Sexualities

This article evaluates and synthesizes research and literature from the social sciences, in order to theorize a much neglected area, same sex partnership bereavement. Traditional psychological theories of bereavement are analysed and critiqued, alongside sociological insights not only related to death, dying and grief, but to stigma, emotion work and invoked notions of contamination and pollution. Mainstream psychological theories of bereavement are exposed as being inherently flawed unless modified in relation to `disenfranchised grief'. This concept bridges sociological and psychological understandings, and can also accommodate the potential impact of historical and contemporary oppression on people of diverse sexualities. Traditional identity and postmodern `queer' perspectives, related to sexuality, are also incorporated in order to avoid homogenizing the experiences of people bereaved within same sex relationships and to make explicit both diversity and similarity. Overall, the article demonstrates how and why bereaved gay people may be particularly at risk of stigmatized and disenfranchised grief, whilst simultaneously highlighting the need for more empirical and theoretical attention to be paid to this important issue.

Historically singleness has operated as a marginalized status while heterosexual couples have occupied a privileged position that confers upon its inhabitants a range of social, economic and symbolic rewards. However, demographics now indicate that single-person households are the fastest growing household formation in the UK, signalling the beginning of what some have termed `the singles' century'. This article will examine how the stigmatized status of singleness is defined and negotiated within a culture that privileges couple relationships. Consideration will be given to whether it is possible for singleness to resist and transcend its `outsider' status within a context where individuals are purportedly able to exercise a greater degree of choice in how they organize their sexual lives. Narratives that single people (across different sexual identities) construct about couple relationships and their own cultures of intimacy, constituted to a significant extent through friendships, are analysed. These narratives indicate that positive single identities are possible despite heteronormative regulations which privilege couple relationships.

In this article I explore the constructed realms of thought in the club Laowai and other western-style nightclubs in Taipei, Taiwan. These contested realities revolve around notions of foreign and local, masculine and feminine. In examining Taiwanese women's portrayal of selves as chaste in the setting of a pick-up bar we can explore the complicated web of contradictory messages in which purity is constructed and the foreign is simultaneously exalted and despised. In exploring these issues I address Taiwanese women's sexuality in relation to the representational appeal of, and ambivalence towards, western men. This, in turn, ties in with contested fantasies within one social space. The resulting analysis suggests that to reduce club cultures to the singular, even in one club, is a conceptual error, for there are several overlapping realities in any given locale.

This study describes the complex dynamics of the sexual, economic and social interactions between a group of feminized homosexual men and men who have sex with men and self-identify as heterosexual (`mostaceros'), in lower-income peripheral urban areas of Lima and Trujillo, Peru. The study examined sexual risk between these two groups of men, and the significance of the economic exchanges involved in their sexual interactions. Using a Grounded Theory approach, 23 individual interviews and 7 focus groups were analyzed. The results reveal that cultural, economic and gender factors mold sexual and social relations among a group of men who have sex with men in Peru. Compensated sex is part of the behaviors of these men, reflecting a complicated construction of sexuality based on traditional conceptions of gender roles, sexual identity and masculinity. Several factors (e.g. difficulty in negotiating condom use, low self-esteem, low risk perception, alcohol and drug consumption), in the context of compensated sex, play a role in risk-taking for HIV infection.