelas, e por aqui ficou. Assim, a colonização impôs a esses povos um sistema moral no qual a sociedade colonizadora se baseava - e ainda se baseia. Nesse sentido, a sexualidade possui um papel fundamental para a compreensão desses mecanismos de dominação sobre a vida cotidiana, do imaginário e da memória. Dito isso, fica claro que este livro não é apenas sobre homossexualidade indígena, mas sobre o que podemos aprender com o percurso que levou à heterossexualização forçada desses povos.

Pré-vendas pelo site da Editora Prismas:
http://editoraprismas.com.br/produto/7917235/PRE-VENDA---Existe-indio-gay-a-colonizacao-das-sexualidades-indigenas-no-Brasil

The popular culture of Japan draws and consolidates fans from various geographical domains and multiple backgrounds. Its engagingly rich heredity and culture is much diverse and proliferates around comics (manga), games, animation (anime) and music. These various sub genres of Japan’s popular culture and the various terminologies associated with them and their audiences frame Western fandom. Cosplay (“costume play”) is a fan culture that has an active camaraderie where fans create their costumes which are inspired by fictional characters from comics, games, animation and music. Cosplay is a fine blend of both its origin terms: “costume” and “play” since a cosplayer portrays characteristics of both these words – dressing up as a fictional character and also enact the character’s life and situations with full realization that they are trying to capture the life of someone, temporarily, who does not exist in reality. In this process happens a blurring of reality, entry into the world of fiction, a creation of new identity through this narrative resulting in the birth of an entirely new persona which is supreme in itself. (Dorfman, 2007) According to Judith Butler, the practice of enacting various identities, genders and switching between them and trying new ones or performing multiple identities, like in Cosplay, allows individuals to redefine, discover, stretch and enhenhance their own sense of identity. Thus cosplayers slip in and out of identities by switching between costumes and perform their persona by enacting the “play”. Thus the concept of identity is in a constant influx where public and private realms merge creating a sense of fragmentation and decentered self giving rise to multiple conflicting identities.
This is a postmodern concept in all senses by creating a hyper-reality where there is a disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture formulating a hybrid culture. This signifies that we are living in the postmodern space of virtuality which defines hobbies and connections and we ourselves are unsure of our own structured identity defined by societal norms. In this technology driven age cosplay also allows a certain form of escapism and interaction with the physical world through conversion of hobbies from a screen-centric medium to a concrete physical world.

About the book
Offering critical response to a range of popular debates on children's sexual cultures, this ground-breaking volume challenges preconceived and accepted theories regarding children, sexuality and sexualisation. The contributions to this collection offer compelling accounts from a range of disciplinary fields and transnational contexts to present original empirical research findings, which offer
new ways to make sense of children's sexual cultures across complex political, social and cultural terrains. Organised into five sections, this book addresses the history of young
sexualities research and theory across disciplinary boundaries; pre-teen sexualities and a rethinking of sexual agency and innocence; how space, place and history shape young queer
sexualities; the representation of young sexualities in the popular cultural imaginary; and the role of new media and digital technology in the formation of children and young
people's sexual cultures.

"The cyberPRINT is a fully immersive, interactive virtual environment that is being generated in real-time based on physiological data readings of a human body. In other words, the cyberPRINT is based on creating interfaces between physical and digital spaces and between biology and information technologies. The cyberPRINT is also an event, wherein a performer is connected to the cyberPRINT generator to create a self-sustaining feedback mechanism. Although using the body to electronically drive music and media events is not new, most of these works have paid little or no attention to the potential of interactive 3D virtual environments. Nor have they been so technologically advanced, interdisciplinary intensive (involving architecture, choreography, modern dance, music, bioengineering, medicine and computer science), or architecturally focused as the cyberPRINT.

This project covers a wide and fertile territory that goes from the very technical and design oriented to the very theoretical and interdisciplinary. This paper is intended to (1) expand what has been already published about this project and (2) establish potential areas for discussion before and after the performance"

The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically-received ‘critical’ film, as a symptom of today’s prevailing cultural and political codes. First we dwell on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception. This is followed by a parallel between the biopolitical optic of the film and today’s dominant ideology, which Badiou calls ‘democratic materialism’. We emphasize that, despite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its de-politicizing effects. It is a depoliticized picture, in which the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities in today’s democratic materialist constellation is countered with the inherent excess of the system, the protagonist’s (self-)destructive passion for the Real. Following this discussion at the level of the narrative, we discuss the film in the context of what Deleuze conceptualized as ‘time-images’. Our point here is that with the The Hurt Locker we are within ‘the cinema of the seer’, within a nihilistic portrayal of nihilism from inside, on the basis of highly formalized time-images that do not become politicized. In other words, The Hurt Locker is trapped within what it describes.

Grounded in three narratives, a lesbian high school student, a transgender college student and a high school teacher/researcher, this paper discusses student resistance in hetronormative spaces and places it relates to themes of agency, affect, and reflexivity.  The purpose of this paper is twofold.  It seeks to, on one hand, further nuance William A. Smith’s framework of Racial Battle Fatigue as it applies to questions of school, culture and fe/male bodies.  On the other, this piece discusses the multiple possibilities in resistance and with resilience when young wo/men enact a sense of agency to create spaces of equity and access in school.  By foregrounding the multiple intersections of self and sexual orientation in public schools today the paper discusses the direct impact of what the authors call Queer Battle Fatigue; an examination of the nexus of the ontological and epistemological as they relate the questions of equity and access in schooling.

Wozolek, B. (2015). Are we not fatigued?: Queer battle fatigue at the intersection of heteronormative culture, International Journal of Curriculum and Social Justice, 1(1), 186-214.

The only way of making meaning from sex work that accords them agency, is their interpretation of sex work as ‘healing’, because it helps beleaguered male clients to return, invigorated and refreshed, to the national work force. Sex workers assume a maternal stance, or strive to provide men with an amateur, girlfriend experience – all the time shouldering the stress of imbibing this professional stance of being simultaneously maternal and virginal, that genders the entire economy as a masculine domain. Sex workers juggle this stress of ‘nonwork’,
with poor working conditions, health and safety constraint\s, and a risk of physical danger that threatens their finances, along with the danger of exposure to family members and partners. While some sex workers resort to narratives of sacrifice – of openly undertaking the stigma of sex work to resolve family financial constraints, this still does not secure them respect, with their narratives often dismissed as pretexts. While ‘healing labor’ is paradigmatic for precarious, gendered work in the masculine economies of Asia and beyond, it is the abusive nature of the system itself that places the onus of choosing it on individual laborers.
This produces disinterest in reform, due to the high turnover of cheap labor, where the meaning attributed to labor becomes inherent to service provision itself.

A History of Bisexuality combines history and queer deconstructive theory in order to rethink our understanding of sexuality in the West. Complicating recent historical and theoretical accounts, it begins with the assumption that any understanding of sexuality’s historical and epistemological construction is impoverished without an analysis of bisexuality.  The book argues that any definition of homosexuality or heterosexuality necessarily entails a definition of bisexuality, such that each of these terms requires the other two for its self-definition. A History of Bisexuality demonstrates this by retracing the history of modern sexuality through sexology, psychoanalysis, gay liberation, social constructionism, queer theory, and the science of molecular biology and genetics.

It reveals that, in order to sustain our culture’s pigeonholing of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, the history of sexuality has been one of repeated attempts to deny the existence of bisexuality. A History of Bisexuality traces the historical forces responsible for this cultural myth, and in the process reveals sexuality, and its accompanying terms hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality, all to be arbitrary designations whose boundaries overlap and merge inevitably and imperceptibly into one another.

Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) are at greater personal and academic risk than their heterosexual peers (Kosciw et al.., 2014). Many experience a negative school environment and few see themselves represented in the curriculum. According to the literature, few English/Language Arts teachers are utilizing LGBTQ-focused texts in their courses (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005; Page, 2014). This case study demonstrates how one English/Language Arts teacher provided challenging, safe, inclusive educational experiences for students. In so doing, the instructor also provides an example of critical pedagogy in practice. The multiple strands of the teacher's instructional approach are discussed, with the goal of helping in-service and pre-service teachers to envision ways in which they, too, might engage in critical pedagogy as a means of challenging inequity and supporting sexual minority and other students.

The article examines Pier Paolo Pasolini's reflection on sexuality and the development of its conception in Italy during the two decades between the 50's and the 70's. In particular, the economic and political considerations linked to the development of the conceptions of sexuality in the contemporary Italian society in Pasolini's writings, as well as the crucial analysis of the role played by the television in shaping the imaginary of the new mass society, can still result relevant and fruitful at present: the contribution of the journalist to the debate on civil rights for homosexual people, for instance, could be crucial.

Abstrakt: Artykuł skupia się na uzależnieniu młodzieży od gier komputerowych oraz zjawisku agresji wśród graczy. Omawia on różne typy gier, wskazuje czy występuje w nich i w jakim stopniu zjawisko agresji, a także jaki ma to wpływ na młodzież. Ponadto, autor próbuje również zaproponować działania, które można zaproponować młodzieży w miejsce gier komputerowych.

Abstract: The article focuses on youth addiction to computer games and the phenomenon of aggression among players. Discusses the different types of games, indicates if are aggressive and how aggression it affects youth. In addition, the author is also trying to propose actions that can be proposed to youth in the place of computer games.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

http://sainsbury-institute.org/news-events/legislating-manga-workshop/

This talk will explore the implications of the Prohibited Images of Children section of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 for Boys' Love and Yaoi in the UK. The British legislation will be set in context briefly with regard to the legal situation in North America, Australia, Japan and China. Anna is Chair of Qualitative Inquiry in the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds and is author of 'Boys’ Love manga for girls: Paedophilic, satirical, queer readings and English law' in Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015). Her online BL fandom survey can be found at https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

This paper focusing on the fifth of the six stories, “The Best School of All,” that constitute Funny Boy, explores sexual identity politics on the school campus, by analysing how Selvadurai’s appropriation of the generic English school story, invests the popular genre with a disruptive potential, unknown to its original form, thereby generating immense pleasure in the reader. The paper argues that the pleasure in reading “The Best School” independent of the novel is to discover in it the familiarity of the school story, and also how it is constantly de-familiarised. By relating theories of genre, gender, nation and the diaspora, the paper attempts to show that “The Best School,” not only subverts generic rules by transfiguring an overtly masculinist genre to accommodate queer desires; it also opens up a dialogic space by confronting authoritative discourses on the colonial system of values perpetuated through the educational institutions, compulsory heterosexuality and ethno-centric nationalism of the postcolonial nation-state. In effect, “The Best School” becomes an important node in the dialogic network of queer narratives produced across the globe, qualifying as a “cause” novel: it advocates recognition of non-heteronormative identities and desires in a postcolonial nation, which is politically and morally opposed to legalising homosexuality, still criminalised under a Draconian colonial law.

Drawing from historical and literary analysis, I look at Ginsburg's Howl as a piece of performance poetry that redefined the spheres of sexuality that existed for many homosexuals during the Cold War era in the United States. Drawing from queer theory, Howl is seen as a literary cry that makes the invisible homosexual visible and destroys the silencing powers of heteronormativity

In Gothic discourse, it is popular to categorise texts as “Male Gothic” or “Female Gothic”. However, as critics such as Carol Margaret Davison have argued, such categories often reaffirm essentialist views of gender and risk making generalised assumptions about the experiences of men and women. Moreover, attempts to divide texts into gendered categories largely ignore the extent to which several nineteenth century Gothic writers foregrounded androgyny as a central facet of their work. Vernon Lee is one such writer.

This chapter explores, firstly, the relationship between exoticism and eroticism in the nineteenth century imagination. It considers how the Catholic Mediterranean settings of two of Lee’s tales, ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890) and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ (1896), contribute to explorations of sexual transgression in relation to contemporary discourses which associated national and religious Otherness with sexual dissidence, constructing a model of the queer body that proliferated throughout supernatural fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While these associations were commonly utilised to construct homophobic Gothic narratives, however, this chapter explores Lee’s conception and construction of the Mediterranean as a space where, unlike in England, transgressive self-expression and desire could be explored, enjoyed and even advocated.

Considering the concept of empathy as understood and popularised by Lee, it then meditates on how characters’ identifications with one another in these fictional works produce or enhance transgression in relation to gender and sexuality. Through empathy with desiring female supernatural figures, Lee troubles the identity of characters perceived as heterosexual men, and hence heteronormativity itself, through Gothic allegories.

Finally, it delves into the nineteenth century association between sickness and sexual dissidence. The period marked a radical shift in thinking about sexuality when, in 1886, the German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing popularised the term “homosexuality” in Psychopathia Sexualis, categorising it as a pathological condition and thus lending credence to existing widely-held beliefs about sexual transgression.
Significantly, the former absence of language to describe same sex desire was often filled by Gothic fiction. George Haggerty for instance, argues that ‘Gothic fiction offered the one semirespectable area of literary endeavour in which modes of sexual and social transgression were discursively addressed on a regular basis.’ This chapter therefore examines the ways in which Lee responded to cultural associations between sickness and sexual dissidence, posing challenges to normative and hegemonic discourses through radical Gothic narratives. In doing so, she rejects Victorian notions of what it meant to be a sexually healthy man or woman.

It ultimately suggests that Lee’s short stories embody Teresa Goddu’s notion of ‘haunting back’, reclaiming the often deeply homophobic Gothic mode to instead sensitively and progressively represent subjugated subjectivities. As such, it considers the ability of supernatural fiction not only to articulate the experiences of queer people in the nineteenth century, but also to challenge the essentialist binary distinctions made between men and women, which, as critics such as Judith Butler have argued, can function to uphold heteronormativity: a national political and social project at the end of the nineteenth century.

In this chapter, I use my experience with studying gayborhoods as an opportunity to reflect on five methodological problems: (1) how to sample hidden populations; (2) how to interview like an ethnographer; (3) how to bring demographic statistics into conversation with cultural meanings; (4) how to move beyond binary conceptions of the city; and (5) how to identify indicators of queer spaces. These five conundrums collective capture the spirit of "queer methods," a provocative new subfield emerging in sociology and beyond.

Clients from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of India’s surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics, lives in surrogacy hostels and speaks with surrogates, their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons to capture the full mechanics of the business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande’s research focuses on the intersection of production and reproduction and its reflection of India’s larger labor regime. Yet her work also showcases the strategies surrogates deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures.. Pande ultimately advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.