Sexualities

Research into queer intimacies and families has been largely conducted from and about the Western (specifically Anglo-American) context. It very often (re)presents a hegemonic, mono-normative paradigm and vision of intimacy and family life, and profoundly influences the scope and methods of such research in other localities. This article uses findings from a large-scale mixed methods study called Families of Choice in Poland which was designed to examine the diversity of intimate and familial practices of non-heterosexual lives. It highlights how geo-temporal conditions shape LGBTQ relational lives and, as such, unsettles the dominant Western knowledge on queer kinship.

This article explores how advancements in equality rights combine with attitudinal changes in UK society and LGBTQ communities to impact on the experience of lesbian mothers over a generation. The author reflects on ordinary moments where sexuality and relationships become meaningful and situate emotions at the heart of analytical enquiry because it is through emotional interactions that micro–macro networks of relations intersect. Autobiography is combined with original data from empirical research to provide analytical entry points, which aims to advance understanding and also facilitate reflection on how we understand and come to know queer parenthood. Whilst there are now many routes into lesbian motherhood and the stigma of queer kinship is diminishing, this article demonstrates the need to problematize the prevailing narratives of coupledom that are emerging and tease apart the conflation of temporal progression, progressive rights and narratives of progress.

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.

This article draws on three narratives from a Canadian research project on LGBTQ people and fertility clinics to illustrate how LGBTQ bodies, identities and family configurations are frequently misrecognized and unintelligible in the fertility clinic context. The flow of the patient through the clinic is disrupted by the inability of clinic staff to disentangle the assumptive links made between body parts, gametes, gender, sex, sexual orientation, sexual practice and family configuration. The author explores how the ‘gender and kinship labour’ and processes of objectification that typically operate in the fertility clinic to bolster conventional masculinities and femininities break down in relation to queer and trans bodies, and offers the beginnings of a framework to assist practitioners, and others, to conceptualize and work more effectively with LGBTQ people.

What kinds of creative potential exist in silence – in not coming out? This ethnographic study takes the strategic silences that queer persons in Mumbai deploy regarding ‘coming out’ as productive for theorizing the connections between kinship and queerness. While some strands of queer critique conceptualize the relationship between kinship and queerness antagonistically, the author deploys the concept of agonistic intimacy outlined in Singh’s Poverty and the Quest for Life (2015) to consider how queers might inhabit heterosexual kinship networks through the interplay of contestation and submission. Silence, then, need not signal the image of the transnational queer in need of saving, but a mode of negotiating desires for respectability and queerness.

This article explores the controversial kinship practice in mainland China of ‘gay’ men marrying unwitting women. It questions the ‘marriage fraud’ discourse that condemns the men involved while pitying their wives, or tongqis. Taking an ethnographic approach, this article considers the major flaws of this popular discourse: the idealized-package of marriage–love–sex, the oft-neglected difficulties of living outside marriage, and most importantly, the essentialization of homosexuality. It also examines the im/possibility for married ‘gay’ men to be honest in their marriages. Finally, it cautions that honesty, if used as a decontextualized ethical yardstick for queer kinship, may obscure the racist and homophobic prejudices that exist both outside and inside queer communities. Accordingly, this article proposes that we shift to ‘opacity’ as an epistemological, methodological and ethical parameter that radically queers kinship (studies).

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in many cases, facilitate their acceptance. At the same time, continuing contestation over such understandings helps drive instances of opposition.

This review article attests to the maturation of research into consensual non-monogamy and polyamory. It provides an in-depth review of a selection of recent publications that push boundaries and pair interdisciplinary inquiry with queer sensibility and theoretical sophistication in the three areas of theorizing emotions, theorizing intimacies and sexualities and theorizing discourses and the public sphere. This work foregrounds the persistence of moral normativity and judgemental attitudes regarding consensual non-monogamy. It underscores the power dimension around non/monogamy and reveals the complexity of contradictory dynamics of discrimination and privileging around non/monogamous life choices. It shows how non-monogamous people deconstruct feeling rules and demonstrates the nodal function of gender and race/ethnicity in the discursive framings of different forms of non-monogamy.

This article presents data from five years of research on fashion, gay identity, and post-apartheid democracy in Cape Town, South Africa. Through interviews, observations, and survey data on the experiences of young “black” and “coloured” gay men, it shows how admission standards at nightlife venues in the city’s “Gay Village,” De Waterkant, police patrons’ clothing and institutionalize essential models of raced and classed gay belonging that complicate the multicultural “Ubuntu” promised by the state. The article troubles the multiculturalism coincident with tourism media, which frames De Waterkant as “Africa’s Gay Capital,” and instead argues that participants’ understanding and use of clothing in city and black township nightlife present aesthetic anomalies through which the becoming of Ubuntu can be productively rethought. Contributing to geographies of sexuality work, the article shows how classed-race exclusions in De Waterkant help fashion Ubuntu at the junction of multiple scales of spatiality, and by applying Women of Color Feminism and Queer of Color Critique to African Studies, how everyday spaces, and the clothed bodies therein, can reveal the mutually constitutive becoming of Ubuntu and queerness.

Based on quantitative survey data collected during Pride parades in six European countries – the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland – we analyse who participates in Pride parades. Engaging with the so-called protest normalization thesis we ask: are Pride parade participants, aside from sexual orientation, representative of the wider populace? In none of the countries could we find indications that Pride participants mirror the general populations. The parades remain dominated by well-educated, middle strata youth, rich in political resources. However, we find variation between countries, which we link to differences in elite and public support for LGBT rights.

This article introduces the concept of abnormativity as way of theorizing the realities of subjects who suffer from marginalization and/or erasure, specifically sex workers. It then develops livability as a playbook of political action which attends to the abnormative lives of sex workers by balancing resistance to institutionalized forms of marginalization with queer critical approaches to heteronormativity. It proposes this framework as suitable for frontline sex-worker support projects, outlining the limitations and benefits of three ethico-political models that aim to address the conditions of abnormativity: the politics of recognition, intersectional recognition, and critical intelligibility. It argues that each of these models is insufficient on its own, but that intersectional recognition and critical intelligibility can be mobilized productively together as the politics of livability.