Sexualities

The last decade has seen significant change in LGBT-Q politics in many (neo)liberal democracies. In Ireland, Civil Partnership (CP) was signed into law in 2010. While LGBT-Q advocacy groups had been divided over the terms of CP, they presented a united front in favour of marriage and in May 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to vote in favour of same-sex marriage in a constitutional referendum. This article begins from a personal moment as I sat in a television audience where a polarized debate – mainstream ‘progressive’ Left in favour of marriage equality versus ‘conservative’ religious Right against – ensued. It draws on interviews with five advocates in LGBT-Q politics and an analysis of print media related to CP and marriage from January 2010 until January 2014. This article inquires into the discourses and decision-making as CP and marriage emerged. It is anchored by the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and others, focusing on the concepts of discourse, truth, normalization and equality. I demonstrate how the advocates adopted a politics of pragmatism and employed integrative, assimilationist strategies in line with consensus politics. I show how these approaches played their part in foreclosing radical sexual politics or broader kinship discussions. The article asserts that the advocates were motivated by how CP/marriage had the potential to achieve ‘real life’, large-scale cultural change through normalization. However, I demonstrate how mobilizing a politics of change based on normalization and sameness simultaneously (re)produces an ‘acceptable’ sexual citizen and reassigns ‘others’ as peripheral.

This article utilizes gay adult film as a means to understand the commodities generated through intimate labor. It offers a new concept, intimate commodities, in order to understand what, in addition to intimacy, is produced through intimate labor. Intimate commodities are material objects that are generated in conjunction with intimate labor, which are then traded or sold, and through their utilization generate intimate ties between individuals and themselves, other persons, or groups. Through ethnography and a survey of men who perform in the gay adult film industry, this study explores how the stratification of the conditions of production influence the commodities themselves, their use, and how, through their circulation, they may perpetuate inequalities. This conceptualization calls for increased attention to the illusory divide between productive and reproductive labor.

Sexuality in the Family Planning Program (FPP) has been largely overlooked, even though the practice of birth control is inextricably connected with procreative behavior. Focusing on the sexuality discourse of the FPP in South Korea, this article examines the process of constructing an intimacy sphere and making modern families in a non-western society. The FPP was adopted as national policy and implemented by the military junta during the repressive dictatorship in the 1960 and 1970s. However, contrary to the public perception of FPP as a coercive intervention into people’s personal lives, the FPP took a critical stance regarding the repression of sexuality and stressed the pleasurable aspect of sexuality, disconnecting it from procreation and associating it with love. By analyzing this unexpected aspect, this article highlights that the emphasis on the association of sex, love and marriage was a western concept ushered into the modern Korean family in a postcolonial context. Women’s sexual desire was justified and encouraged—but conversely, women’s autonomy became bound to a sexual dimension and embedded in the marital relationship as the core of the South Korean ‘modern’ family.

The essay contributes to Cultural Studies as an evaluation of changing practices of media and social activism while highlighting theories of feminism and dialogic aesthetics. More specifically, it discusses women’s use of online self-photography as a protest medium and a platform for feminist activism within two distinctive protest movements, the Umbrella Movement of Fall 2014 and the mainland Chinese feminist movement of 2012–2013. Forerunners of these movements in mainland China can be found in the work of performance artists and sex bloggers such as Ye Haiyan and Muzimei, who have used bulletin board systems and blogs to lay bare their sex lives and the cultural mechanisms of misogyny. Their performances in public spaces and their online postings have also elicited public brawls and significant responses within governmental agencies (Farrer, 2007; Tong, 2011).

The article posits that these discourses also have a historical lineage in the ‘light’ or ‘fleeting’ dissident writings of the Cultural Revolution that generated large-scale responses but did not aim at becoming earnest or solidified works of art (Voci, 2010). In this vein, nudity is employed to titillate and stir fellow netizens rather than offering a coherent and embodied stance. It offers flippant gestures and statements that come to signify ideology within online social movements.

Hook-up websites and apps are said to be transforming the sexual lives of gay men and have been linked with the apparent erosion of gay publics as the basis for identity politics and social action. This article examines these dynamics in the interview and focus-group talk of gay men living on the economic and geographical margins of metropolitan gay culture. It offers perspectives on the importance of location – class, generation and space – for the experience of digital media, the negotiation of safety, and the new codifications and elaborations on sex with the (non) stranger; a figure who is not alien, yet not familiar, in sexual sociality. Reflecting on these situated perspectives in connection with debates on the erosion of gay publics, this article argues against monolithic framings of gay men’s sexual lives after digital media.

This article uses British diver and homosexual celebrity Tom Daley as a case study to examine instances of homosexual stereotyping on LGBT internet forum the DataLounge. Through textual analysis, I consider the anonymous discourse relating to Daley in terms of its representational implications. Of interest is how Daley is constructed through this discourse and what such constructions have to tell us about views on homosexuality and a particular well-known homosexual subject. I argue that Daley is objectified and aligned with certain stereotypes within this dedicated homosexual forum via the anonymous comments made about his profession, his body and mannerisms, and his personal life. I nominate certain ‘themes’ to make sense of this discourse, namely: the ‘dancer body’, the bottom, the slut, and the daddy’s boy. In addition to offering insight into how a particular homosexual celebrity is constructed through discourse by his own community, these themes also point to the pressures gay men feel to conform to ‘ideals’, and the consequences of nonconformity, of being a ‘failed representation’ (also known as a ‘stereotype’).

This article reports on the results of a study on men who pay for sex across Ireland. In presenting a detailed picture of the diverse group of sex workers’ clients, their motives and attitudes, we debunk the prevalent stereotypes about men who pay for sex, as continuously used in the public discourse about sex work on both sides of the Irish border: we show that the majority of clients do not fit the image of violent, careless misogynists. We argue that these debates about commercial sex as well as the experiences of those who pay for sex are shaped and nurtured by the specific local context, by conservative Christian morals and the dominant sex-negative culture across Ireland. Finally, we argue that the criminalization of paying for sex which came into effect in Northern Ireland in 2015 and is being discussed in the Republic of Ireland will likely not stop the majority of clients from paying for sex and thus fail to achieve its aim to reduce or abolish sex work.