Sexual Ideology Research Articles

From Bush to Obama: Rethinking Sex and Religion in the United States' Initiative to Combat Human Trafficking

This analysis of how the Bush administration brought religious and theological language to bear on the issue of human trafficking suggests that while the recourse to theological language appeared to highlight the imperative for decisive anti-trafficking measures, this strategy actually entailed policies that are inimical to ending trafficking violations. Zimmerman analyzes how the Bush administration used religious rhetoric to legitimate introducing to the United States' anti-trafficking policies a sexual ideology that turns on a delegitimation of all nonmarital sexual activity, and the paradoxical effects that have been wrought on anti-trafficking efforts by this recourse to religious rhetoric. The article concludes by offering a set of recommendations for how the Obama administration can begin to reorient U.S. anti-trafficking policies away from their current preoccupation with moral impropriety toward promoting and protecting human rights. Language: en

Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahābhārata. By Arti Dhand. Albany: State University of New York Press.2007. ix, 254 pp. $80.00 (cloth).

Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahābhārata. By Arti Dhand. Albany: State University of New York Press.2007. ix, 254 pp. $80.00 (cloth).

LOVE AT FIRST SEX: LATINA GIRLS' MEANINGS OF VIRGINITY LOSS AND RELATIONSHIPS

Drawing upon interviews with second-generation Latina youth, this article extends knowledge on young women's sexual lives by examining how Latina girls construct their sexual subjectivity within the context of their first sex experiences. In their narratives, girls identified two types of relationships as appropriate for virginity loss—those defined by love and those characterized by a mutual sentiment of caring. Their perceptions of these relationships not only informed how Latina girls made sense of their first sex experiences but also entailed critical consequences for their ability to negotiate curiosity and safe sex with partners at this point in their sexual biography. The focus on the first sex experiences of Latina youth provides insight into their notions of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual ideologies and how they use these ideas to socially construct their sexual identities.

My ill literacy narrative: growing up Black, po and a girl, in the hood

Hegemonic discourses authorise certain ways of being, knowing, and doing. We internalise or appropriate images, patterns, and words from the social activities in which we have participated. Race, gender, sexuality, age, education, class are among aspects of identity (social constructions) that affect our language and literacy acquisition, the way we make sense. Grounded in the field of New Literacy Studies and drawing on the tools of critical discourse studies, I analyse verbal and non‐verbal excerpts from a street literature memoir, tentatively titled ‘PHD 2 Ph.D.: Po Ho on Dope 2 Ph.D, The Ill Narrative of Dr. E’, to examine young Black women’s negotiation of raced, classed, gendered and sexual ideologies. My aim is to show that these ideologies work to constrain the possibilities for Black womanhood by ascribing negative meanings and identities to Black women, which render them ‘at‐risk’ for various sorts of disadvantage, that ‘at‐risk’ youth are not inherently so, and that educators and other youth workers should be aware of the ways that social literacies frame youth identity and sense making.

“Fighting with Proverbs”: Kasena Women's (Re)Definition of Female Personhood through Proverbial Jesting

This study is an attempt document and critically explore what I term the proverbial revolt of Kasena women from northern Ghana. The women take advantage of a socially sanctioned medium, the joking relationship that exists between a Kasena woman and her husband's siblings or kin of the same generation, subvert, contradict, and deconstruct the sexist ideology in Kasem proverbs. In the process, they create a corpus of counter-proverbs by which they establish their own signifying terms. This activity is termed ka jang de memanga (lit. to fight with proverbs); it is an activity that Kasena, who see proverbs as the wisdom of their ancestors, would typically avoid. Using the conception of proverb as strategy, and employing the theoretical concepts of positionality, identification, and performance, I examine how perceptions of gender and female personhood are invoked, evoked, enacted, rejected, consciously reshaped, or completely transformed by these contemporary African women.

Benevolent and Hostile Sexism and preferences for romantic partners

This research investigated the associations between sexist attitudes and preferences for romantic partners both cross-sectionally ( N = 347 women, 130 men) and longitudinally over a nine-month period ( N = 174 women). Women placed greater importance on status/resources partner characteristics, particularly when they were high in Benevolent Sexism (ideation of women who conform to traditional gender roles). Longitudinal analyses also revealed that, for women, Benevolent Sexism predicted increases in status/resources preferences over time. Men, in contrast, placed greater importance on attractiveness/vitality characteristics, particularly when they were high in Hostile Sexism (hostility toward women who oppose traditional roles). These findings indicate that sexist ideologies promote preferences for romantic partners who possess qualities congruent with traditional gender roles.

Ideologies of sexuality, menstruation and risk: girls' experiences of puberty and schooling in northern Tanzania

This paper examines girls' voiced experiences of menstruation, puberty and schooling in northern Tanzania. The study was conducted in Moshi and Rombo Districts of Kilimanjaro, a predominantly Chagga region with historically strong support for girls' education. The major question explored was how the onset of menses and puberty may be impacting on girls' school participation, given societal implications of pubertal onset and potentially gender discriminatory school environments. The methodology included a comparative case study using in‐depth interviews and participatory research with young women living in urban and rural Kilimanjaro. Along with important findings about how menstrual onset creates challenges for girls attending school emerged findings about the significant gaps in girls' knowledge about body changes, sexual health and HIV/AIDS. These findings underline the importance of identifying new girl‐centred approaches to guidance on bodily development and HIV prevention.

German Vices: Sexual/Linguistic Inversions in Fin-de-Siècle France

In 1896, the prolific French author and journalist Armand Dubarry published the novel Invertis (Le Vice allemand), one in a series entitled Les desequilibres de l'amour that Dubarry devoted to the varieties of sexual perversion. Inversion was, of course, the term commonly used in the late nineteenth century for what was also called homosexuality; it referred to the idea that the homosexual had an inverted gender identity, a woman's soul trapped in a man's body, or vice versa. Dubarry's curious volume, which the first part of this essay will discuss in some depth, marks a notable moment in the histories of both popular literature and sexuality, a monument to the widespread public interest in perversion at the fin de siecle and a record of some of the most deeply entrenched and resonant ideologies of sexuality in France. It can productively be read, furthermore, in relation not only to contemporary works of sexology but to other literary attempts to inscribe sexuality in fiction, and notably to Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, whose earliest sections--including those on sexuality--were conceived barely a decade after Dubarry's novel was published. While Dubarry's overwrought potboiler and Proust's masterpiece can hardly be considered literary peers, both reflect their authors' keen interest in contemporary French sexology. The musings of the Recherche on the subject of inversion are deeply indebted to medical, legal, historical and ethnographic writings on sexuality that, like Dubarry's, proliferated in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. (1) Proust's novel often elaborates--albeit in far more sophisticated form--tropes derived from such texts; the second part of this essay will be dedicated to exploring one that has particular resonance for both Dubarry and Proust, the notion of deviant sexuality as foreign and/or treasonous to the French nation, and indeed to Frenchness itself. Sexology was just one of Armand Dubarry's varied interests. In addition to working as a journalist, he also produced children's books; biographies; a history of brigands and smugglers in Italy (depuis les temps les plus recules jusqu'a nos jours [from ancient rimes to the present] (2)); several titles, both fictional and non-fictional, on ancient Rome; an anecdotal history of foods; and numerous thrilling adventure stories, frequently set in exotic locales of the New World, with titles like Aventuriers de l'Amazone; L'Alsace-Lorraine en Australie: histoire d'une famille d'emigrants sur le continent austral; and tueurs de serpents: aventures d'un officier francais au Lac Tchad. Dubarry combines several of these genres in Invertis. It begins as a mildly salacious bodice-ripper with a standard Gothic plot: Claire, the heroine, who loves an impoverished electrical engineer, Georges, is forced by the terres of a legacy to betroth herself to the loathsome and decadent aristocrat, Adolphe, the comte de Champlan. We soon learn that the real reason for the count's desire to marry Claire is that he has the most dishonorable intentions towards Georges and thinks that marrying Georges' beloved will bring him into closer proximity with the object of his unnatural desire. Meanwhile, the count's sister Florine, the baronne de Morangis--a woman with a suspiciously downy upper lip--harbors designs on Claire and is anxious for her brother's marriage to give her unfettered access to her new sister-in-law so that she can pursue her own nefarious purposes. The marriage between poor Claire and the evil, effeminate count takes place as scheduled but, not surprisingly, is never consummated. Instead, her new husband launches an all-out assault on the virtue of her beloved Georges, while Claire's sister-in-law assails her chastity with equal fervor. In the end the beleaguered young lovers are forced to flee to Switzerland to escape the clutches of their depraved admirers. Adolphe and Florine pursue them across the Alps, but come to a hideous end when they are, first, trapped by an avalanche and then torn to pieces by a pair of eagles pointedly described as heterosexual. …

Putting a Dominatrix in Her Place: The Representation and Regulation of Female Dom/Male Sub Sexuality

This article takes an interdisciplinary perspective to examine the treatment of professional dominatrices (doms) and male submissives (subs) in law and film. I argue that while the cinematic and legal discourses are formally distinct, they are functionally similar in the ways they discipline this sexual arrangement. The legal analysis deconstructs the case of R. v. Bedford, which effectively criminalized some forms of professional dominant services, in relation to recent popular films that represent female doms and the men in their lives. This deconstructive project demonstrates that both legal and cinematic fields view female dominance as a moment of “gender trouble” that needs to be contained, and, if possible, rectified, by masculine authority. I posit that this comparative analysis offers a microcosmic perspective on how the gender prescription of male dominance and female submissiveness is sustained and imposed in law and film, representing a moment of converging sexual ideology in these disparate discourses. I conclude with a suggestion that such efforts of gender regulation ultimately and unwittingly betray a desire for the sexual Other, while opening up spaces for counter-hegemonic identifications and subjectivities.

Masculinity Scripts and the Sexual Vulnerability of Male Youth in Malawi

ABSTRACT This study investigates contextually rich talk about sex and sexual activity among Malawian male youth. While their sexual ideologies have a potential to prompt them into risky practices, a more urgent driver of their vulnerability is their sexual scripts which constitute masculinity as very fragile and in need of constant protection, making the boys wary both of female partners who refuse them sex and of sexual practices which offer little or no control and power over women, raise suspicions about their manliness, or do not clearly validate their identities as powerful, go-getting males. These were, however, inherently risky sexual partners and practices. Urgently needed are strategies to help male youth realize the ways in which defense of masculinity, which may seem like self-defense, puts them at risk.

Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation

Can one be both a Confucian and a feminist without apology? In this book, Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee challenges the stereotyping representation of Confucianism as an extremely sexist ideology, a theory that must be totally eradicated for China to make any real progress on gender issues. Rosenlee also questions the implicit practice of Western transnational and global feminists who all too quickly embrace the assumption that Chinese women’s liberation (as in any third world country) can come only from Western ethical theories. Through abundant use of philosophical and historical texts from the pre-Qin to the late Qing periods and insightful analysis of social practices such as the customs of widowhood and footbinding in their appropriate contexts, Rosenlee successfully demonstrates the possibility of creating a viable theory of Confucian feminism. Chapter 1 situates the discourse on gender oppression in its historical context as part of the nationalistic discourse of China in the early twentieth century. Humiliated by countless defeats at the hands of the new imperial powers of Japan and the West, literati of the Reform Movement and the May Fourth Movement blamed Confucianism and patriarchal practice for what was wrong with the Old China. A total and radical rejection of Confucianism was completed in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. At approximately the same time, “there was a surge of interest in Chinese gender studies on the part of Western feminists as well as Asian specialists” (1). However, in this new wave of transnational and global feminist discourse, Rosenlee finds that Western cultural and ethical assumptions are almost uniformly privileged in cross-cultural gender studies over other ethical theories from other cultures. In other words, “while the concept of ‘gender’ is well articulated” in feminist scholarship, “the concept of culture remains relatively marginal” (2). Nonetheless, if one affirms that (a) a Chinese woman is not only a gendered being but also a cultural being and (b) gender is a cultural-social construction, then this neglect of the cultural element is self-contradictory. First, in transposing a familiar Western gender paradigm to Chinese culture as the universal conceptual framework “within which the condition of Chinese women is comprehended and its possible liberation theorized,” Western feminists “in effect, essentialize the category of ‘woman’” and reduce Dao (2008) 7:461–465 DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9082-9

Sexual Subjectivity: A Semiotic Analysis of Girlhood, Sex, and Sexuality in the Film Juno

Historical approaches to girlhood provide a basis for understanding changing cultural ideologies of sex, sexuality, and youth. While situating sexual desire, biological possibilities, and social responses to girls’ engagement in sexual intercourse at the center of its plot, the film Juno depicts the transgressive sexual agency of a young girl without substantially disrupting longstanding discourses of femininity. Through an analysis of the semiotics of girlhood within the film, I argue that the girl figure in this representation signifies an amalgam of two traditionally dichotomized conceptions of “femininity.” Juno serves as a particularly intriguing example of the ways in which adolescent female sexuality is conceptualized within popular western culture during the early part of the 21st century.

From ‘Filthy Catamite’ to ‘Queer Icon’: Elagabalus and the Politics of Sexuality (1960–1975)

Elagabalus. The name evokes an image of a depraved sybarite treading in silver dust and sand of gold, his head crowned with a tiara and his clothes studded with jewels, working at women's tasks in the midst of his eunuchs, calling himself Empress and bedding every night with a new Emperor, picked for choice from among his barbers, scullions, and charioteers (Huysmans 1959, 45). (1) Such portraits of Elagabalus derive, ultimately, from the accounts of the emperor's reign (218-22 C.E.) provided by Dio Cassius, Herodian, and the author of the Historia Augusta. These historians represent Elagabalus as an oriental despot prone to extravagance of all sorts and as a religious fanatic determined to impose a Syrian god upon the Roman populace. (2) They also report that the emperor cultivated a feminine appearance; that he married three women (including a Vestal Virgin) and one man; that he had a sexual predilection for well-endowed males; and that he asked his court physicians to construct a vagina in his body. (3) Elagabalus, if these sources are to be credited, (4) was an emperor gone wild. The exploits of bad emperors have exercised a potent fascination down through the centuries, but different forms of imperial misbehavior have drawn attention depending upon what political and moral anxieties happened to be ascendant in a given cultural moment. Moderns have tended to regard, for instance, Elagabalus's taste for gastronomical novelties as little more than a sideshow curiosity, but have seized upon the emperor's effeminacy and sexual 'deviancy' as significant factors behind his ultimate ruin. (5) This tendency relates directly to the prominence that gender and sexuality have assumed, as sites of political contestation, in modern Western societies. Within this particular cultural climate, Elagabalus has become an iconic figure through whom ideologies of gender and sexuality can be naturalized, contested, and renegotiated. Elagabalus, indeed, has come to occupy an especially complex position in the modern imagination, because the historical sources, in reviling the emperor as a gender and sexual deviant, enable a variety of different contemporary identifications: modern readers of Elagabalus's lives can identify the emperor as 'homosexual,' 'bisexual,' or 'transgendered.' (6) All three of these identifications involve a certain violence to the historical sources, but all can nonetheless claim to be grounded in ancient evidence. This article examines representations of Elagabalus in three texts published between 1960 and 1975: Alfred Duggan's Family Favourites, Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner's Child of the Sun, and Martin Duberman's Elagabalus. Inasmuch as the publication dates of the selected texts span a formative period in the development of modern sexual politics, they can serve as an ideal site for examining different representations of Elagabalus during a time of substantial political tension and cultural change. In all three texts, Elagabalus emerges as a 'queer icon': a non-heterosexual representation that performs significant ideological work in either naturalizing or challenging popular constructs of the 'queer' (not in every case strictly 'homosexual') male. This study, then, delineates the different ways that representations of Elagabalus contributed to the politics of sexuality between the years 1960 and 1975. Family Favourites; or, It Was All at Bottom Harmless Enough The earliest of the three texts is Alfred Duggan's Family Favourites. Published in 1960, (7) this novel belongs to a line of quality historical fictions that the Oxford-educated author composed in rapid succession during the later years of his life. (8) Writing a novel about Elagabalus was an audacious move for Duggan, (9) who had cultivated a broad-based readership by the early 1960s (Waugh 1983, 626), and Family Favourites appears--if reviews in the popular press are any indication (10)--to have disconcerted that public, especially in the author's Britain. …

Gender, Sovereignty, Rights: Native Women's Activism against Social Inequality and Violence in Canada

Gender, Sovereignty, Rights:Native Women's Activism against Social Inequality and Violence in Canada Joanne Barker (bio) Contemporary Native women's struggles against social inequality and violence and for Native sovereignty and self-determination are mired in histories of sexist ideologies and practices. While these struggles and histories did not begin in the nineteenth century (sexism certainly existed before then), they were fortified in powerful ways by the Indian Act of 1868. The act consolidated under Canadian Parliament authority all previous colonial legislation addressing the status and rights of Native people in Canada. In 1876, the act was amended to establish patrilineality as the criterion for determining Indian status, including the rights of Indians to participate in band government, have access to band services and programs, and live on the reserves.1 The amendment instanced and reified the sexist ideologies and practices of colonialism in which the act emerged and functioned, and it did so specifically by empowering status Indian men with all of the rights, privileges, and entitlements of status in band government and reserve life. Over time, this led status Indian men to an expectation of entitlement in band government and property rights over Indian women, irrespective of their status. The provisions of the Indian Act and its enforcement by Canada only affirmed and perpetuated those expectations.2 In 1983 and 1985, several different kinds of Indian women's constituencies (status, nonstatus, reserve, urban, rural) and their allies (including Indian men) secured constitutional and legislative amendments that partially reversed the 1876 criterion.3 The amendments were not passed easily. Status Indian men who then dominated band governments and organizations protested vehemently against the women and their efforts. They accused the women of being complicit with a long history of colonization and racism that imposed, often violently, non-Indian principles and institutions on Indian peoples. This history was represented for the men by the women's appeals to civil and human rights laws, and more particularly to feminism, to challenge the [End Page 259] constitutionality and human rights compliance of the Indian Act, an act the men represented as providing the only real legal protection of Indian rights to sovereignty in Canada. Demonized as the proponents of an ideology of rights based on selfish individualism, and damned for being "women's libbers" out to force Indian peoples into compliance with that ideology, the women and their concerns were dismissed as embodying all things not only non- but anti-Indian.4 Their agendas for reform were dismissed as not only irrelevant but dangerous to Indian sovereignty. These dismissals perpetuated sexist ideologies and discriminatory and violent practices against Indian women within Indian communities by normalizing the men's discourses regarding the irrelevance of gender as well as the disenfranchisement of women in Indian sovereignty struggles. The longer work from which this article is drawn examines the 1983 and 1985 amendments and the activism that led to their development and passage as an instance of the co-constitutive relationship of sovereignty and gender.5 By developing how and which specific discourses of rights were mobilized by various constituencies of Indian men, women, and their allies, the article opens up the conflicts surrounding gender politics and women's rights within Native sovereignty movements. In doing so, it intends to provide a forum for thinking about the kinds of social reformations needed to bring about equity between and for men and women in Indian communities, an essential aspect of any agenda for decolonization and social justice for Native peoples. Structuring Inequalities: Understanding the Indian Act System Canada's Constitution Act of 1867 assigned "exclusive jurisdiction" to Parliament over "Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians" (Section 91, 24).6 Canada's Indian Act of 1868 enumerated these powers by defining the laws and procedures of band governments as well as the terms of occupancy and use by bands of trust lands or reserves. It commissioned the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) to oversee band government operations and the management of reserve lands, resources, housing, and all related program and funding issues, such as education and health care. DIAND agents were also given the authority to remove band officials from office if...

Representing and Remembering Murdered Women: Thoughts on the Ethics of Critique

Representing and Remembering Murdered Women: Thoughts on the Ethics of Critique Amber Dean (bio) Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord, eds. Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006. 380 pp. $38.95 (paper). Cultural Memory Group. Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials Across Canada. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006. 272 pp. $28.95 (paper).1 [End Page 229] [C]ritique is not equivalent to rejection or denunciation... the call to rethink something is not inherently treasonous but can actually be a way of caring for and even renewing the object in question. Wendy Brown Edgework These two important texts on women and violence were both published in the few months leading up to the first trial of Robert Pickton (who is accused of killing twenty-six women in total, making this Canada’s largest case of serial murder), as Vancouver (and the rest of the country) prepared to learn the details of what happened to Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Angela Joesbury, Georgina Papin, Mona Wilson, and Brenda Wolfe, the first six women for whose murders Pickton was to stand trial. Although this may be one of the strange coincidences of the publishing world, these are nonetheless very timely texts. In fact, both of these books make reference to murdered or missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in their first few paragraphs. Undoubtedly, the violence directed at women from the Downtown Eastside has provoked new attention, both popular and academic, to the problem of violence against women and to questions about how such violence ought, or ought not, to be represented and remembered. I count myself among those whose attention has been caught by stories of “missing women,” by the representations of women’s lives (and sometimes of their violent deaths) put forth in these stories, and by the questions they raise about the relationship between cultural memory and social justice. These two texts also arrive at a moment in which questions about how and why we remember (or fail to remember) particular victims of violence or murder are garnering significant attention across a wide variety of academic disciplines. Those of us whose attention is drawn in this direction, particularly those of us attempting to respond to these acts of violence from within the academy, negotiate difficult ethical and political terrain. What is the relationship between representation and violence? Between violence and remembrance? Between representation and cultural memory? For feminists taking up these questions in our intellectual or political work (or both), these two similarly themed but very different texts will undoubtedly prove to be valuable resources. But while both texts ask us to contemplate the ethics and politics of representing or remembering acts of violence against women, they also raise some important questions about the ethics of critique. I will argue that both texts might, as a result, benefit from some further reflection on how critique might best be formulated when it attempts to respond to violence, murder, loss, and the suffering of those left in their wake. Burfoot and Lord begin their introduction to the collection of essays in Killing Women with reference to the recent rise in attention to the disappearance of potentially more than five hundred indigenous women in [End Page 230] Canada. They juxtapose coverage of this story on the cbc’s website with in-depth coverage of rape in Darfur, asking: What is it that one wants of representation in such situations? What would a just representation be? Is the representation of violence drawn so heavily from genre and gender codes that even the most horrific realities are destined to become “stories”—normalized and folded into the everyday racist and sexist ideologies that form our senses of belonging to a nation, a gender, a race, an ethnicity, a class? (xii) The essays in this collection take up these compelling questions in an effort to draw links between a contemporary fascination with women who are the victims of violence and with women who commit violent acts. The collection is thus a unique attempt to demonstrate similarities between representations of women as victims of violence and those of violent women, and by doing so the editors offset the risks...

Decoding Black Women: Policing Practices and Rape Prosecution on the Streets of Philadelphia

Black women are generally displaced as victims of rape. The police response to the sexual assault of black women in general and lower-class black women in particular is illustrative of how sexual ideologies help construct complex social hierarchies that in turn structure rights. How the law currently deals with rape places black women outside of the narrative frames that legitimate entitlement. Rape continues to stand in for, and effectively obscure, other social, political, and economic concerns. Unpublished and often ignored, the rape narrative is a ripe site to supply oppositional interpretations of national experience and transmit some of the structural problems in the criminal justice system. Pulling from over two thousand “real” rape cases of low-income black women ignored and not investigated in Philadelphia between 1995 and 2000, this article reads black female rape narratives as case studies in order to discuss the way personal narratives of rape victims are structured by competing and overwhelming sociolegal narratives that undercut their reception. As the fastest growing prison population, the presence of the law to punish black women stands in stark contrast to the absence of the law to protect them.

Transcultural bodies: female genital cutting in global context

Female circumcision or, more precisely, female genital cutting (FGC), remains an important cultural practice in many African countries, often serving as a coming-of-age ritual. It is also a practice that has generated international dispute and continues to be at the center of debates over women's rights, the limits of cultural pluralism, the balance of power between local cultures, international human rights, and feminist activism. In our increasingly globalized world, these practices have also begun immigrating to other nations, where transnational complexities vex debates about how to resolve the issue. Bringing together thirteen essays, Transcultural Bodies provides an ethnographically rich exploration of FGC among African diasporas in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. The contributors analyze changes in ideologies of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities, the frequent marginalization of African women's voices in debates over FGC, and controversies over legislation restricting the practice in immigrant populations.

Disgust, scrupulosity and conservative attitudes about sex: Evidence for a mediational model of homophobia

In the present study, core disgust predicted negative attitudes toward homosexuals even after controlling for contamination fear. The effect of core disgust on negative attitudes toward homosexuals was indirect, partially mediated by conservative sexual attitudes and religiosity. The effects of religious principles on negative attitudes toward homosexuals were indirect, via conservative sexual beliefs. These results establish a link between disgust and negative attitudes towards homosexuals that is not fully accounted for by contamination concerns, but rather is partially accounted for by conservative sexual ideology and religiosity.

Hidden Love: Sexual ideologies and relationship ideals among rural South African adolescents in the context of HIV/AIDS

In KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa, the social construction of young people's sexuality reflects both a complex historical process of cultural and religious integration, as well as the contemporary resurgence of ‘traditionalism’. How do young people interpret these factors to construct and give meaning to their own sexualities? This multi‐method qualitative study examined sexuality and relationship formation among sexually experienced young people aged 14–19 in a rural sub‐district. In this setting, sexual activity is highly stigmatised, particularly for young teenage women. Dominant sexual ideologies centre on ‘good behaviour’, the idea that ‘sex is wrong’, and abstinence as a preferred prevention strategy. Young women's relationships are often hidden but sexual relationships are also an important part of the transition to adulthood. These dichotomies of love and romance versus stigma and secrecy frame young people's discourse about sexuality. A discourse about healthy sexuality is largely absent, impeding the prevention of HIV in this setting.

A Study of Femininity and Masculinity Represented in Men's and Women's Fashion Magazine in Korea since 2000

The purpose of this study is to typify femininity and masculinity represented in mainstream women's and men's fashion magazines in Korea since 2000 and infer sexual ideology appearing in contemporary Korean society by content analysis with the view of plural sexuality. For the content analysis total 259 editorial fashion photography was analyzed. As the result, 5 femininities and 5 masculinities were typified, and then sexual discourse was inferred out of the frequency of each type and texts with the images. On the basis of previous studies and historical considerations of this topic, the types of sexuality represented in mainstream fashion magazines in Korea since 2000 were classified as follow.: in women's fashion magazines Traditional Femininity and Androgynous Femininity were almost similarily dominant sexuality, and Glamor Femininity, Babydoll Femininity, and Genderless sexuality were alternative. Meanwhile, in men's fashion magazines Traditional Masculinity formed clear dominant sexuality, and Macho Masculinity, Androgynous Masculinity, Adolescent Masculinity, and Genderless sexuality were alternatives. In addition, Androgynous Masculinity in women's fashion magazines occupied the highest frequency, while Glamor Femininity in men's fashion magazines did so. From this sexual discourses represented in mainstream fashion magazines in Korea since 2000 are as follow.: First, mainstream fashion in Korea sticks to the modern values preserving traditional sexual ideology even in this postmodern period of the former 21C. Second, Androgynous Femininity as another dominant femininity with Traditional Femininity connotes the change of conception of femininity in Korean society. Third, Androgynous Masculinity to females is preferred, while femininity to males is still regarded as fetish or adorned object. Fourth, the appearance of various alternative sexualities leads to pluralization of sexuality, and then fashion gradually codifies youthfulness and feminine values, such as body and sexual desire more than before.