Sexualities

The aim of the study has been to investigate men’s perspective on the effect of female genital cutting (FGC) on both women and men’s sexual feelings, their sensitivity, well-being and attitudes. Do men perceive any difference between a cut and an uncut woman when it comes to sexuality? If so, how do men understand and interpret the impact of FGC? Will their personal sexual experience have an influence on their attitude to the practice? Is there a mismatch between sexual scripts and personal experience when it comes to FGC? During 2014, 50 Gambian men, Mandinka and Wolof, and eight Mandinka women were interviewed. The interviews had a qualitative and open structure, and the men were asked to compare and assess the effects that they thought FGC had on the women, and on the sexual act itself, as they experienced it. The interviews disclosed that men perceive a difference in the feelings and behaviour expressed by women who are cut and those who are uncut. Their sense of women’s feelings have an impact on their own sexual pleasure, and on their attitude to the practice.

This article explores the interactive relationship between sexuality, ‘race’ and space. By drawing on ethnographic research with bisexual and lesbian women, it looks at the lived experiences of the intersections of sexuality and ‘race’ in a particular sexualized space, namely Manchester’s Gay Village. The article argues that this ‘primarily’ sexualized night-time leisure space is simultaneously racialized through the ways in which it is structured around whiteness, which is perpetuated through a somatic norm that operates in different ways. It explores perceptions of the Gay Village as a ‘racially neutral’ space, exclusionary practices such as door policies, practices of looking and touching, and expressions of sexual desire, all of which racialize bodies and spaces. Examining ways in which ‘race’ and sexuality work together to constitute space and how sexualized space that is inherently racialized constitutes racial-sexual subjectivities, the article demonstrates the significance of the spatial dimension of everyday intersectional experience and therefore calls for researchers to pay more attention to ‘space’ as a concept when researching intersectionalities.

Mainstream and pornographic images and practice norms are becoming increasingly blurred (Paasonen et al., 2007), while sexual entrepreneurship discourses (Gill, 2009) promote ongoing sexual self-transformation. Women’s sexuality, specifically, is expected to be proficient and perpetually practising. We examine what the mainstreaming of pornography means for sexual desire and agency among 27 young women negotiating heterosex. Participants’ accounts of sexuality and pornography are reflected in a (dis)ordering porn interpretive repertoire. Porn is positioned alternately as: ridiculous and recapitulated performance; a (contested) arousal tool; pedagogy and pictogram; and (resisted) re-enactment pressure. Pornography’s regulatory effects are both rejected and recapitulated. Whether they use porn as a template for sexual possibilities or decry its codes as undesirable, porn acts as an unavoidable cultural reference point for considering sexuality for these young women. A sexual syntax that draws on pornographic images and tropes for sexual desire, pleasure and agency is described.

Based on archive research and interviews with activists who were affiliated with the early homosexual subculture in Budapest, this article traces the transformation of a secretive and socially invisible subculture (that was based mainly on sexual exchange between men) to the establishment of the first formal homosexual organization and the emerging homosexual movement at the end of the 1980s. The article illustrates how the emergence of HIV/AIDS worked as a catalyst in transforming the Hungarian gay subculture into a more organized homosexual movement. Rather than state-socialism being in crisis, it was a crisis of public health and perceived danger to the members of the community that instigated the creation of the first formal homosexual organization.

The concept of love was introduced into a Swedish policy context in the early 1980s as regulations of same-sex cohabitation were proposed. The same-sex cohabitation legislation was presented as a tool in the battle against discrimination of lesbian women and gay men in the government commissioned reports, and offered an inclusion of same-sex couples based on the idea of same-sex love and heterosexual love as fundamentally the same. The article demonstrates how this governing of same-sex relationships rested heavily on authenticity and inclusion/exclusion of wanted/unwanted non-heterosexual subjects. By creating a concept of gay identity based on an essentialist notion of orientation, love was used as a sign of normality indicating authentic ‘homosexual orientation’ and restricting this authenticity to individuals in monogamous and stable same-sex relationships. Nevertheless, the act only recognized a selected few and created new lines of division between different non-heterosexual subjectivities.

A sizable body of mainstream social psychological body image research suggests that gay men are more dissatisfied with their bodies than heterosexual men (Morrison et al., 2004). However, much of this research has been criticized for producing explanatory models that pathologize gay men by foregrounding homosexuality, irrespective of broader sociohistorical factors, as the source of gay male body dissatisfaction (Filiault, 2010; Filiault and Drummond, 2009; Kane, 2009, 2010) – what we refer to as psychology’s gay male body dissatisfaction imperative. Situated within a critical psychology perspective (Teo, 2015), this article relies on the voices of 19 gay/queer participants to problematize psychology’s epistemological determinism. Their ‘talk’ was less interiorized and totalized than the models’ conceptualizations of gay male identity and body image, highlighting the need for models that instead explicate how gay men develop individual, embodied understandings of sexual and gender identity while navigating heterosexist, masculinist, and neoliberal discourses. We investigate the corporeal manifestations of discourse and pay specific attention to queer forms of embodied resistance.

This essay offers some ways quantitative sociology may embrace increasing scholarly and public recognition of sexual and gender diversity. Specifically, we suggest that increasing (1) public awareness and debate concerning sexual and gender fluidity, (2) calls for sociologists to become engaged in public debates, and (3) awareness of gender and sexual nuances underlying the majority of social phenomena create an opportunity for quantitative sociology to begin answering longstanding calls for more empirically grounded measurements of sexualities and gender. To this end, we use our experiences designing quantitative measurements of sexual and gender diversity to provide options for quantitative sociology to better capture the empirical complexity of gender and sexuality within the contemporary world by expanding gender options on survey instruments and expanding sexual identification methods on survey instruments.

The concept of homonationalism has proven useful to analyse the political problematization of LGBTI human rights in the UK. This article analyses discourses on LGBTI asylum in the UK, and focuses in particular on the relationship between liberalism, nationhood and hospitality. Using the methods of discourse analysis it demonstrates that, with asylum, queerness becomes a porous frontier in and out of the nation. Looking firstly at narratives of asylum cases, the article shows how they create a specific temporality, where queer futures are deemed impossible outside of the UK. Then, it looks at how the tropes of the domestic homophobic past and the homophobic elsewhere interact in discourses to produce a unique type of politicization of asylum, whereby British liberal queers can be invested in defending the rights of LGBTI asylum seekers. Finally, the article unpacks what constitutes the promise of ‘happy queer futures’ in the UK. Doing so, it shows that homonationalism is more than a collusion between certain gay and lesbian subjectivations and the liberal state, but rather that it provides complex ways of understanding and articulating sexuality, nationhood and homonormative practices. The article will thus argue that happiness works as an exhortation as much as a promise in asylum, and that the queer futurism offered by homonationalist discourses on asylum perpetuate a dream of the good life – albeit a homonormative conception of it, where happiness, individual freedom and autonomy on the market are closely intertwined.

In this paper, I demonstrate that the adjudication of sexual orientation asylum is one of the processes made possible under what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism. I make an analytical distinction between cases that employ a narrative of ‘the homosexual’ versus other less (homo)normative sexual identities. In the asylum system ‘the homosexual’ is a unitary and fixed identity characterized by visibility, coherence and linearity. These features, notably, are consistent with a homonormative identity construction, which privileges white, Western, gay male sexual politics. My analysis indicates that applicants that can adopt the narrative of ‘the homosexual’ have greater success than applicants’ identities that are not easily encapsulated by this single narrative. Moreover, applicants must also show an infliction of bodily harm to signify a need for asylum; the treatment of their bodies in their country of origin must vary significantly from the protection that the United States purports to offer.

In 2012 Amsterdam Gay Pride Canal Parade hosted a Turkish Boat, organized by Dutch citizens of Turkish decent. The newspaper articles consistently emphasized what an advancement this was for the Turkish migrants, considering their ‘cultural background.’ Simultaneously, public opinion on the former immigrants from Turkey and Morocco as intolerant towards LGBTI people and how they are ‘gay bashing on the streets’ was still present. The scholarship on homonationalism and gay imperialism has been dealing with questions of Orientalism, islamophobia and racism since the 2000s. The question of agency within this scholarship, however, was not dealt with extensively. This paper will engage with this question by mapping out Dutch homonationalism and focusing on how this specific context produces historically contingent subject positions – such as gay, lesbian, Muslim, Turkish or Moroccan-Dutch – that are hierarchized within the Dutch public sphere. None of them is innocent of power or neutral, the power configurations among these subject positions lay the ground of agency upon which the subject can act.

Gay-friendliness and gender equality have been taken as signs of modern Western superiority over other cultural spheres and geographical spaces, particularly those of the Muslim world. In a similar manner, the promotion and defense of gay rights has become the crucible of othering discourses in relation to Africa. Across different cultural and national spaces, the meanings of citizenship, nationalism, modernity, colonialism and sovereignty are being negotiated in debates about anti-homosexuality on the continent. The focus of this article is the politics of mapping anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa in Swedish daily newspapers. Drawing on the work of Jasbir Puar and other feminist and queer scholars theorizing race and sexuality in relation to processes of nation-building, the authors analyze the mapping of the regulation of homosexuality in Africa as an instance of imaginative geographies. They investigate how journalistic rhetoric about homophobia on the African continent in Swedish daily newspapers relies on a politics of homonationalism and sexual exceptionalism in ‘gay liberation’ discourses.

Tel Aviv’s Gay-Center is unique in Israel for being sponsored, managed and controlled by the municipality. This article focuses on the Gay-Center as a material, symbolic and discursive space in order to clarify the relationship between LGBT individuals and the nation. Based on an ethnographic study, we show that since its establishment the Gay-Center has undergone centralization processes as a result of being located in central Tel Aviv and by striving for LGBT mainstreaming, thereby accelerating the achievement of sexual citizenship and urban belonging. However, the expansion of sexual citizenship, which is always based on processes of inclusion and exclusion, reveals homonational practices and homonormative discourses. Since being in the city is the easiest and, at times, the only way to earn sexual citizenship, we argue that LGBT urban citizenship is an indication, a marker and thus a prerequisite of homonationalism.