Sexual Politics Research Articles

Post-homophobic imaginaries amongst the far-right in Germany and Switzerland

ABSTRACT Alongside violently opposing gender and sexual equalities, far-right parties in Western Europe have increasingly denied their political positions as homophobic. This article explores how far-right party actors in Germany and Switzerland actively use liberal discourses to advance reactionary gender and sexual politics beyond outright opposition. It queries how party actors consolidate hetero-patriarchal ideological commitments with a desire to include homosexual subjects within the parties’ respective ideologies. This study argues that reactionary actors in Germany and Switzerland are highly adaptive to the ‘post-homophobic’ discursive terrain they navigate. In doing so, openly gay and lesbian actors within far-right parties and their allies are not operating in a vacuum. They can draw on an expansive archive of mainstream political discourses, including normative ideas about the neoliberal family, a gendered economy of reproduction and the potent construction of homophobic immigrants. Our analysis thus demonstrates that liberal ideas around sexuality are not always overtly opposed to but also actively invested in for reactionary gains.

‘I have aym’d my black shafts at white markes’: Colours in The Queen of Corinth

The article offers a new angle on The Queen of Corinth (1617), a tragicomedy that Philip Massinger co-wrote with John Fletcher and Nathan Field. It discusses the way in which colours are skilfully used to sketch out the characters’ personalities, reproduce their mindset, values, gender, and social roles, and define the different agencies of men and women. This article sheds light on how the presence of colours and their interaction convey a cultural ideology and negotiate multiple meanings in terms of morality, sexual politics, gender, and justice while crystallising the sexual, social, and political anxieties of the period.

The Forgotten Feminist

Kate Millett (1934–2017) is best known for her text Sexual Politics (1970). Despite her sudden rise to popularity in the women’s liberation movement, she was quickly dismissed and forgotten, even while continuing to produce new works. Victoria Hesford and Sheila Jeffreys have, respectively, examined the role of homophobia and shifts in feminist theory on Millett’s cataclysmic rise and fall. Expanding on these accounts, the article addresses how sanist discourse pathologized Millett’s bisexuality and polyamory as symptomatic of mental illness to delegitimize her critiques of heteronormative patriarchal psychiatry. It draws a connection between Millett’s public outing in 1970, her first involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in 1973, and the unfavourable and problematic literary responses to her memoirs Flying in 1974 and The Loony-Bin Trip in 1990. Relying on Maria Rovito’s Madwoman theory, the article argues literary critics participate in the silencing and pathologization of Millett by continuing to frame her as mentally ill, instead of as a survivor of psychiatric abuse. It seeks to demonstrate that Madwoman theory is an ethical feminist disability methodology for literary criticism that restores Millett’s voice by unveiling the intersections of heteronormative monosexism and sanism that functions to silence queer Madwomen through epistemic violence and social death.

“Gays in Your Living Room”: LGBTQ+ Television, Homophobia, and the Birth of Channel 4 in 1980s Britain

ABSTRACT This article examines the conflicting attitudes toward homosexuality and public-service broadcasting among British program-makers, pressure groups, newspapers, politicians, and viewers in the 1980s through the prism of Channel 4’s One in Five (1983), billed as “the first programme ever to begin to show what it means to be positively gay.” It pairs a close reading of the broadcast with wide-ranging research in the archives of broadcasters, LGBTQ+ organizations, Parliament, and the press to show why minority programming formed a major arena of contestation over the representation and rights of lesbian and gay people in late twentieth-century Britain. Straight opposition to One in Five captured the strength and characteristics of homophobia in the 1980s, while the program’s divisive effect on queer audiences illuminated divisions within the LGBTQ+ community at the cusp of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The program was dogged by difficulties in creating a cohesive queer identity capable of accommodating differences in gender and ethnicity, region and nation, lifestyle, class, sexual practices, and political orientation. The inception, production, and reception of One in Five simultaneously highlight the particularities of sexual politics in Thatcherite Britain and ongoing dilemmas about the processes and merits of achieving inclusion, diversity, and equality for marginalized groups.

The Baby and the Bathwater: Class Analysis and Class Formation after Deindustrialisation

Abstract This paper is an edited version of the Deutscher Memorial Lecture delivered in November 2023 which expands upon The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. It develops an account of the productivity limits of interpersonal service work more firmly rooted in Marxism and argues that the separation of social reproduction from production is primarily economic rather than political. This theoretical device is then deployed to argue that there is indeed a global ‘crisis of care’. This crisis is triggered not only by destabilisation of earlier care regimes, but also the encounter between the productivity limit and new forms and expanding volume in demand for care. Finally, this crisis is linked to the new global sociology and politics of gender and sexuality. Methodologically, the paper argues for renewed attention to the empirical specificity of proletarianisation processes, rather than ‘class abstractionism’.

The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti by Erin Durban (review)

The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti by Erin Durban (review)

Queer Terrorists, Terrorist Queers: The Sexual Politics of Turkey’s War on Terror

How do the so-called wars on terror impact queer lives and politics? This article addresses this question by exploring the racialized gender and sexual politics of Turkey’s own brand of war on terror and its ramifications for LGBTQI+ lives. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war and public culture analysis, I reveal how the political construction of Kurdish militants as queer figures goes hand in hand with state terrorization of LGBTQI+ people in contemporary Turkey. I anchor my analysis in a novel counterinsurgency trope—“terrorists in skirts”—a trope popularized by the state-controlled media for psychological warfare purposes. I argue that the voyeuristic media fascination with cross-dressing militants is both symptomatic and constructive of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarian regime where terrorism and gender and sexual nonnormativity are violently conflated in state discourse and practice.

Refusing Redress: Debt, Inheritance, and Creation in Rosario FerrÉ’s Sweet Diamond Dust

This article proposes a reading of Rosario Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust through the logic of debt, an effort focused on unearthing the ideological preconditions of extraction via debt rather than the mechanism of extraction itself. This seminal Puerto Rican collection has largely been read as a critique of the national romance and its underlying racial, gender, and sexual politics of genealogical inquiry. This article traces this inquiry, yet focuses on inheritance, redress, and property ownership as both central to the national romance and as key sites for the negotiation and contestation of the ideologies central to accumulation via debt. It uses Rosa Luxemburg’s theorisation of ongoing primitive accumulation to understand the continuation of capitalism and its generation of a particular indebted subjectivity, reading Gloria and Titina’s razing of the De la Valle home in the book’s eponymous novella as a complication and negotiation of the constitution of an indebted subjectivity.

Femininity Through the Lens: Narrating Sexual Politics and Women’s Emancipation in Parched and Lipstick Under my Burkha

Femininity Through the Lens: Narrating Sexual Politics and Women’s Emancipation in Parched and Lipstick Under my Burkha

Theorizing Sexuality Politics of Neoliberalism: A Queer Sociological Approach

ABSTRACTThis article provides a critical overview of neoliberalism scholarship from a queer sociological perspective. Despite mainstream neoliberalism scholarship neglecting sexuality as a system of intersecting power relations, sociologists of sexualities have explored how neoliberalism reshapes the state, market, society, and subjectivity concerning sex, intimacy, and sexual politics. Highlighting the intersection of the sociology of sexualities with transnational feminist and queer studies, as well as critical race studies, I advocate for a refined understanding of sexuality as integral to neoliberalism's operations with empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism. I suggest areas for future research to further develop this understanding, including the emphasis on the variegated nature of neoliberalism, its ambivalence and contradictions, and its promiscuous convergence with other political, social, and cultural formations. This article ultimately calls for a queer political economic analysis in the continued engagement with neoliberalism and its interactions with sexuality politics to understand new global challenges and social transformations, including shifting geopolitics, digital and platform economies, and climate and reproductive crises.

Film and the stigmatisation of ageing female sexuality: consumer commentary of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of macro-level discourses of age, gender and sexuality in a meso-level consumer discussion from social media revealing how gender ideology and power materialise in the consumption of the 2022 film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. We respond to the call to establish ‘how fictional representations in films…can be used discursively to understand market structure and consumption experiences’. We demonstrate the enduring value of popular culture as a window into understanding consumers. By establishing that postfeminist and successful ageing discourses are appropriated to inform consumption, we contribute to the theorisation of affective marketplace exclusion by arguing that these powerful ideologies weaponise stigma to marginalise and exclude, in other words, that the symbolic consumption of popular culture informs marketplace gendered and sexual politics.

Afterword

This essay provides a synthetic overview of the preceding articles in this special issue on Feminist Histories, situating them within the historical literature that helped shape the field of U.S. women’s history. Drawing out recurrent ideas across topics, the afterword identifies how the authors both build upon and innovatively expand the overlapping concepts of “the personal is political” and intersectional identities. They raise new questions about authorial experience, the inseparability of race, gender, and sexual politics, and the complexity of historical interpretation.

Reclaiming Voice and Agency through Resistance in Meena Kandasamy's Poetry

One of the leading voices of Indian English Literature, Meena Kandasamy is a candid activist, fierce poet, critically acclaimed novelist, and noteworthy translator of the current era. As a writer, she excels in the stark portrayal and deconstruction of caste and gender-based violence in contemporary Indian society. Her poetry reflects aggressive resistance towards oppressive hierarchy promoted by the champions of casteism and cultural supremacy. With her unique and raw style, she covers the shocking atrocities engineered against underprivileged beings in her poetic collections like Touch and Ms Militancy. She deftly examines sexual politics and unapologetically questions the norms of a male-dominated society. With blatant rawness, she dissects the power dynamics of patriarchy and challenges certain taboos & stereotypes about femininity. This paper examines how her poetry seeks to reclaim the voice and agency of the silenced and underprivileged women, destined to live on the fringes. It explores the fierce spirit of resistance in her discourse of subversion. It also traces how she reinterprets and dismantles the instruments of colonization and constructed dominance of the female body by the power institutions of patriarchy.

Negative News about the Catholic Church as A Challenge for a More Active and Critical Reading of the News

Media content is not the facts that happened, but the media's representation of these facts. The media report and narrate reality in a way that is as interesting as possible for the audience. Because media content contains exaggeration, drama and speculation and frames facts in different contexts, consumers of media content rightly feel that the media distort the truth. We find that there is a very large discrepancy between the life of the Catholic Church (and Catholics) and the news we find in the media, and that the line between fake news and convincing news is very thin. In order to ascertain the facts in media news (and to distinguish between facts, exaggerations and representations), it is necessary to critically evaluate media content. This requires a high level of personal engagement and knowledge of the topic, but also professional expertise in media content. As a result, most users do not analyse media content, but interpret it intuitively or take it literally. Our 2019 survey shows that the media in Slovenia most often associate the Catholic Church with sexual abuse, money and politics. In an analysis of 3 735 articles, we examined these topics in detail and found that the connotations of these articles are polarised: half are positive, half negative. Furthermore, in these articles we find no reports on serious socio-political problems and the positive solutions offered by the Catholic Church.

Sexing the history of Indian anti‐colonial internationalism: White women, Indian men and the politics of the personal

AbstractIn contrast to the wealth of literature on the gendered and sexual politics of Indian nationalism, studies on the internationalisation of Indian anti‐colonial nationalism are rarely informed by the twin themes of gender and sexuality. As Indian activists traversed international political spaces in the early twentieth century, they frequently entered into sexual relations with white women. This article explores the possible political consequences of such sexual contact through a study of the personal lives of Arathil Candeth Narayanan Nambiar and Manabendra Nath Roy and their relationships with the largely unknown German‐born sisters, Eva and Lu Geissler.

Gender Wars? Diplomacy as a Depolarizing Practice in International Politics of Gender and Sexuality

Abstracts To what extent is diplomacy a depolarizing tool of international society? This article proposes a novel theoretical and empirical focus on depolarization in international politics of gender and sexuality. It operationalizes the concepts of polarization and depolarization and integrates them with Self/Other theory in international relations. It puts forward an argument that the logic of diplomacy is, although not unequivocally, compatible with the logic of depolarization. The claim and the application of the framework are illustrated with a case study of gender equality and LGBT+ rights diplomacies in Poland. Based on the empirical findings, the article contends that diplomacy is primarily a practice of depolarization.

The Wife of Bath’s Sexual Poetics and Politics of Food and Drink

The Wife of Bath’s Sexual Poetics and Politics of Food and Drink

Triangulating Sexual Politics in India

Triangulating Sexual Politics in India

Sexual Politics in Select DNT Autobiographies: A Study

The implementation of the Criminal Tribes Act by the British Government in 1871 branded certain nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes in India as born criminals who lived by thieving. Despite the official denotification of such tribes in 1952, the stigma associated with their names still remains and they still continue to face various discriminations and violations of human rights in the society. The sufferings of these communities remain mostly ignored by the government. They also hardly find any place in the books of historical, sociological and literary studies. However, the autobiographical narratives produced by writers themselves belonging to such tribes act as authentic documentation of the historical injustices and various casteist segregations faced by their people. But there is hardly any female writer from the nomadic tribes. As a result, the specific concerns of the women of such marginalized communities are even less known than those of their male counterparts. The predicament of the denotified and nomadic tribes (DNT) women is known only so far as it is represented by the male DNT writers. The present study is an attempt to understand the sexual politics and vulnerabilities of the DNT women as represented in the autobiographies of Laxman Gaikwad and Laxman Mane.

Caging and Uncaging Pride: Di(s)visibility and the Borders of Budapest Pride

ABSTRACT In 2008, following right-wing attacks in 2007, Budapest’s Pride march was ‘caged’ by a cordon of police barricades which remained until repudiated by march organisers in 2017. Both caging and uncaging resulted in fundamental transformations of the march, its spectacle of identity, politics, and belonging, and the meanings of Hungarian sexual politics. Grounded in ethnographic research from 1999 to the present, this paper explores the implications of these transformations for Budapest Pride’s layered visibilities and invisibilities, and their borders of desire, being, politics, and belonging. Weaving together queer concepts of ‘disidentification’, anthropological thinking on ‘friction’, and postsocialist analysis of queer ‘in/visibility’, I argue that that Budapest Pride’s shifting caged and uncaged state renders it a critical site of ‘di(s)visibility’: contingent frictions, simultaneously productive and destructive, between queer and other visibilities and invisibilities, whose ambiguous, ambivalent relations both crystallise and dissolve multiple borders of identity, politics, and belonging.