Discourses Of Sexuality Research Articles

The Forgotten Sex: Modern Responses to Correlative Sexism in Kang Youwei and He-Yin Zhen

Abstract The oversight of Chinese feminist traditions in transnational feminist discourse is remarkable given China’s historical importance and vast population. Despite historical suppression by Confucianism, Chinese feminisms emerged at the turn of the last century, drawing from Marxist, anarchist, and liberal movements. While scholars increasingly recognize overlooked female thinkers like Ban Zhao, contemporary discussions of China often revolve around reconciling Confucianism and feminism. This tendency underscores the perception of Chinese feminism as a derivative of Western feminism, where modern thinkers reject local culture for transnational movements. This paper contends that Chinese feminists, including Kang Youwei and He-Yin Zhen, remained deeply rooted in their traditions. While Kang incorporated foreign ideas to advocate for feminist goals and modernize society, he predominantly engaged with traditional philosophy to address its sexist elements. Similarly, He-Yin’s anarcho-feminist approach integrated Western influences to engage with traditional Chinese thought rather than rejecting it outright. By examining prevalent gender and selfhood concepts in traditional Chinese thought, this paper elucidates the notion of “correlative sexism,” and argues that women were not primarily regarded as a “second sex” as described by Simone de Beauvoir. The paper then demonstrates how Kang and He-Yin responded to this sexist discourse, offering novel perspectives on women’s liberation and societal reform.

In Their Own Words: Muslim Women Reconstruct the Sexual Script

Using semi-structured, qualitative interviews of 25 heterosexual Muslim women residing in the US, the author examines the extent to which respondents simultaneously constructed and deconstructed the gender dichotomy when explaining sexuality, countering reductionist accounts of Muslim women’s sexuality. Integrating concepts of religiosity and gender norms, respondents reconfigured the dominant discourse of power and sexuality in innovative ways. One of the main themes that emerged from this research is that male sex drive discourse, typically associated with power and “machismo” within the traditional sexual script, was reimagined by Muslim women as an indicator of women’s greater strength in the eyes of God.

Sexuality Discourses: Indexical Misrecognition and the Politics of Sex

This review of research on sexuality discourses directs attention to the patterns of indexical disalignment that have facilitated the global rise of transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist discourses. Over the last two decades, scholarship in the area of language and sexuality has focused primarily on patterns of alignment in the community-based indexical production of social personae, a necessary move for establishing the discursive agency, and indeed humanity, of LGBTQ+ groups. The focus of this review, however, is not alignment but disalignment, for it is in the clash of indexical systems that sexual ideologies take root. Specifically, the article focuses on acts of misrecognition that arise at the boundaries of indexical meaning, identifying practices such as indexical inoculation, indexical presumption, and indexical denial. The review is designed to provoke future research on misrecognition as contextualized social practice, a turn we believe imperative for uncovering the power-laden infrastructure of sexuality discourses.

Negotiating Prejudice and Equality: Analysing Gender and Sexuality Discourse Among Supporters of Populist Radical Right Message in Switzerland and Finland

ABSTRACTResearch on gender, sexuality and the populist radical right has revealed the contradictory positions of such parties and politicians regarding gender issues. However, less is known about the perspective of laypeople on these matters. This study focuses on supporters of a radical right populist message and analyses how prejudice is constructed in populist gender discourse. Analysing interview material from two countries, Finland (n = 55) and Switzerland (n = 33), this study adopts a discursive–rhetorical approach and identifies six key discursive practices: radical supporters of gender equality, privileged gender and sexual minorities, assimilating individuals as exceptions, sexual minorities excluded from normality, the unprejudiced self distanced from the discriminating party and the self aligned with the rational party. First, this study sheds light on supporters' constructions of equality, gender and feminism in contemporary discourse. Second, our discursive–rhetorical analysis shows how different categorisation strategies are used in negotiating prejudice. Third, the study further complements existing research on gender populism by examining gender issues from the demand side, illustrating the appeal of radical right populist ideology among voters. We conclude that discursive category constructions and exceptions allow including, excluding and delegitimising gender and sexual minorities and their supporters while distancing and aligning oneself with (un)prejudiced positions in gender discourse. Please refer to the Supporting Information section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

Gendered Authorship of the Female Identity: A Gynocritical Comparative Study between Norwegian Wood and the God of Small Things

The paper seeks to elucidate the differences in the representation of women in male- and female-authored texts, specifically analyzing Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Numerous critics over the years have noted that male and female authors often portray femininity in markedly different ways. While male authors tend to perpetuate prejudiced or stereotypical views of women, female authors, drawing from their direct experiences of womanhood, provide more authentic depictions that foster female empowerment. Theoretically identifying this marked difference is thus the primary aim of this paper and hence this study employs a qualitative textual analysis, utilizing theoretical frameworks such as Michel Foucault’s discourses of sexuality, Elaine Showalter’s gynocriticism, Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, Judith Butler’s gender performativity, and Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of gender stereotypes. The findings reveal a significant divergence in the way that male- and female-authored texts characterize female figures. Murakami, in his portrayal of Naoko and Midori, has often associated reductive and stereotypical attributes that in essence undermine their agencies and voices; their attributes and mannerisms were shown to be limited to emotional and/or sexual contexts that conflate the female experience and undermine gender fluidity. In contrast, Roy depicted Ammu and Rahel in accordance to feminist sensibilities as they can be seen to portray androgyny as well as employ their sexualities to challenge and subvert social norms and stereotypes. The study therefore concludes that women-authored narratives provide more nuanced and authentic representations of female experiences, whereas male-authored texts frequently reinforce patriarchal frameworks and stereotypical assumptions of one-dimensional gender linearity.

Visions of degeneracy

Previous research on discourses of gender, sexuality and race in role-playing games (RPGs) finds that they favour a white, heterosexual, cis-male perspective, (re)producing stereotypes that are misogynist, homophobic and racist. This article uses feminist critical discourse analysis to examine a game with a reputation for challenging conventions of the genre and the medium, the fantasy RPG Exalted (2001– ). An analysis of 31 sourcebooks shows how many of the harmful discourses present in wider geek culture are interwoven with progressive ideas in the second edition of Exalted. Specifically, women’s roles are limited to those of virgin, (monstrous) mother or ‘prostitute’; sexual ‘deviance’ is pathologised; and a colonial geopolitics of race, sex and gender is reproduced. Given the importance of gaming culture to contemporary popular culture and politics, the study advocates for ethnographic engagement with actual gameplay to supplement feminist analysis of RPG sourcebooks.

Browning’s Poetics of Necropolitical Power Dynamics

This article explores the life-scaring power dynamics in Browning’s poetry regarding the social praxis of gender as staged by Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess.” To this end, it peruses these poems to show the poetic necropolitics; politics of death. Delving into the poems, the male chauvinist narrators hold the bodies of their female counterparts before annihilating them. Taking stock of necropolitical power wielded by the sovereign narrators, this paper aims to parse the deadening lives of the perpetrated Duchess and Porphyria. For this purpose, it deploys Achille Mbembe’s understanding of necropolitics as a critical insight that he imbibes from Michel Foucault’s biopolitical racism (that holds the authority to deploy alterity and expose life to death). Meanwhile, the study does not only expand the necropolitical literary explication of Browning's poems, nonetheless, it attempts to reorient the readers to reexamine the alibi of the killers in the poems. Enthused by Mbembe’s acumen that revisits how power makes its subjects docile through political decisionism: “who must live and who must die,” this paper debates the sexist discourse of the killer-narrators and the living-dead ladies before their killing. Largely, it wonders to know how the subjects turn out to be the living dead or the object of male sadism. To elucidate this life-scaring politics; necropolitics, this paper also probes the presence (hegemonic existence) of sexist males that renders the female absent (non-existence) before they are immolated in the poems. It concludes that sexist patriarchy replicating the sovereign power constitutes the precarious life of the females via making them abject and invisible through ‘corpsing-policy’ which becomes a pertinent issue to rear humanism in Humanity Studies.

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.

Other Sexuality: A Study of the Discourse of LGBTQ Sexuality and the PLUSH Community in the Special Region of Yogyakarta

The purpose of this research was to find out the experiences of informants with regard to their sexuality and to look at the role of PLUSH in the discourse of 'non-normative' sexuality in Indonesia, more specifically Yogyakarta. This research method is a qualitative research with a'mini' approach to discourse analysis by Foucault, research informants, data collection techniques (interviews, literature studies, documentation, and other media sources), data presentation, and triangulation. The data used came from primary data, namely interviews with the five informants (Bhista (30), Shamil (37), Nakula (35), Abimanyu (23) and Rangga (26), as well as secondary data from reliable sources (documentation from the media, literature, and others). The results of this study are as follows: (1) a world dominated by heteronomous concepts, where general discourse tends to corner non-binary sexuality, as experienced by members of the PLUSH, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. (2) The research contributes to the fields of community empowerment, social movements, LGBTQ studies, and social policy by providing a platform for marginalized voices and documenting new social movements. (3) The research is based on the theory of panopticon prison theory, which is used to describe the experience of the informants in exploring and fighting for their sexual identity in the context of a dominating discourse. It is hoped that further research can involve informants from various sexual orientations such as asexual and bisexual, to provide a more comprehensive picture of non-heteronormal sexuality discourse.

‘Crossed the line’: Sexuality discourses of motherhood under 15 years in Uganda

AbstractMotherhood under 15 years is constructed as having crossed the line of societal morals and this construction shapes the provision of sexual and reproductive health services (SRH) for mothers under 15 years in Uganda. Using collaborative ethnography and through the lens of discourses and governmentality, I established that adolescent pregnancy is constructed within normative discourses enshrouded in religious and cultural values. What is constructed as non‐normative is regulated through restrictive SRH policies and penalizing discourses which inhibit access to SRH services and care. A paradigm shift in adolescent SRH policies that are rooted in human rights and equity is one alternative required.

The Batman and the redemption of first responders: The culmination of a rhetoric of rescue during COVID-19, Trump and protest

The timing of Matt Reeves’s The Batman (2022) situated the film as a symbol of and response to the social troubles that resulted from the political unrest in 2020 and 2021, presenting solution-driven rhetoric amidst the numerous public crises in American discourse and identity. Captured and represented in his opening prologue speech in juxtaposition to his rhetorical culmination speech, Batman’s orations mirror his own arc and the politically prescribed reawakening of confidence in political figures and institutions. Paralleling his addresses, the evolution of Batman’s excessive violence when he initially works under the identity of ‘Vengeance’, compared to his subsequent performance as a first responder at the end of the film, serves as a rhetoric of redemption for first responders. Multiple scenes focus on Batman’s learning to recognize humans’ need for compassion as he becomes a student of social progress. Working as a unifying symbol of a diverse leader, Gotham’s newly elected mayor, Bella Reál, simultaneously offers a vision for transitioning away from leaders associated with racist and sexist discourse. With Batman’s rhetorical culmination and transformation into an emergency rescuer, The Batman serves as unifying verbal and visual discourse in response to contemporary political unrest.

Funny Boy, postmemorial potentialities, and the queer diasporic Sri Lankan novel

ABSTRACT As the first anglophone novel to foreground queer experiences and memorialize the state-sanctioned 1983 Black July pogrom of Tamils, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy trailblazed a second wave of Sri Lankan American writing. This article examines Selvadurai’s invocation of queer memory as “postmemory” in line with Marianne Hirsch’s theorization to investigate the transgenerational inheritance of violence emanating from colonial discourses of sexuality and ethnonationalism. It illustrates how Funny Boy extends Hirsch’s framework beyond its Eurocentric and heteronormative familial setting. By calling attention to the afterlives of imperialism, Selvadurai posits queer memory as a postscript that supplements the amnesiac postcolonial record. Funny Boy uses the Bildungsroman genre to illustrate how the queer protagonist undermines the colonial value system that casts a long shadow over postcolonial lived experiences. The article argues that the novel proposes a new epistemic way of interrogating Victorian sexuality, patriarchal norms, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka.

The Influence of Sexism and Incivility in WhatsApp Political Discussions on Affective Polarization: Evidence from a 2022 Multi-Party Election in India

In contemporary political discourse, the concern of affective polarization, often fueled by uncivil and sexist discourse, is notably evident in digital communication contexts like WhatsApp. In this study, we examined the potential effects of uncivil and sexist messages as well as moderator interventions against these messages coming from political in- and out-group members in such political groups through a survey experiment ( N = 1,464) fielded during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh (India) Legislative Assembly Elections. We investigate these questions and extend the prior work on affective polarization by introducing a new measure of Average Inter-party Affective Distance, which provides a single metric to index overall polarization in a multi-party election context. Our results showed that exposure to sexist uncivil messages had no discernible effect on affective polarization, political participation, and voting intention. Additionally, moderator warnings against incivility had no significant effects. However, we observed a variation in how respondents processed these messages based on their preexisting attitudes; notably, individuals with less sexist views were more inclined to vote after being exposed to sexist uncivil messages. These findings suggest that the influence of incivility and sexism in messaging platforms like WhatsApp on the wider electorate’s political behavior and attitudes is relatively limited. This research contributes to our understanding of the role of digital political communication, highlighting the importance of message content and preexisting individual differences in shaping affective polarization and mobilization.

Exploring the relationship between mothers' competence and comfort in sexual and reproductive health discourse with adolescent girls and its related factors.

The mothers-adolescent discussion regarding sexual and reproductive health (SHR) issues plays an important role in preventing negative outcome associated with sexual risk behaviors. The present study aimed to explore the relationship between mothers' competence and comfort in SHR discourse with adolescent girls and its related factors. A cross-sectional study was conducted involving 160 mothers from July to September 2020. Data were collected through questionnaires covering demographic characteristics, Mother's Comfort in Sexual Discourse (MCSD), Mother's Interest in Sexual Discourse (MISD), and Parenting Sense of Competence (PSOC). The collected data were analyzed using simple and multiple linear regression models. The mean scores for MCSD, MISD, and PSOC were 45.49±16.15 (13-78), 7.9±4.2 (0-13), and 64.07±9.44 (45-94), respectively. The primary topics of mother-adolescent discourse on SRH were menstruation (5.61±0.98) and the delivery process (4.55±1.57). The mean age for "sex talks" and age-appropriate "sex talks" with daughters was 11.76±1.85 (range: 6-15) and 17.05±1.86 (range: 14-23) years, respectively. Significant associations were found between MCSD and MISD (β=0.482, p<0.0001), PSOC (β=0.223, p<0.005), self-efficacy (β=0.202, p<0.011), mother's job (β=0.185, p<0.019), mother's education (β=0.173, p<0.029), and father's age (β=0.161, p<0.042). After adjusting for other variables, major influencing factors on MCSD included MISD (β=0.487, p<0.0001), self-efficacy (β=0.143, p<0.039), satisfaction (β=0.169, p<0.015), daughter number (β=-0.235, p<0.014), son number (β=-0.219, p<0.024), birth rank (β=0.263, p<0.008), and residency (β=0.172, p<0.014). MISD, PSOC, and certain demographic characteristics emerge as significant factors influencing MCSD in mother-daughter sexual discourse. As such, it is imperative to consider these determinants when devising strategies to maintain and enhance the sexual health of teenage girls.

Debt, sex, and money: Imperialist discourses of transactional sex across three geographic and cultural contexts

Discourses surrounding similar forms of transactional sex in the United States and Europe, Africa, and East Asia exemplify the ways that sexual transactions serve as affectively charged inflection points at which gendered, racialized, and classed forms of power collide. Deconstructing academic discourses and affective strategies surrounding sugar arrangements in the United States and Europe, blessed relationships in Africa, and compensated dating in East Asia uncovers the ways that cultural norms surrounding sex, gender, and money serve to uphold imperialist, patriarchal, racist hierarchies. Outlying examples of intersectional discourses provide a roadmap for challenging these dominant power structures in the academic literature.

Scoping review of discourses on masturbation in Africa: an afrofeminist analysis

ABSTRACT Masturbation – self-sexual stimulation of the genitalia – literature is underdeveloped, especially in terms of non-Western samples. More importantly, there remains very little or no research about how masturbation as a sexual practice contributes to understanding the gender dynamics of sexual choices in Africa. Using the African feminist resistance framework of ‘radical rudeness’, developed by the Ugandan feminist Stella Nyanzi, this paper, through a scoping review of twenty-five studies, aims to review and synthesise the literature on masturbation discourse by identifying the socio-demographic dynamics of masturbators, their understanding of masturbation and its rationale, and the agentic and innovative ways of masturbation as reflected in existing works. The author argues that masturbation offers a space to experience one’s own sexual pleasure, as they push for a conceptually nuanced viewpoint about African sex. The analysis thus makes a clarion call to rethink the sex discourse in order to better appreciate and promote the sexual diversity of Africa.

Sexuality in Emerging Translated Modern Arabic Literature

This article addresses the question of how The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon employs the translation of sexually explicit language to present a “resistant and hybrid cultural identity.” Adopting a postcolonial framework, the article explores the kinds of literary, linguistic, and translation-related interventions Antoon exerts to provide a hybrid-discourse to the hegemonic Anglo-American discourse of Arab sexuality, particularly through the creative and conscious self-translation of his novel.

Defending Guinevere: Re-reading William Morris’ “The Defence of Guenevere”

This essay examines how William Morris strategically defended Guinevere and her affair with Lancelot in his poetry “The Defence of Guenevere” within the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century. Instead of repeating the conventional reading of Queen Guinevere as a model of transgressive women fixed by the dichotomous good versus bad femininity, this essay more focuses on Guinevere’s various guises in order to contexualize Guinevere and her adultery in a broader sense of human nature. First, this essay explores how Morris portrayed a true picture of Guinevere, which was obscured and overshadowed by the dominant gender discourse of the time, by applying his anachronistic and unconventional literary device deviated from conventional social norm and literary style. Although Morris’ radical and unconventional Arthurian world failed to appeal the contemporaries, this essay argues that it was Morris’ subtle and ingenious way that reflected the nineteenth century culture as well as his forward-looking view of a potential shift in the status of women. Considering the fact that it was a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of women and sexuality, Morris was a more realistic observer describing Victorian anxieties about the conservative Victorian sexual discourse in his poetry.

Normativity and Body: Efficient Control Mechanisms in Society and School

Objectives: The objective of this discussion is to establish a relationship between concepts and historicity of the body, sexuality and domination, from the perspective of Michel Foucault. This is because we understand the body as involved in existing power relations, from and in the various instances of society. In this sense, biopower presents itself as a control mechanism, once well instituted and established in society it is diluted in micro relationships. Methodology: as part of the challenges of the Education in the Cerrado and Citizenship Research Group, a set of debates were carried out by members of the group. Using Discourse Analysis from a Foucauldian perspective as a tool, the search was to explain historical aspects specific to the constitution of subjects in different sociocultural positions, thus, we sought to make an ethical and aesthetic approach. Results and conclusion: sexual discourse covered in disguise is no longer supported by mechanisms of oppression, but by mechanisms of ideology that cannot be escaped, as they are everywhere. In this way, we understand that the discourse on the modern repression of sex is sustained by micro relationships and no longer by oppression, an ideological bias passed from father to son, reinforced at school, endorsed by the teacher-student relationship. Implications of the research: the research leaves questions: will schools being restricted from dealing with the dilemmas of sexuality and gender identities contribute to this move towards freedom of sexual language and the understanding of the real meaning of sex, if restricted to family cultural values? Would it be a return to the values ​​and customs of the traditional Brazilian family?

Down the (digital) rabbit hole: Mapping and decolonizing Safavid women's imagery in digital museums

In this article, I trace Safavid paintings depicting women's imagery online and explore the possibility of digitally mapping Safavid (1501–1736) paintings featuring women on publicly accessible platforms. Along with the practice of online mapping that led me to digital museums, I investigated the descriptions presented on three digitized paintings on different platforms to address the questions, “Where and how can Safavid paintings be digitally encountered” and “In light of the theoretical developments in the scholarship on pre-modern discourses of Safavid gender and sexuality, how do the descriptions of Safavid paintings reflect gender discourses online?” By following Safavid paintings of women online and probing the textual descriptions attached to them, and using netnographic research methods to document my experience and encounter with the digitized Safavid paintings, I explore whether the online descriptions accompanying the images could contribute to the making of decolonial knowledge about non-Western gender discourses.