Sexual Politics Research Articles

Book review: Gowri Vijayakumar. 2021. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis

Gowri Vijayakumar. 2021. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 280 pp. Appendix, Notes, bibliography, index. $85 (hardback)

The Climate of Orlando: Woolf, Braidotti and the Anthropocene

This essay brings Rosi Braidotti’s recent writing on the Anthropocene into dialogue with Woolf’s writing on climate in her novel Orlando (1928). As critics are beginning to notice, Woolf’s novel presents the reader with vicissitudes in ‘the English climate’ that parallel Orlando’s own personal transformations, presenting itself as an early outlier of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’). Less remarked upon is the radical understanding of materialism that informs Woolf’s presentation of the interrelation between human life and broader nonhuman entities and systems. This article reads Woolf’s material ontology, in which humans, weather systems and environments are irreversibly entangled, alongside Braidotti’s ‘monistic approach to subjectivity’, arguing that in both we find a similar attempt to articulate a non-anthropocentric worldview which nonetheless remains alert to political and ethical issues within human society. Showing how Woolf actively historicizes the Anthropocene in Orlando, I contend that not only can Braidotti’s work help to articulate Woolf’s materialism, but that Woolf’s attention to the sexual politics of climate change provides depth to Braidotti’s posthuman feminism.

Introduction

RISE 5.1 is the first of a two-volume issue dedicated to the study of Irish sexual liberation and its literatures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This first volume, entitled ‘Speaking out / when it’s dangerous’, brings together six scholars whose critically attentive articles equally interrogate not only the material and political practices of the heteropatriarchal state in its attempt to codify the sexual and moral script of the nation, but also the historiographic conventions of state-centred narratives revised and recovered in academic scholarship on sexuality and sexual identity. One of the most important contributions of this collection, however, is the range of forms of literary and cultural production addressed: from the traditional literary forms of novels, short stories, and dramas, to the cultural forms of periodicals, trial records, and sports entertainment, these articles offer compelling and innovative frameworks through which scholars of Irish Studies can continue to imagine and reimagine the relationship between sexual politics and social transformation in Ireland.

Is consent enough? What the research on normative heterosexuality and sexual violence tells us

In this paper, I first critically review previous research on normative heterosexuality and its intersections with sexual violence to demonstrate that the common focus on consent in Western sexual justice politics, sexuality education, and sexual violence prevention is inadequate for defining and promoting ethical sex and preventing sexual violence. In particular, I demonstrate that a consent focus allows men to (a) hold women responsible for communicating (non)consent; (b) define the conditions of sexual interactions; (c) achieve consent through violence and coercion; (d) accept “yes” as unfettered consent; and (e) minimize and justify sexual violence. I then articulate an alternative view of ethical sex that moves beyond consent and centers care, empathy, co-determination, and ongoing communication and attention, and highlight the importance of social norms and gender transformative approaches to sexual violence prevention.

Introduction – Here versus There: Beyond comparison in queer and sexuality politics

This special issue explores the simplification of common narratives that have developed in the wake of changing sexual and gender politics in the early part of the 21st Century into binarised narratives of a ‘here’ where sexual politics are ‘sorted’ and a ‘there’ which must ‘catch up’. In this introduction, we reflect on the challenges of attending to the historical, material, political and legal forces that give ‘here’ and ‘there’ geopolitical, discursive and geographic coherence, and discuss how the papers in the special issue explore, challenge and contest the dynamics that underpin the construction of ‘Here versus There’.

Reading the Black Romance: Exploring Black Sexual Politics in the Romance Fiction of Rebekah Weatherspoon

Reading the Black Romance: Exploring Black Sexual Politics in the Romance Fiction of Rebekah Weatherspoon

Sexual politics in the field: gendered research spaces in tourism geographies

Sexual violence and harassment in field research is an uncomfortable and under-discussed phenomenon in the social sciences. Tourism geographies, being cross-cultural, often require solo fieldwork that exposes one’s gender in geographically remote locations. There is a pressing need to normalise the discussion of sexual politics in the field, specifically concerning occurrences of gender-associated risks in fieldwork and report on the unexpected physical and mental health risks for women researchers. This study takes a feminist theoretical lens to unpack the hidden dimensions of women engaged in ‘voluntary’ risk taking by conducting field research in male-dominated research environments. Taking an exploratory approach within an interpretivist paradigm, this study is based on the fieldwork experiences of 13 women from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds with the participants sharing their subjective realities of researching in tourism geographies. A thematic analysis revealed the two key themes of risk/perceived vulnerabilities and wellbeing/care in the field as paramount for field research spaces for women, along with 11 subthemes. Findings reaffirmed the political nature of tourism geographies fieldwork and the need to challenge sexual politics and patriarchal domination, including for LGBTQ researchers. Further, the results highlighted the intersectionality of race and gender of women’s experiences of sexual violence and other risks in the field. Thus, the findings suggest an urgent need to provide an imperative for fieldworker safety, wellbeing considerations, and alternative ways of researching.

Queer Asias: Genders and sexualities across borders and boundaries

In this introduction, we highlight the developments and transformations that have been put forward and situate our examination of Queer Asias within that context. We then turn to the contributions in this special issue, which collectively examine the intricate and imbricated flows of capital, power, intimacy, citizenship, sexual politics, and categories of gender and sexual (self-)identification in and across Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the United States. The articles in this special issue take up the following questions through an exploration of local genealogies of sexual practices, intimacies, and meanings in people’s everyday lives: What forms of categories, politics, and activism have gender and sexually diverse peoples across East and Southeast Asia embraced, constructed, and challenged in the 2010s through the early 2020s? What new theories have scholars developed and to what end? Whose politics are now being advocated and how might their activism contest older strategies and discourses?

Queer encounters: Navigating ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhoods with (and against) cultural maps of homophobia

This article provides an intersectional analysis of LGBTQ definitions, experiences and perceptions of the ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhood. It draws on interviews with a diverse group of LGBTQ people living in the London neighbourhood of Brixton to provide a situated interrogation of the ways that evaluations of place-based ‘gay-un/friendliness’ are made. The article argues that LGBTQ people’s experiences of local places are frequently framed through cultural maps, which sustain and connect racialized and classed spatializations of sexual progress across multiple scales. Despite this tendency, however, other accounts – in particular those of long-term residents and queers of colour – provide contradictory evaluations of Brixton’s ‘gay-friendliness’. These trouble dominant assumptions about the conditions needed for LGBTQ flourishing and thereby suggest an expanded horizon for urban sexual politics. Examining the paradox of Brixton’s designation as ‘gay-unfriendly’ even as it is a vibrant site of LGBTQ life, the article demonstrates the importance of an intersectional approach that attends to variations and specificities in the relationship between sexual politics, local places and LGBTQ experiences.

Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam

Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam

Sublimations and Shadows: Sexual Politics of Ibadan Modernism in Black Orpheus

This paper argues that genealogical ties exist between the “national-masculine” literary tradition that characterized the sexual politics of the Ibadan modernist arts journal Black Orpheus and the homosocial environments of the colonial boarding schools and university system of Nigeria. Within this flagship journal, a certain form of short story thematized social issues and forms of violence commonly associated with Western second-wave feminism and frequently siloed under the category of “women’s issues.” These included general sexual violence, abortion, and rape. The symbolic handling of these forms of violence within Black Orpheus is notable because it marks a sharp departure from similarly gendered issues within contemporaneous market literature and stands in contrast to social concerns raised by African women writers who were the male authors’ peers. Like the authors of market literatures, these texts do not engage women as rounded subjects capable of speaking their own minds. Yet unlike market literatures, these texts flatten womanhood in order to engage in performative acts of solidarity, allyship, and/or sympathy with figures of womanhood, especially—and ironically—related to issues surrounding women’s bodily autonomy. In short, these works allowed male authors to construct fictionalized women and fictionalized male voices to speak for and of them.

Translating gender and sexuality in children’s literature: Turkey as a case study

Drawing on the translations of sexuality in five Turkish translations of children’s literature, this paper starts with introducing the origins, developments, and trends of gender as well as the dilemma between gender pedagogy and taboo issues closely related to the sexuality and body politics in children’s literature and its translation in different contexts. Particularly focusing on the context of Turkey where sexuality and body politics have always been controversial issues, the paper intends to shed some light on the matter. Thus, the examination of Turkish translations of children’s literature can yield eye-opening outcomes in terms of the understanding of sexuality and the travel of sexual and body-political content from one context to another.

The Case Against Speciesism and Sexism


 
 
 Using the interactionist approach of comparative philosophy, I evaluate the intersecting points made in Animal Liberationby Peter Singer and The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol Adams. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a combination of the utilitarian and feminist perspectives helps us adopt a new philosophy accounting for all systems of oppression involved in eating animals. I conclude that by removing unnecessary harm to animals and unlearning phrases with an absent reference to oppressed groups, society can progress toward an anti-oppressive system of liberation.
 
 

The gender and sexual politics of the COVID-19 pandemic

The gender and sexual politics of the COVID-19 pandemic

The psychological impact of sexual torture: A gender-critical study of the perspective of UK-based clinicians and survivors.

Despite the high prevalence of sexual torture and its close link with gender, little work has been published on refugee torture survivors from Muslim-majority countries. The aim of this project was to introduce a gender-critical framework, that draws on post-modern and post-colonial feminism, to the study of sexual torture in terms of its operationalization and psychological impact in Iranian, Afghan, and Kurdish refugees in the United Kingdom (UK). This exploratory qualitative research was conducted in collaboration with two voluntary organizations in the UK. Mental healthcare providers (HCPs) were invited to participate through convenience sampling from amongst their staff as well as from community mental health services. Torture survivors were recruited through snowball sampling. The study consists of two parts: 1) semi-structured face-to-face interviews with a total of eight experts (doctors and therapists) and three torture survivors; followed by 2) a focus group with four experts to discuss the emerging results from the interviews and together reflect on the politics of gender and sexuality in the context of torture (‘assisted sense-making’). A thematic gender-critical analysis was performed for the qualitative data. Our findings from interviews with (only Kurdish) torture survivors and HCPs suggest that gender mediates the impact of sexual torture at the intersection of gender, cultural norms, forms of social inequality, and body politics. The conclusions of the study will have implications for health services by deepening our understanding of variables that intersect in an entangled and unpredictable network.

The Epistemologies of ‘Lockdown’: closets, vulnerability, and citizenship

This paper reviews current concepts from the social sciences and humanities through which to understand and interpret the sexual and gendered politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We revisit Sedgwick’s ‘epistemology of the closet’ to think about the ways in which sexuality and gender have become known and understood in new ways through a different form of containment, the experience of COVID-19 lockdowns. This paper sets out a framework for rethinking sexual and intimate citizenship during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine how the pandemic has impacted on the everyday negotiation of intimacy and highlighted material inequalities that impact on the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people. Non-technical summary: This working paper provides an overview of concepts from the social sciences and humanities which might contribute to an analysis of the sexual and gendered politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw parallels between the metaphor of ‘the closet’ to think about the ways in which sexuality and gender have become known and understood in new ways through a different form of containment, the experience of COVID-19 lockdowns. This paper sets out a framework for rethinking sexual and intimate citizenship during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine how the pandemic has impacted on the everyday negotiation of intimacy and highlighted material inequalities that impact on the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people.

Sexual and intimate citizenship in a Time of Pandemic

This paper provides an overview of a transnational research project exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and public health responses to it, on sexual and gendered politics. It sets out a framework for rethinking sexual and intimate citizenship during the COVID-19 pandemic, and draws on examples from India, Italy, Mexico and the UK to illustrate our analysis. We examine how the pandemic has impacted on the everyday negotiation of intimacy and highlighted material inequalities that impact on the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people. We argue that the pandemic has produced new faultlines between women and different groups of LGBTQ+ people, as well as amplifying existing tensions. In addition to identifying these faultlines, we explore the cracks opened by them which might reveal possibilities for new coalitions and alliances in relation to sexual and gendered politics.

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

#AlmaToo: The Art of Being Believed

Abstract Despite the key role played by Alma Schindler Mahler-Werfel (1879–1964) in the preservation of her husband Gustav’s compositions and biography, she has often been viewed as having deliberately distorted his legacy. As sometimes happens to the widows of accomplished men, Alma’s capacity for sound judgment and right to control her image have been challenged by her husband’s devotees. This article considers Alma’s situation in terms of the #MeToo movement’s demand for the reevaluation of sexual politics between powerful men and younger women. Fundamental to this reconsideration is the imperative to listen to what individuals say about their experiences. Alma was nearly twenty years Gustav’s junior and pregnant when their marriage was hastily arranged. I explore key elements in their relationship, such as the devastating letter in which Gustav forbade her to compose, in terms of new conceptualizations of gaslighting, grooming, consent, character assessment, and believability articulated by the #MeToo movement. This theoretical foundation grounds extensive critique of both the conventions of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the chauvinism of late twentieth-century scholars. I conclude by briefly proposing an alternative perspective on Alma’s musical contributions based on her writings, compositions, and editorial, organizational, and curatorial activities. The revision of assumptions about one of Europe’s most famous musical couples has gained urgency since #MeToo began to articulate a new perspective on gender relations and artistic aspirations founded on social justice.

From Performance to Prison: The Case of Vera ‘Jacko’ Holme Analyzing Body Politics, Gendered Transgression and Socio-Political Identity of a Stage Actress, 1890–1914

In Britain, during the nineteenth century the process of identity formation of a female performer was conditioned by a challenge towards the pre-existing gender norms that underwent a paradigmatic shift owing to the ‘new performative turn’. The story of Vera Holme popularly known as ‘Jacko’, emanates from this very shift. Holme was an actress born in Lancashire in 1881. Often known as the ‘first female chauffeur of Britain’, she not only embodied the social, political and the sexual, but also imparted it through personal and dramatic means thereby challenging the ideology of separate gendered spheres much before the ideas of the ‘new Sapphic woman’ and ‘female masculinity’ came into being. Using the case study of Vera Holme, I study the socio-political identity of a stage actress who embodied gendered transgression across a time that permeated from her public life to private life and vice versa. Themes such as performativity, political theatre, deconstruction of sexuality and body politics become intrinsic in order to decipher the sexual lexicon of the time that fettered women on the condition of being socially and morally deviant. Utilizing the personal papers of Vera Holme, I posit her forays into theatre and politics, within this context, that will not only complicate the understanding of gendered transgressions but simultaneously will throw light on how theatricality socio-economically ‘enabled’ many women to break away from the existing normative patriarchal structures including Holme.