Sexual Politics Research Articles

Data‐bility: Endogamous social intimacies on dating apps in Mumbai

AbstractIn this paper I argue through the double entendre of ‘data‐bility’ that how dateable one is on a dating app relies on data. This techno‐social framework enables an understanding of how dating apps are reconfiguring a politics of sexuality, circumscribed by digital technologies and data. Drawing on research with middle‐class women and gender‐minority dating app users in Mumbai and one dating app executive, the paper investigates how algorithms and users' digital behaviour together constitute data‐bility in three ways. First, dating app algorithms are designed to match those of similar social identities to one another. Second, dating app users engage with others' digital data on profiles and through message chats, reading class through these processes, deciding who to match/reject and correspondingly who is data‐ble. Third, users and algorithmic infrastructures come together to create new regimes of verification, through deeming some users ‘real’ and others ‘fake’ on dating apps, extending violent legacies of categorisation. Together, these processes result in data‐bility, a techno‐social order of digital dating oriented around the exclusion of those labelled ‘creeps’ along class and caste lines.

Fiona Volpe: A New Perspective on James Bond's Iconic <em>Femme Fatale</em>

While narratives of gender politics and female identity in Western visual culture have become more dynamic with the passage of time, one of the most contentious spheres of discussion in mass media surrounds that of Ian Fleming’s ultimate fictional creation, James Bond. Female sexuality and gender politics in the Bond universe has been robustly, and rightfully, scrutinised by academic and casual spectators for at least 50 of the 70 years since his inception. Yet, one of the most enduring characters in the cinematic canon has not yet been given this discerning treatment, in earnest. Originally called "Fiona Kelly" by screenwriters Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins, Fiona Volpe was portrayed by Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi-Solomon in Terence Young’s 1965 film adaptation of Thunderball. In November 2017, I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Paluzzi-Solomon for a now-abandoned book concept. As one of the few actresses from the Sean Connery-era who are still living, she was remarkably forthcoming regarding her professional and personal experiences on set. Without pride or prejudice, Mrs. Paluzzi-Solomon’s account proved to be not only to be illuminating in and of itself as an interview, but also served as a foundation to better understand the origins, development, and public reception of the gold standard femme fatale of the Bond films. This article will explore the character of Fiona Volpe, her origins, plot function, and legacy, from the unique perspective of the woman who brought her to life.

Mediating queer masculinities through alternative music from Palestine

ABSTRACT Queer feminist media studies habitually overlooks how popular communications mediate same-sex sexualities beyond the global northwest. Thinking with this gap, this paper problematises mediated queerness in the Arab world. I use the case study of “alternative” music in Israeli-dominated Palestine to theorise how far (or not) Palestinian vernacular modalities constitute a politics of sexuality above and below—although not necessarily in opposition to—the master-narratives of LGBTQ+ recognition, visibility, and the individual closet that often overshadow global commodity platforms. Drawing on my twenty-eight-month ethnography on “alternative” music in Palestine, I explore how queer-identifying Palestinian musicians use music, drag, and performance videos to self-fashion gender and sexual identities, in the context of dominant, media-friendly visions of queerness on digital networks. Through close reading of Bashar Murad’s 2021 song and video, “maskhara” (mockery), and via interviews and ethnographic data, I argue that music constitutes a shifting politics of sexual (in)visibility in Palestine. Musicians move between visible and invisible queer subject positions, depending on audience, locality, and framing. Expanding the field’s focus on Anglo-American sexual representations, then, the contribution theorises mediated queer cultural worldmaking in contexts of settler-colonisation and militarised occupation.

Decolonial Excesses: Racial and Sexual Dissidence in Johan Mijail’s Amor Vegetal

Johan Mijail (1990), born in the Dominican Republic, stands out a trans performer who systematically seeks to destabilize heteronormative culture and colonial legacies ingrained in the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. In her most famous performance Amor vegetal (2015), the naked artist does headstands while inserting small branches, leaves or flowers in her rectum. By placing the “obscene” at the center of her work, Mijail creates alternative knowledge that challenges traditional values of homophobia, Catholicism, and fear of Blackness, all located at the heart of libidinal politics in Abya Yala. In Amor vegetal the artist creates a procto-poetics of the obscene through excess, which offers up the anus/ass as a transfeminist, decolonial, and countersexual axis.

Eighteenth-Century Proud Boys; or, Why Sir Charles Grandison is (a) No Wanker

This article links Samuel Richardson’s final novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) to the twenty-first-century Proud Boys in order to examine seriously the implications of two often overlooked aspects of both: Grandison’s virginity and the Proud Boys’ “No Wanks” policy. This policy, which limits members’ masturbation, can serve to elucidate the sexual politics of Grandison, as both the modern-day men’s rights group and the eighteenth-century novel valorize male sexual restraint as a form of domestic dominance. This article argues that Grandison’s idealization of male sexual restraint reinforces the portrait of male virility for which Richardson’s earlier novels were criticized, rendering the virile male protagonist palatable to readers of the domestic novel’s courtship plot. The valorization of restraint exhibited by Richardson’s hero and the Proud Boys advances a sublimated understanding of male virility that works to solidify the fiction of sexual essentialism that still permeates our culture today.

Depiction of Patriarchal Society in Disney's Cinderella

Purpose: The objective of this study is to examine the patriarchal society of Disney’s Cinderella using patriarchal analysis. Cinderella is a well know adaptation of the fairytale. Although seemingly a harmless cartoon about princess, it actually has a harmful representation of a patriarchal society. Methodology/approach: Descriptive qualitative and library research methods were used to analyze and describe the quotations and transcripts based on the Kate Millet theory of sexual politics. Results/findings: From the research, two signs of patriarchal society are depicted: (1) the ideological sign where every male character in the movie thinks of women as something to be subjugated at and to be married to continue the family line. (2) Psychological signs where the female character including Cinderella is accepting their traditional role as home maker and not making any effort to escape the patriarchy Limitations: This study depicted many signs of patriarchal society in the film, but this discussion is limited only into two clear signs of patriarchal society Contribution: Hopefully, this analysis can contribute to the field of film, literary studies, and sociological perspectives.

The sexual politics of empire: Postcolonial homophobia in Haiti By Erin L.Durban. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 234 pp.

The sexual politics of empire: Postcolonial homophobia in Haiti By Erin L.Durban. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 234 pp.

Lucien Descaves on Trial: Naturalism, Sexual Politics and Patriotism in the Third Republic

Abstract: This article examines the 1890 trial of young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves, in which he was charged with, and later acquitted for, "injures à l'armée" and "outrages aux bonnes mœurs" following the publication of his antimilitary novel Sous-Offs (1889). I argue that literary style dominates the trial, not least because one of its key figures was an Idealist novelist with a fervent hatred of Naturalism. The article situates the trial in the context of debates about the social function of literature in the Third Republic and, crucially, anxieties about the reading habits of the peuple . I show that the trial offers a privileged lens for understanding the pressure Naturalism was under at this point in the century, insofar as it brings together, and then stages in the form of debate, the many social and cultural flashpoints touched on by the novel and how they might be represented in fiction.

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 –activism and intersectionality? A discourse analysis of queer –political subject formations in the problematization of ‘race’

ABSTRACT Queer and intersectional perspectives play an important role in activism and academia and are critical of a collective ‘we’ that is arranged around a (single-issue) identity. However, queer sexual politics are still a side of white theory production, especially in the German-speaking world. This study explores how the current queer political subject in the German-speaking world is constituted in the ‘problematization’ of racism based on a poststructuralist critique of the subject. Against the backdrop of the shared but slightly different critique of identity politics from queer and intersectional perspectives, it also looks at the role intersectionality plays in these queer problematizations of racism. To that end, following Foucault and Jäger, discourse analysis was conducted on materials produced by five German-speaking queer-activist organizations between 2010 and 2016. This study presents the results of the analysis of two representative discourse fragments; in both discourse fragments, a more open queer political subject is constituted in the problematization of ‘race’ by referring in slightly different ways to intersectional critiques, but also to the concept of precarity.

Sexual Knowledge and Expertise in Europe's East: Transnational Exchanges

East Central Europe played a crucial role in shaping the development of sexual science from the 1870s onwards. The life-histories of influential and well-known figures such as Sigmund Freud (born in Freiberg/Příbor), Magnus Hirschfeld (born in Kolberg/Kolobrzeg) and Karl Maria Kertbeny (born in Vienna, based in Budapest) reveal the imperial interconnectedness of East Central Europe with what would become Western Europe. By 1932, when the World League for Sexual Reform held its congress in Brno (following previous meetings in Berlin, London, Vienna, and Copenhagen), the society had established branches across the region, including Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In that same year, Poland decriminalised homosexual acts. Yet, East Central Europe is often neglected in the history of sexology and little is known about how sexual science in these regions shaped, and was shaped by, global networks of knowledge production. Indeed, despite recent attempts to demonstrate the ways in which sexual science was a truly global enterprise, East Central Europe remains to be fully incorporated into our mapping of the global networks of sexological dialogue and exchange.1 This is especially true of scholarship on the period after the Second World War. Historians have tended to misconstrue the transnational nature of sexual science in East Central Europe both before and after 1945. First, the contribution of East Central Europeans to European cultures of scientific exchanges has been obscured by the tendency of much historical writing to focus on a small number of key pioneers (Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis). Second, it is assumed that East Central European sexual science was largely cut off from international networks of knowledge exchange after the Second World War following the onset of the Cold War.2 Third, there are preconceived notions that communist authoritarian governments, having curtailed political freedoms and economic entrepreneurialism, must have also taken a repressive stance against sexual expression.3 Fourth, the dominance of 1989 as the fundamental caesura has encouraged a periodisation that fails to draw enough attention to the shifts in transnational patterns of knowledge exchange around sexual politics during the period 1945 to 1989 and fails to identify key continuities that link the sexual politics of the contemporary world with those of the communist period. None of these assumptions can withstand scrutiny, as the articles in this forum reveal. Building on a recent boost in scholarly interest in the sexual histories of the region,4 we present a collection of papers that each detail the transnational connections of local sexual experts in creating sexual knowledge both before and during state socialism.5

The Dissident Power of Queer Art and Curating in Central Eastern Europe

The text aims to explore the political, cultural and artistic implications of LGBTQ+ art and curatorial practices in Central Eastern Europe in the 21st century. Currently, queer exhibitions, are on the rise in post-communist Europe, especially those held in contemporary art centres and museums. They cast light on new queer art and activism and the volatile sexual politics in the region because of the significant increase in the number of artists working with LGBTQ themes and the topical political background of this movement and its impact on cultural debates. Curators are developing innovative perspectives on sexual, social and artistic dimensions of queer exhibitions in this geographic context still seriously affected by homophobic state policy. The objective is to feature three art shows of major queer artists which have been organised in Hungary, Poland and Estonia in the last decade. The exhibitions are: The Survivor’s Shade: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky at the Museum of Fine Art- Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest in 2015/16; Daniel Rycharski: Fears at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2019 and Jaanus Samma. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale, Museum of Occupations and Freedom, Tallinn in 2016. The three artists and their exhibitions have been selected because they were organised by major cultural institutions in the capitals, they have achieved a significant social impact and huge audience and the artists have played an important role in the contemporary art scene in each country. Their work is a current manifestation of the queer artistic and intellectual culture that has been developing slowly in the region since the 1980s and has come to play an increasingly important role in recent years. The exhibitions and art of the three artists are a starting point for a broader outline of the themes and important figures in recent queer art in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). Moreover, in each case, they appear in a complex and difficult political context related to the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Hence, I would like to propose a thesis about the dissident power and status of queer art and curating in CEE.

Religion and Intimacy

Michel Foucault has famously argued that, since the counter-Reformation, the modern West has been preoccupied with extracting truth from sex, above all, the truth about power and the human subject. Africa has long been waging its own battles over the politics of gender, sexuality, personhood, and power, a conflict in which religion has played a pivotal role, abetting and sometimes challenging established modes of governance. In recent times, this relationship has become ever more agonistic. In many parts of the continent, religious authorities have mounted puritanical crusades against nonconforming gender and sexual practices. But faith has also been mobilized to offer refuge to the persecuted. How might these issues of identity, exile, and redemption speak to more general transformations in the nature of religious life in the current moment, in Africa and beyond?

The Sexual and Racial Politics of Intimacy in Thomas A. Digges's Adventures of Alonso (1775)

Abstract: This article examines the uses of intimacy in Thomas A. Digges's understudied 1775 novel Adventures of Alonso . Throughout the transatlantic travels of the picaresque hero Alonso, Digges narrates various constellations of intimacy among men in order to espouse an idea of liberal interiority and relationality that depends on the exclusion and affective distancing of racialized, gendered, and sexualized persons and populations. The article reads and contrasts two scenes of male intimacy and their larger repercussions in the novel. In the first, intimacy represents a social feeling that enables and fosters the public reasoning of white men on a ship crossing the Atlantic; in the second, Digges uses the intimacies of the sexually deviant Arab body in a Barbary captivity episode in order to demarcate and police the racial and sexual boundaries of liberal personhood. In doing so, Adventures of Alonso functionalizes intimacy to reorganize the bodies of white men into a fantasy of (proto-) democratic social form while it dismisses the bodies of racial and sexual others as politically expendable.

Caste Capitalism and Queer Theory: Beyond Identity Politics in India

This article uses “caste capitalism” as a framework for thinking through the entanglements of sexuality politics, caste, and capital in contemporary India. The author uses a queer hermeneutic of heritability and endogamy, drawing inspiration from Indian feminist, queer, anti-caste, and Marxist critiques, and from racial capitalism as theorized by Cedric Robinson. The author argues that caste capitalism, read through a queer hermeneutic, makes the historicity of caste rules clearer, showing how they are both enforced through violent social norms, and, at the same time, selectively or intermittently ignored, e.g., in spaces of non-normative sexuality and gender expression. The use of this hermeneutic emphasizes the normative functions of caste-based endogamy while undoing the idea of sexuality as a scientized aspect of the privatized and “private” self, which is understood here as an effect of conceiving the body as hived off from questions of land rights, economic autonomy, and historically contingent iterations of caste categories and relations. This use of caste capitalism contributes to countermanding Hindu nationalist deployments of homonationalist rhetoric that rely on the ahistoricity of caste as a central aspect of arguing for a timeless and territorially coherent religion and culture that must now be defended through violent and autocratic means.

Children of the Sexual Politics of Abortion and Transition

This article elucidates the connection between anti-trans and anti-abortion political movements, looking closely at laws banning gender-affirming care in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022. In particular, the article claims, “anti-abortion and anti-trans political successes are floated by a moral crisis over a fantasized, imperiled child.”

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (2023) by Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston’s Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health combines archival research with incisive textual analysis to examine how topics such as sex, fertility, contraception, hygiene, and eugenics were circulated in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Reading medical case studies and newspaper articles alongside literary works by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Kate O’Brien, and Brian O’Nolan, Houston’s book is a remarkable history of sexual politics and sexual rhetoric in Irish public life.

Julka Chlapec Ðorđević’s New Woman

The paper presents the concept of the new woman by Julka Chlapec Đorđević (1882–1969) as an intersectional figure between the different lines of the writer’s feminist thought and social engagement. We dedicate the first part of the paper to the theoretical basis of this concept. In the second part, we analyze the modes of its formation in Chlapec Đorđević’s writing. Our research focused on her discursive formulation of the new ethics and politics of sexuality and the related private/public micro-institutions of patriarchy as basic frameworks within which she articulated the concept of the new woman. Chlapec Đorđević comprehensively realized the concept of the new woman in the novel Jedno dopisivanje [A Correspondence] (1932). We depict its heroine as a paradigm of the writer’s theoretical thought on the emancipated woman in correlation with many modern phenomena.

Sexual consent in the Spanish Criminal Code: shadows of its political and legal construction through the Law on the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom

The criminal regulation of sexual crimes in Spain has recently been modified in order to include a consent-based definition of rape. From a feminist framework, this socio-legal research calls this criminal reform into question. Specifically, the main objective is to study the potentialities and constraints of the legal element of sexual consent to meet women's lived experiences and their ways of performing gender. Drawing on the works of feminism and legal feminism of the last century that dismantled heteropatriarchal sexual politics, as well as relying on current feminist approaches to consent, I expose the shadows, grey areas, and deep-rooted assumptions that underlie the political-legal construction of this hackneyed concept. To do so, I primarily use Carol Bacchi's critical policy analysis in order to explore the Spanish criminal policy discourse concerning this penal modification. In my analysis I examine the preparatory works of the legislative amendment as well as selected oral debates held in the Congress of Deputies and in the Equality Commission. The main findings show how this policy contradicts and collides head-on with many foundational contributions of feminist theory in relation to sexual violence. Nonetheless, relying on broader historical discourses of human rights and international law and repeatedly alluding to the feminist social movement, as well as due to the functionality of the modern notion of consent in a neoliberal system, this legislative amendment enjoys a high level of acceptance.

<em>Royal Sexualized Bodies at the Tudor Court</em>

This cluster of seven short essays focuses on sexualized representations of Tudor queens, especially in moments of pregnancy, childbirth, and public display. Each of the essays covers a familiar subject, such as Henry VIII’s “Great Matter,” in a new way, thus exposing the sexual politics of such events. The cluster shows how five Tudor queens were sexualized by their contemporaries, how their first sexual experiences were understood, and the ways in which beauty and fertility were discussed. Collectively, these essays suggest that a greater discussion of how these royal Tudor female bodies were understood in their own time will allow for more work on how that sexualization and de-sexualization was carried across time and genre, down to our own period.